Information Retrieval List Digest 448 (March 29, 1999) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-448.txt IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 March 29, 1999 Volume XVI, Number 12 Issue 448 ****************************************************************** III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. New Series in Natural Language Processing 2. CIMCA '99 Proceedings 3. JASIS, Volume 50, Number 5 4. [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] EDUCAUSE Washington Update 3-22-9 B. Meetings 1. BISCA-99 2. Interuniversity of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Seminar 3. Text Mining Workshop: Paper Deadline Reminder 4. ECDL99: Extended Call for Papers 5. EDUCAUSE Net '99 Meeting 6. Scholarly Communication Symposium C. Miscellaneous 1. UW: SLIS: Talk by S.E.Robertson on Probabilistic IR ****************************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: Ruslan Mitkov Re: New Series in Natural Language Processing New series in Natural Language Processing Call for Proposals John Benjamins Publishers is launching a new book series on Natural Language Processing as a timely response to the growing demand for NLP literature. Three general types of books will be published: Monographs - featuring (i) original leading edge research or (ii) surveys of the state-of-the art of specific NL tasks or applications. Collections (i) books focusing on a particular NLP area (e.g., emerging from successful NLP workshops or as a result of editors' calls for papers) or (ii) books which include papers covering a wide range of topics (e.g. emerging from competitive NLP conferences or as a result of proposals for books of the type "Reading In NLP"). Course books (i) general NLP course books or (ii) course books on a particular key area of NLP (e.g. Speech Processing, Computational Syntax/Parsing). Authors will be encouraged to append supplementary materials such as demonstration programs, NLP software, corpora etc. and to indicate web-sites, computational language resources etc. where appropriate. This call invites proposals from potential authors of the types of books described above. Topics The scope of the new series will be maximally comprehensive ranging from theoretical Computational Linguistics topics (Computational Syntax, Computational Semantics etc.) to highly practical Language Technology topics (speech recognition, information extraction, information retrieval etc.). The new series will cover both written language and speech; it will welcome works covering (but not limited to) areas such as: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics, dialogue, text understanding and generation, machine translation, machine-aided translation, translation aids and tools, corpus-based language processing; written and spoken natural language interfaces, knowledge acquisition, information extraction, text summarisation, text classification, computer-aided language learning, and language resources. New results in NLP based on modern alternative theories and methodologies as opposed to the mainstream techniques of symbolic NLP such as analogy-based, statistical, connections as well as hybrid and multimedia approaches, will be also welcome. The series will pay special attention to current "hot topics" such as multilingual NLP, evaluation and speech. Editor/Advisory board The new series' editor is Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton) and the advisory board of the series includes: - Christian Boitet (University of Grenoble) - John Carroll (University of Sussex, Brighton) - Eugene Charniak (Brown University, Providence) - Ed Hovy (Information Sciences Institute, USC) - Richard Kittredge (University of Montreal) - Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster University) - Carlos Martin-Vide (Rovira i Virgili Un., Tarragona) - Andrei Mikheev (Harlequin Co. & Univ. of Edinburgh) - John Nerbonne (University of Groningen) - Nicolas Nicolov (University of Sussex, Brighton) - Kemal Oflazer (Bilkent University) - Allan Ramsey (UMIST, Manchester) - Monique Rolbert (Universite de Marseille) - Richard Sproat (AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park) - Keh-Yih Su (National Tsing Hua University, Taipei) - Isabelle Trancoso (INESC, Lisbon) - Benjamin Tsou (City University of Hong Kong) - Jun-ichi Tsujii (University of Tokyo) - Evelyne Tzoukermann (Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill) - Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield) The managing editor at John Benjamins is Kees Vaes (Email kees.vaes@benjamins.nl). Submission of proposals Interested authors should submit proposals by email (plain text or postscript files) to the series editor: Prof. Ruslan Mitkov School of Languages and European Studies University of Wolverhampton Stafford St. Wolverhampton WV1 1SB United Kingdom Telephone (44-1902) 322471 Fax (44-1902) 322739 Email R.Mitkov@wlv.ac.uk The proposals should include an outline of the book (1-2 pages), a preliminary table of contents, the target readership, related publications, how the book will differ from other similar books in the area (if applicable), time-scale and information about the prospective author (relevant experience in the field, publications etc.). Each proposal will be reviewed by members of the advisory board or additional reviewers. More information More information on the new series will be available in due course at http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~le1825/NLP_series.htm Information on the new series is also available at John Benjamins' web site http://www.benjamins.nl/jbp/index.html (new projects). ********** III.A.2. Fr: Marcella Janmaat Re: CIMCA '99 Proceedings IOS Press is pleased to announce new publications in Computational Intelligence. Please find enclosed more information on the three new publications: CIMCA'99, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control and Automation. Computational Integration for Modelling, Control and Automation '99, volume 1 Neural Networks & Advanced Control Strategies Volume: 54 Concurrent Systems Engineering Series Edited by: M. Mohammadian 1999, 404 pp., hardcover ISBN: 90 5199 473 7 This edited volume is dedicated to the theory and applications of Neural Networks and Advanced Intelligent Control Strategies. The book consists of 64 accepted research papers from the 1999 International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modeling, Control and Automation --CIMCA'99. The research papers presented in this book cover new techniques and applications in the areas of Neural Networks, Advanced and Intelligent Control Strategies for Manufacturing, Robotics and Automation. Computational Integration for Modelling, Control and Automation '99, volume 2 Evolutionary Computation & Fuzzy Logic for Intelligent Control, Knowledge Acquisition & Information Retrieval Volume: 55 Concurrent Systems Engineering Series Edited by: M. Mohammadian 1999, 546 pp., hardcover ISBN: 90 5199 474 5 This edited Book is dedicated to the theory and applications of Evolutionary Computation and Fuzzy Logic for Intelligent Control, Knowledge Acquisition and Information Retrieval. The book consists of 86 selected research papers from the 1999 International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control and Automation - CIMCA'99. The research papers presented in this book cover new techniques and applications in the following research areas: Evolutionary Computation, Fuzzy Logic and Expert Systems with their applications for Optimisation, Learning, Control, Scheduling and Multi-Criteria Analysis as well as Reliability Assessment, Information Retrieval and Knowledge Acquisition. Computational Integration for Modelling, Control and Automation '99, volume 3 Intelligent Image Processing, Data Analysis & Information Retrieval Volume: 56 Concurrent Systems Engineering Series Edited by: M. Mohammadian 1999, 350 pp., hardcover ISBN: 90 5199 475 3 This edited volume is dedicated to the theory and applications of Computational Intelligence techniques for Intelligent Image Processing, Data Analysis and Information Retrieval. The book consists of 52 accepted research papers accepted research papers from the 1999 International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modeling, Control and Automation - CIMCA'99. The research papers presented in this book cover new techniques and applications in the of Image Processing, Computer Vision, Multimedia Systems, Filtering, Classification, Data Analysis, Prediction, Intelligent Database and Information Retrievals. Marcella Janmaat Promotion Manager Van Diemenstraat 94 1013 CN Amsterdam Tel: +31 20 638 2189 Fax: +31 20 620 3419 http://www.iospress.nl ********** III.A.3. Fr: Richard Hill Re: JASIS, Volume 50, Number 5 Journal of the American Society for Information Science JASIS VOLUME 50, NUMBER 5 Editorial In This Issue Bert R. Boyce 385 Research Increasing Link Marker Effectiveness for WWW and other Hypermedia Interfaces: An Examination of End-User Preferences John R. Carlson and Charles J. Kacmar 386 The Role of Experience in the Information Search Process of an Early Career Information Worker: Perceptions of Uncertainty, Complexity, Construction, and Sources Carol Collier Kuhlthau 399 A Parallel Relational Database Management System Approach to Relevance Feedback in Information Retrievel Carol Lundquist, Ophir Frieder, David O. Holmes, and David Grossman 413 Hypersonic and Supersonic Flow Roadmaps Using Bibliometrics and Database Tomography R. N. Kostoff, Henry J. Eberhart, and Darrell Ray Toothman 427 An Analysis of Orientedness in Cataloging Rules Shoichi Taniguchi 448 Information Society or Cash Nexus? A Study of the United States as a Copyright Haven Julian Warner 461 Brief Communication Do Deans Publish What They Preach? Blaise Cronin and Holly Crawford 471 Book Reviews The DDC, the Universe of Knowledge, and the Post-Modern Library, by Francis L. Miksa Birger Hj\orland 475 Basic Research Methods for Librarians, by Ronald R. Powell William T. Fischer 477 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The ASIS home page contains the Table of Contents and brief abstracts as above from January 1993 (Volume 44) to date. The John Wiley Interscience site includes issues from 1986 (Volume 37) to date. Guests have access only to tables of contents and abstracts. Registered users of the interscience site have access to the full text of these issues and to preprints. We are still working on restoring access for ASIS members as "registered users." American Society for Information Science 8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501 Silver Spring, MD 20910 (301) 495-0900 FAX (301) 495-0810 http://www.asis.org ********** III.A.4. Fr: EDUCAUSE Re: [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] EDUCAUSE Washington Update 3-22-99 EDUCAUSE: Transforming Education Through Information Technologies http://www.educause.edu EDUCAUSE WASHINGTON UPDATE --- MARCH 22, 1999 ***IN THIS ISSUE*** BUSY WEEK FOR THE FCC: COMMISSION PRESENTS RESTRUCTURING PLAN TO CONGRESS; ADOPTS CLARIFYING RULES TO PROMOTE DEPLOYMENT OF ADVANCED TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES HOUSE REINTRODUCES FRIENDLIER DATABASE PROTECTION BILL; ACADEMIA, ADMINISTRATION STILL HAVE CONCERNS SELLING IT-SQUARED TO CONGRESS: HOUSE SCIENCE SUBCOMMITTEE HEARS TESTIMONY ON PROPOSAL TO INCREASE FEDERAL FUNDING FOR IT RESEARCH >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Written from EDUCAUSE'S Washington office, "The EDUCAUSE Washington Update" is a free service of EDUCAUSE, an international nonprofit association dedicated to transforming higher education through information technologies. Anyone may subscribe to the Update by sending e-mail to listserv@listserv.educause.edu with "subscribe update firstname lastname" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send a "signoff update" command to the same address. If you would like more information about the Update or would like to offer comments or suggestions, please contact Garret Sern at gsern@educause.edu. ********** III.B.1. Fr: Roberto Poli Re: BISCA-99 BISCA-99 BOLZANO INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS IN COGNITIVE ANALYSIS ADVANCES IN COGNITIVE SEMANTICS BOLZANO, 6-10 September 1999 Speakers: DAVID CRUSE GEORGE LAKOFF RON LANGACKER LEN TALMY General information: 1. Attendance to the school will be limited to about 30 participants. 2. A hotel list will be sent upon notification of acceptance. Hotel costs in Bolzano range between 70,000 and 250,000 Italian Liras per day, full board. 3. Each speaker will give 4 lectures, with ample time for discussion. 4. All lectures will be in English. 5. The lectures will be given at Castel Maretsch, downtown, starting September 6, at 9 a.m. 6. A small number of boursaries are available to qualified students to meet the costs of participation. People wishing to participate should write to Liliana Albertazzi, Department of Sociology and Social Research, 26 Verdi st., 38100 Trento, Italy (call: (++39) 461 881 403; fax: (++39) 461 881 348), or send an e-mail message to: liliana.albertazzi@soc.gemini.unitn.it For information on the initiatives of the Istituto Mitteleuropeo di Cultura Mitteleuropäisches Kulturinstitut see http: //www.soc.unitn.it/dsrs/IMC/IMC.htm BISCA's board of directors includes: L. Albertazzi (Trento), R. Langacker (La Jolla), J. Petitot (Paris), R. Poli (Trento) and L. Talmy (Buffalo) Roberto Poli Department of Sociology and Social Research 26, Verdi street 38100 Trento -- Italy Tel. ++39-461-881-403 Fax: ++39-461-881-348 e-mail: roberto.poli@soc.unitn.it Axiomathes: http://www.soc.unitn.it/dsrs/Axiomathes/Axiomathes.htm IMC: http://www.soc.unitn.it/dsrs/IMC/IMC.htm ********** III.B.2. Fr: L Angel Perez Miranda Re: Interuniversity of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Seminar INSTITUTE FOR LOGIC, COGNITION, LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION (ILCLI) UNIVERSIDAD DEL PAIS VASCO / EHU Villa Asuncion Apdo. 220--20080-Donostia-San Sebastian e-mail: FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT We are organizing the X Seminario Interuniversitario de Filosofa y Ciencia Cognitiva with the support of the Spanish Society of Analytic Philosophy. The meeting will be held in San Sebastian, on June 17-18-19, 1999. This time, the main invited speaker will be Prof. Jaegwon Kim (Brown University), and the topic of the Seminar the following one: EXPLAINING THE MIND: CAUSATION, REDUCTION AND SUPERVENIENCE As it is usual, the organization will cover the accommodation expenses of the authors of accepted papers. CALL FOR PAPERS Contributed papers related with the topic of the Seminar are invited. Submission requirements: Three copies of an extended abstract (5-10 pages.), written in English should be submitted to Jesus Ezquerro no later than April 30, 1999. In order to facilitate blind review by the referees, all authorships data must appear on a detachable sheet. Acceptance of the papers will be notified by May 25, 1999. INSCRIPTIONS Those interested in attending the Seminar should manifest their intention to the organization in order to receive further information PROGRAM COMMITTEE Juan Jos Acero (Univ. de Granada), Agustin Arrieta (UPV / EHU), Fernando Broncano (Univ. de Salamanca), Josep Corbi (Univ. de Valencia), Jesus Ezquerro (Secretario. UPV / EHU), Manuel Garca-Carpintero (Univ. de Barcelona), Jess M. Larrazabal (UPV / EHU), Manuel Liz (Univ. de La Laguna), Carlos Moya (Univ. de Valencia), Daniel Quesada (Univ. Autonoma de Barcelona). ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Kepa Korta, Jesus Ezquerro, Jesus M. Larrazabal, Fernando Migura y Luis A. Perez Miranda. ********** III.B.3. Fr: Haym Hirsh Re: Text Mining Workshop: Paper Deadline Reminder IJCAI-99 Workshop TEXT MINING: FOUNDATIONS, TECHNIQUES AND APPLICATIONS Stockholm, Sweden August 2, 1999 http://www.cs.biu.ac.il:8080/~feldman/ijcai_99.html The information age has made it easy to store large amounts of data. The proliferation of documents available on the Web, on corporate intranets, on news wires, and elsewhere is overwhelming. However, while the amount of data available to us is constantly increasing, our ability to absorb and process this information remains constant. Search engines only exacerbate the problem by making more and more documents available in a matter of a few key strokes; so-called "push" technology makes the problem even worse by constantly reminding us that we are failing to follow critical news, events, and trends. We experience information overload, missing important patterns even as they unfold before us. Text Mining is a new and exciting research area that tries to solve the information overload problem by using techniques from data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, natural-language understanding, case-based reasoning, statistics, and knowledge management to help people gain insight into large quantities of semi-structured or unstructured text. Text Mining typically involves preprocessing of a document collection (such as through text categorization or term extraction), storage and indexing of the intermediate representations, analysis of the intermediate representations (such as via distribution analysis, document clustering, trend analysis, and association rule discovery), and visualization of the results. Sample topics appropriate for this workshop include the development of efficient algorithms for very large document collections, tools for visualizing such document collections, the use of intelligent agents to perform text mining on the internet, and the use information extraction to better capture the major themes of the documents. More generally, we solicit papers in all areas relevant to the problem of gaining insight into large collections of text, including, but not limited to, the following areas: Association Rule Discovery from Document Collections Document Representations Information Extraction for Text Mining Multi-lingual Text Mining Storage Issues Taxonomy Generation for Text Mining Term Extraction Text Categorization Text Mining Applications Text Mining on the Internet Trend Analysis Visualization Techniques Workshop presentations will be selected from among those submitting a ten-to-twelve-page paper on their work. Papers should be in postscript, PDF, HTML, or plain text format, and should be submitted by emailing a URL to feldman@cs.biu.ac.il that points to the submission. (Those for whom doing so would be a hardship should contact feldman@cs.biu.ac.il to arrange an alternative submission method.) Those wishing to attend without making a presentation should instead email feldman@cs.biu.ac.il a short (at most one page) summary of their interests. We also plan to have a demo session for research and commercial text mining systems, and those wishing to participate in this session should email feldman@cs.biu.ac.il a one-page description of their system/demo. Submission Deadline: April 15th 1999 Accept/Reject Answers mailed: May 5th 1999 Deadline for receipt of camera-ready copy: May 15th 1999 Program Committee Rakesh Agrawal (IBM, Almaden, USA) Yonatan Aumann (Bar-Ilan University, ISRAEL) Ronen Feldman, Co-Chair (Bar-Ilan University and Instinct Software,ISRAEL) Marti Hearst, (UC Berkeley, USA) Haym Hirsh, Co-Chair (Rutgers, USA) Willi Kloesgen (GMD, Germany) Yves Kodratoff (LRI, France) Heikki Mannila (Microsoft Research, USA) Martin Rajman (EPFL, Switzerland) Ian Witten, (New Zealand) Send submissions to Ronen Feldman Director, Data Mining Laboratory Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan, ISRAEL, 52900 (972) 3-5318629 (tel) (972) 3-5353325 (fax) Email: feldman@cs.biu.ac.il ********** III.B.4. Fr: Anne-Marie.Vercoustre Re: ECDL99: Extended Call for Papers ECDL'99 Extended Call For Papers Third European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries Paris, France, September 22-24, 1999 Co-organized by BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) and INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) After Pisa in 1997 and Heraklion in 1998, ECDL will take place in Paris at the prestigious location of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It is the third of a series, partially funded by the European Commission's TMR Programme, of European conferences on research and technology for digital libraries. Its main objective is to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to present their work on enabling technologies for digital libraries. The conference also provides an opportunity for scientists to develop a research community in Europe focusing on digital library development. The conference organisers solicit papers, panels and tutorials on novel research on digital libraries, including but not limited to the following list of topics: Digital library models, frameworks, and systems, interoperability, scalability Information retrieval, navigation, indexing, catalogues Multimedia information management, digitization (image, graphic, video, sound) Electronic authoring, publishing, multilinguality Metadata, knowledge representation, agent technologies Experiments in DL system development, business models for digital libraries (pricing, etc.) User interfaces, evaluation of these interfaces by users The conference is partially sponsored by ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) which will in particular provide some scholarships for young researchers attending the conference. Some selected papers will be published in the International Journal on Digital Libraries. Program Committee Serge Abiteboul, INRIA (France), chair Nabil Adam, Rutgers U. (USA) Robert Allen, Bellcore (USA) Thomas Baker, Asian Institute of Technology, (Bangkok, Thailand) Vassilis Christophides, Forth (Greece) Bruce Croft, U. Massachusetts (USA) Jacques Ducloy, LORIA (France) Gérard Dupoirier, Rank Xerox (France) Norbert Fuhr, Dortmund U. (Germany) Keith Jeffery, CLRC-RAL (UK) Judith Klavans, Colombia U. (USA) Carl Lagoze, Cornell U. (USA) Derek Law, U. Strathclyde (UK) Dominique Maillet, BNF (France) Alain Michard, ERCIM (France) Marc Nanard, CRIM Montpellier (France) Christos Nikolaou, U. Crete & FORTH (Greece) Andreas Paepcke, Stanford (USA) Carol Peters, IEI-CNR (Italy) Hans J. Schek, ETH Zurich (Switzerland) Alan Smeaton, Dublin City U. (Ireland) Ingeborg T. Sølvberg, NTNU-Trondheim (Norway) Shigeo Sugimoto, Univ. of Lib. Info. Sc. (Japan) Costantino Thanos, IEI-CNR (Italy) Anne-Marie Vercoustre, INRIA (France) Jean-Didier Wagneur, BNF (France) PC Chair: Serge Abiteboul (INRIA) Organization: Thierry Grillet (BNF), and Florence Balax (INRIA) For information: http://www-rocq.inria.fr/EuroDL99 or contact Florence.Balax@inria.fr Important dates: 15 April: submission of papers, tutorials, panels 14 June : Notification of acceptance 12 July : Camera-ready papers due 31 July : Final date for early registration We look forward to seeing you in Paris at ECDL99! Anne-Marie Vercoustre Inria Rocquencourt Domaine de Voluceau-Rocquencourt B.P.105 78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, FRANCE Phone: +33-1 39 63 56 62 Fax: +33-1 39 63 56 74 Email: Anne-Marie.Vercoustre@inria.fr http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~vercoust ********** III.B.5. Fr: Joan K Lippincott Re: EDUCAUSE Net '99 Meeting "Realizing the Promise of Advanced Networking" EDUCAUSE Networking '99 April 28-30, 1999 Renaissance Hotel, Washington, DC The long-running annual networking conference in Washington, DC, is the premier conference on federal policy affecting networking and information technology for higher education. Featured speakers this year include Senator Conrad Burns, Robert Khan of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and Milo Medin of @Home. Presentations and discussion will focus on federal telecommunications law and regulation, federal funding for information technology science and research, industry perspectives on technology policy and updates on the hottest topics in Washington telecommunications and Internet policy. Register now to reserve a seat. The conference registration fee is $250. (Registrations received after April 5th will be $275.) Online registration is available at: http://www.educause.edu/netatedu/contents/events/apr99/ SPEAKERS: The Honorable Conrad Burns, U.S. Senate (R-Montana) Robert Kahn, Chairman, CEO & President, Corporation for National Research Initiatives Milo Medin, Chief Technical Officer, @Home Rick Boucher, U.S. House of Representatives (D-Virginia) (invited) Becky Burr, Department of Commerce Robert Colette, Teleglobe International Corporation William Decker, National Science Foundation Robert Guida, Federal Public Key Initiative Steering Committee Dewayne Hendricks, Com21 Scott Huddle, MCI WorldCom Kay Howell, National Coordinating Office for Computing, Information & Communications Elliot Maxwell, Department of Commerce Mike Knotek, Department of Energy Neville O'Reilly, NetSpeak Michael Roberts, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers Peter Swire, Office of Management and Budget (invited) David Tennenhouse, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Lisa Zaina, FCC Common Carrier Bureau WHEN: Beginning 6 p.m., April 28 through 12 p.m., April 30, 1999. For the complete and updated schedule, see: http://www.educause.edu/netatedu/contents/events/apr99/ WHERE: Renaissance Hotel 999 Ninth Street NW, Washington, DC 202-898-9000 SPONSORS: EDUCAUSE, the Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Computing Research Association, the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking and the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Customer Service (303-449-4430 or info@educause.edu) or see our Web site at: http://www.educause.edu/netatedu/contents/events/apr99/ ********** III.B.6. Fr: Alan Burk Re: Scholarly Communication Symposium One Day Symposium Scholarly Communication: Options and Challenges April 12, 1999 University of New Brunswick Fredericton, New Burnswick, Canada I am pleased to announce a one day symposium, Monday April 12, 1999. This will be held in conjunction with the Canadian Metadata Workshop (http://www.hil.unb.ca/Texts/burk/metadata/) April 13, 1999 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Presenters: Stevan Harnad - University of Southampton Aldyth Holmes - Director of National Research Council Press Margo Crist - Director of Libraries UMass-Amherst Clifford Lynch - Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information And a panel of University of New Brunswick faculty Jack Passmore - Chemistry Norman Siebrasse - Law Allan Sharp - Physics Program Theme: Rising costs and journal cancellations have been with us for at least a decade. This has led to several reports and recommendations. The AUCC released their report, the Changing World of Scholarly Communication in 1996. This followed similar reports from the US and the UK. Perhaps the most descriptive account of "the library problem" comes from "To Publish and Perish", a special issue of Policy Perspectives, Pew Higher Education Roundtable. "For two decades the leaders of America's universities and colleges have sought relief from the growing costs of providing access to an ever-expanding volume of scholarly output. What they have learned is that, however straight forward the problem appears, the path to resolution has come to resemble nothing so much as a rumba: two steps forward, three steps back, one to the side, twirl, and repeat." In the last few years there have been many articles, reports and news items discussing the changing fabric of publishing. Several innovative publishing initiatives have evolved which challenge the traditional models. Preprint servers and other not for profit publishing partnerships are challenging the publishing industry and the academic community. Do the new technologies provide a basis for a more cost-effective solution? These changes do involve risks, authentication and preservation, to name just two. We are pleased that several key individuals have agreed to take a day from their very busy schedules to guide us through some of these issues. Website and registration: http://www.hil.unb.ca/Texts/burk/scholarly/ Directed to: University administrators Faculty looking for a cancelled journal Librarians Journal editors Publishers Location: The Auditorium, Wu Conference Centre University of New Brunswick Fredericton, New Brunswick FOR MORE INFORMATION See the Workshop Web site with a link to a Web registration form: http://www.hil.unb.ca/Texts/burk/scholarly/ (note upper and lower case matter) For general information and questions about registration, contact Karen Maguire Library Administrative Officer UNB Libraries Phone (506) 453-4740 Fax (506) 453-4595 email: kmaguire@unb.ca Alan Burk, Associate Director of Libraries and Director of Electronic Text Centre (http://www.unb.ca/etc/) phone: 506-453-4740 fax: 506-453-4595 ********** III.C.1. Fr: Efthimis N. Efthimiadis Re: UW: SLIS: Talk by S.E.Robertson on Probabilistic IR The School of Library and Information Science, University of Washington, invites you to attend a research colloquium by Professor Stephen Robertson: "A little theory and a lot of experiments: developing probabilistic models for information retrieval." Date: Tuesday, March 30th, at 4:00 p.m., Place: Odegaard Library, room 220 Reception follows in Odeggard 220, 5:00-6:00pm. Abstract: A little theory and a lot of experiments: developing probabilistic models for information retrieval Stephen Robertson Microsoft Research St George House 1 Guildhall Street Cambridge CB2 3NH, UK ser@microsoft.com The probabilistic approach to information retrieval has proved itself to be a significant and valuable way of formulating and theorizing about problems in IR. It has provided some valuable insights, concepts, and arguments, which have contributed substantially to the state of the art. In addition, it appears to provide a sound theoretical basis for IR models. However, in common with other models, it fails to answer many questions, or provides only partial answers. In many cases, indeed, it does little more than suggest answers. There are several reasons for this; one is that it simply has little to say about some of the phenomena that affect retrieval. For example, while it may be the case that some linguistic phenomena could be described in probabilistic terms, there are other aspects of language which seem much less susceptible to probabilistic modeling. Some of these questions (not all) may be answered by experimental means. Indeed, the combination of probabilistic models and experimentation is more than the sum of its parts. Theoretical modeling and experimentation feed on and contribute to each other. Furthermore, little bits of theory often entail large amounts of experimentation. In this talk, I will discuss the experiences of some years' work in this area. These experiences are mainly associated with City University London and the team that developed the Okapi experimental retrieval system, as well as with the huge international experimental programme known as TREC. Bio Professor Robertson received a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University, a masters in information science from City University, London, and a doctorate from University College, London. He has pursued research at Aslib, University College, London, City University, London, and UC Berkeley. At City University, he was professor and head of the Department of Information Science. At City he established the Centre for Interactive Systems Research and built a research group with a strong focus on the design and evaluation of information retrieval systems (including Micheline Beaulieu and Stephen Walker, and the Okapi system). In 1998, he began working for Microsoft at their new research lab in Cambridge, England, where he is building a team for IR research, and received the Tony Kent STRIX award from the Institute of Information Scientists,UK. For more information about the presentation, please contact SLIS professor Efthimis N. Efthimiadis at efthimis@u.washington.edu or visit the SLIS web site at http://depts.washington.edu/~slis/ Efthimis N. Efthimiadis Associate Professor School of Library & Information Science 303 Electrical Engineering Bldg Box 352930 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195-2930 tel-office: 206-616-6077 tel-school: 206-543-1794 fax.: 206-616-3152 url: http://depts.washington.edu/~slis url: http://u.weber.washington.edu/~efthimis ****************************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, California Digital Library, 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA. 94607-5200. 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