Information Retrieval List Digest 484 (December 20, 1999) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-484.txt IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 December 20, 1999 Volume XVI, Number 48 Issue 484 This is the last issue of 1999. See you in 2000! ****************************************************************** I. QUERIES 1. Languages for Information Retrieval III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. JSASL: CFPapers 2. [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] December 17, 1999 B. Meetings 1. IEEE Vis 2000: CFParticipation 2. ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop: CFPapers 3. ECAI 2000/PAIS 2000: 2nd CFPapers 4. CoopIS'2000: 2nd CFPapers 5. ASIS 2000: CFParticipation 6. ACL 2000: Preliminary CFPapers 7. 6th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies: CFParticipation 8. Workshop on Information Extraction meets Corpus Linguistics at LREC 2000 9. TAG+5: 2nd CFPapers C. Miscellaneous 1. Free ESL Conversion Software ****************************************************************** I. QUERIES I.1. Fr: Maria Salet F. Novellino Re: Languages for Information Retrieval I'm doing a PhD in information science and my thesis is about language for information access. I'm studying about the possibility of building a language based not in the subjects of a domain but on the activities developed inside the domain and their different discourses. I'd like to exchange impressions and oppinions with colleagues interested in the subject. Thanks, Salet ****************************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: Paul Haschak Re: JSASL: CFPapers Hello, The current issue of The Journal of Southern Academic and Special Librarianship (JSASL) is now available on the web at: http://www.icaap.org/SouthernLibrarianship/ JSASL is an independent, professional, refereed electronic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge and research in the areas of academic and special librarianship. It is published three times a year--in February, June, and October--and is distibuted by the International Consortium for Alternative Academic Publication (ICAAP), in Athabasca, Alberta, Canada. ICAAP is "dedicated to the development of an international alternative scholarly communication system outside of the commercial mainstream." ICAAP promotes "a model of high quality scholarly communication free from the heavy costs of printing, distribution, and administration associated with the publication of print and commercial journals." With the cost of journals skyrocketing, we have to ask ourselves, why should librarians keep paying increasing subscription prices for the research we do on our own campuses? JSASL is, and always will be, free to the individual. Strongly consider publishing your research in our scholarly alternative to costly commercial publications. JSASL continually accepts journal article manuscripts for publication consideration. The guidelines are posted at our web site. Just in case you were wondering about the "Southern" in our name, it reflects our geographic roots in the Southern United States. While our roots are in the South, our focus and our interests are global in nature. Thus, we are committed to covering all aspects of academic and special librarianship without regard to region--or country. We are looking for a few good manuscripts. You don’t have to be from the South to submit an article for consideration; and the article doesn’t have to be about the South. Think global! We look forward to seeing your manuscript! Sincerely, Paul Haschak, Co-Founder, Executive Editor, and Publisher of The Journal of Southern Academic and Special Librarianship. ********** III.A.2. Fr: EDUCAUSE Re: [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] December 17, 1999 EDUCAUSE: Transforming Education through Information Technologies http://www.educause.edu IN THIS ISSUE: COMMERCE HOSTS SUMMIT ON DIGITAL DIVIDE; PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES NEW INITIATIVES "THE TWELVE DAYS OF BROADBAND" WHITE HOUSE DELAYS RELEASE OF ENCRYPTION PLAN >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 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: vis2000@gris.uni-tuebingen.de (IEEE Visualization 2000) Re: IEEE Vis 2000: CFParticipation CALL FOR PARTICIPATION IEEE Visualization 2000 October 8 - October 13, 2000 Doubletree Hotel Salt Lake City, Utah Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics In Cooperation with ACM/SIGGRAPH Visualization is a vital research and applications frontier shared by a variety of science, medical, engineering, business, and entertainment fields. IEEE Visualization 2000 focuses on interdisciplinary methods and collaboration among developers and users of visualization methods across all of science, engineering, medicine, and commerce. Sunday through Tuesday of Conference Week will include tutorials, symposia, and mini-workshops. Papers, panels, case studies, and works in progress will be presented Wednesday through Friday. We invite you to participate in IEEE Visualization 2000 by submitting your original research through papers, panels, case studies, work in progress, and demonstrations. Share your perspectives through panels and workshops, or your experience through tutorials. Please select the forum appropriate to your submission, where it will be considered by your peers for presentation. Particular focus on volume visualization and information visualization are addressed in special two-day symposia. For further information on the conference or symposia contact: Charles Hansen, Conference Co-Chair, University of Utah +1 801.581.3154 Fax: +1 801.581.5843 hansen@cs.utah.edu Chris Johnson, Conference Co-Chair, University of Utah +1 801.581.7705 Fax: +1 801.585.6513 crj@cs.utah.edu Steve Bryson, Conference Co-Chair, NASA Ames Research Center +1 650.604.4524 Fax: +1 650.604.3957 bryson@nas.nasa.gov See the conference web page for complete up-to-date information at http://www.erc.msstate.edu/conferences/vis2000 Conference Papers (due March 31, 2000) Papers are solicited that present research results related to all areas of visualization. Original papers are limited to 5,000 words. The submission of NTSC VHS video (up to 5 minutes in length) to accompany the paper is strongly recommended. This year we will begin accepting electronic submissions of papers. If you choose to submit electronically, please submit in the PDF or postscript format. If you chose to submit hardcopy, please submit 7 hardcopies of all materials. Regardless of whether you submit your paper electronically or in the hardcopy format, a complete paper submission form including the abstract must be sent through the conference website for each submission. Details for electronic submission are available at http://www.erc.msstate.edu/conferences/vis2000/. Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings; the videos will be included in the conference video proceedings. Hard copy paper submissions should be sent to: Vis2000, Center for Scientific Computing and Imaging, University of Utah, 50 S. Central Campus Dr.,Room 3440 MEB Salt Lake City, UT 84112 +1 801-581-3154 Panel Proposals (due March 31, 2000) Panels should address the most important issues in visualization today. Panelists should be experts in their fields who can discuss the challenges of visualization, and engage the audience and fellow panel members in a stimulating, interactive debate. Panel proposals should describe the topic to be addressed and identify the prospective panelists. Each panelist should include a position statement on the topic and a short biography, the total of which should be limited to 500 words. The statements will be included in the conference proceedings. Panel proposals should be sent to Jamie Painter - jamie@acl.lanl.gov Case Study Papers (due March 31, 2000) Case studies are reports on how visualization has contributed to the analysis of data in actual applications or studies of the visualization process. A short paper limited to 2500 words (maximum 4 pages B/W plus 1 page color) will be included in the conference proceedings. Images and/or NTSC VHS video to accompany the paper are recommended; the video will be included in the conference video proceedings. This year we are encouraging electronic submissions. For more detailed information concerning submission, see the web site, or contact Robert van Liere - robertl@cwi.nl Work in Progress (due June 15, 2000) Submissions are solicited for Works In Progress sessions that pertain to all areas of Visualization. These submissions must be original abstracts, must describe work in progress by the authors and their collaborators, and may not exceed 500 words or a maximum of 1 page. Images and/or NTSC VHS video to accompany the abstract are recommended. Authors of accepted abstracts will have an opportunity to submit a revised and extended abstract, as well as presenting the work at the conference. These extended abstracts may not exceed 1000 words or a maximum of 2 pages including images. All accepted abstracts will be distributed at the conference but not published in the conference proceedings. Videos associated with accepted abstracts may be included in the conference video proceedings. All submissions will be done electronically. Submission details can be found at the conference web site. For further information, contact Sam Uselton - uselton1@llnl.gov Tutorial Proposals (due March 31, 2000) Half-day and full-day course proposals are invited for visualization systems, methods, and application areas. Tutorials will be offered Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. For more detailed information concerning submission and format content, see the web site, or Contact Penny Rheingans - rheingan@cs.umbc.edu Mini-Workshop and Birds-of-a-Feather Proposals (due March 31, 2000) Proposals may be submitted for Mini-Workshops and evening Birds-Of-A-Feather (BOF) gatherings on visualization methods or application areas. They should deal with state-of-the-art topics and involve experts in the field. Discipline-focused proposals devoted to a particular discipline's methods and needs are encouraged. Mini-Workshop and Birds-of-a-Feather Proposals should be sent to Rob Erbacher - erbacher@cs.albany.edu Demonstration Proposals Visualization 2000 is a unique opportunity to present your products or research to visualization experts from a wide variety of fields. We invite demonstrations of commercial hardware, software, integrated systems peripherals, and literature, as well as academic research. We encourage demonstrators to have technical representatives in attendance. For more information on participating in Visualization 2000 demonstrations, contact Eric Greenwade - leg@inel.gov Creative Applications Lab The Creative Applications Lab (CAL) is designed to let presenters interact with conference attendees on an individual basis. The CAL will have a variety of computers on which the contributors can install their materials for attendees' experimentation and enjoyment. The CAL will be open in conjunction with the demonstrations at Visualization 2000. For details on participating in the CAL see the web site or contact Russell Taylor - taylor@cs.unc.edu IEEE/SIGGRAPH 2000 Symposium on Volume Visualization (VolVis 2000) (submission deadline March 31, 2000) Papers in all areas of volume visualization and volume graphics are solicited for the 2000 Volume Visualization Symposium. http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/volviz/volviz00.html IEEE 2000 Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis 2000) (submission deadline March 31, 2000) Papers, panels and case studies concentrating on issues specific to abstract information visualization. http://www.infovis.org/infovis2000 ********** III.B.2. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop: CFPapers Syntactic and Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing Systems WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION The last decade has seen an explosion in the work done in the development of robust natural language processing systems. A common methodology used in building these systems has been to analyze a sample of the data available (either manually, or automatically for training statistical systems), build statistical/heuristical schemas based upon the analysis, and test the system on a blind sample of the data. Due to this commonly used paradigm, an important area of research that has not been given the attention it deserves is the estimation of syntactic and semantic complexity faced by these systems in the tasks they perform. At the AAAI 1999 Fall Symposium on Question Answering Systems, the problem of semantic complexity, a topic of a 90 minutes panel, motivated a lot of interest and discussion. To continue the investigation of this important issue, in this workshop, we will address the question of complexity as it pertains to the syntax and semantics of natural language. In particular, the workshop will seek to address the following areas: 1) How can we model syntactic and semantic complexity for formal models of natural language? 2) How does complexity impact acquisition of semantic and conceptual information? 3) How does syntactic and semantic complexity impact document classification in information and text retrieval tasks? 4) How do statistical clustering approaches compare to knowledge-based approaches at partitioning and quantifying the semantic space in a document set? 5) Concerning NLP systems that are deployed in the field, how can we quantify the information extraction task and QA task in ways similar to what is currently done with IR tasks and algorithms? 6) How does the estimation of syntactic and semantic complexity impact the evaluation of such systems? 7) Can syntactic and semantic complexity coupled with a history of the past performance of a system be used to predict future performance of the system on a different data set? The workshop invites short papers, full-length papers, proposals for panel discussions, and position statements that deal with any aspect of syntactic and/or semantic complexity of NLP systems. In particular, the workshop is interested in addressing the following topics: - estimation of the syntactic and semantic complexity of specific NLP tasks - semantic complexity and world knowledge - role of syntactic and semantic complexity in system design and testing - syntactic and semantic complexity and its role in the evaluation of NLP systems - use of syntactic and semantic complexity as a performance predictor - relationship between syntactic and semantic complexity FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION Paper submissions should consist of either a short paper (2000 words or less, including references), a position statement (2000 words or less, including references), or a full paper (5000 words or less, including references). Each submission should include a separate title page providing the following information: the title, the type of paper (short/position/full), the word count, a short abstract, names and affiliations of all the authors, the full address of the primary author (or alternate contact person), including phone, fax, and email. Proposals for panels should consist of a short (upto 500 words) description of the proposed panel along with the names of the proposed panelists. Papers and proposals for panel discussions may be submitted by submitting three hard copies or one soft copy (ASCII, or PS) to: Amit Bagga General Electric CRD Room K1-5C38B 1 Research Circle Niskayuna, NY 12309. USA phone: 1-518-387-7077 email: bagga@crd.ge.com IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission deadline: February 7 Notification of acceptance of panels : February 21 Notification of acceptance of papers : February 28 Camera ready papers due: March 13 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Co-Chairs: Amit Bagga General Electric Corporate Research and Development P.O. Box 8 Schenectady, NY 12301 bagga@crd.ge.com 518-387-7077 (voice) 518-387-6845 (fax) James Pustejovsky Computer Science Department and Volen Center for Complex Systems Brandeis University Waltham, MA 02254-9110 jamesp@cs.brandeis.edu 781-736-2709 (voice) 781-736-2741 (fax) Wlodek Zadrozny IBM T.J. Watson Research Center 30 Saw Mill River Road Hawthorne, NY 10532 wlodz@us.ibm.com 914-784-7835 (voice) 914-784-7455 (fax) ********** III.B.3. Fr: Markus Hannebauer Re: ECAI 2000/PAIS 2000: 2nd CFPapers ECAI 2000/PAIS 2000 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems Berlin, Humboldt University August 20-25, 2000 Organized by German Informatics Society (GI) and European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) Hosted by Humboldt University Berlin In this special turn of the century we invite you to celebrate ECAI 2000 in Berlin. In the tradition of previous ECAIs the conference will bring together researchers and developers from academy and industry in order to present the state of the art in AI both in research and in applications. The technical program will have a scientific track (paper presentations, invited talks, panel discussions), workshops, and tutorials. Since the year 2000 is a special year, we will make ECAI 2000 a very special conference. Among the programs thought to realize this purpose is an exhibition concept that reflects AI's history, its gaining grounds in the 20th century and its progress paths envisioned into the 21st century. Furthermore, we plan to have a rather unusual sidetrack meant to attract layman such that ECAI 2000 becomes an event in Berlin and not only one of diverse scientific congresses hardly noticed by the public. In so far, we aim at presenting AI on ECAI 2000 in a very broad scope in order to show its relation to other classical and advanced IT-topics (e. g. databases, distributed computing, robotics, operations research, artificial life, neuro sciences, virtual reality, and multimedia). For the first time, ECAI comprises the Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems sub-conference (PAIS 2000). The purpose of this event is to provide a forum for industry practitioners to learn about the power and applicability of selected intelligent systems techniques and share experience on the application, development and deployment of intelligent systems in industry. This will be the largest showcase in Europe of real applications using intelligent systems technology and the ideal place to meet with those working to make successful applications. On behalf of the conference officials Kurt Sundermeyer DaimlerChrysler AG Local Chair ECAI 2000 "At the change of ages we will make ECAI 2000 in Berlin a special conference" FURTHER GENERAL INFORMATION http://www.ecai2000.hu-berlin.de ECAI 2000 SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS The ECAI 2000 Program Committee invites submission of papers for the technical program of the 14th biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2000). IMPORTANT DATES 2 Feb 2000 Deadline for paper summaries 4 Feb 2000 Deadline for papers 28 Apr 2000 Notification of acceptance 29 May 2000 Camera-ready copies of papers 23-25 Aug 2000 Technical program at ECAI 2000 Submissions are invited on substantial, original and previously unpublished research in all fields of Artificial Intelligence, including, but not limited to: * Abduction * AI and Creativity * Adaptive Systems * Affective Computation * Art and Music * Automated Reasoning * Autonomous Agents * Bayesian Learning * Belief Revision * Case-Based Reasoning * Causal Reasoning * Cognitive Modelling * Cognitive Robotics * Conceptual Graphs * Constraint Programming * Constraint Satisfaction * Constraint-Based Reasoning * Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery * Deduction * Description Logics * Diagnosis * Distributed AI * Genetic Algorithms * Human Language Technology * Inductive Logic Programming * Information Retrieval and Presentation * Intelligent User Interfaces * Knowledge Acquisition * Knowledge Representation * Lifelike and Believable Characters * Logic Programming * Machine Learning * Meta-Heuristics for AI * Model-Based Reasoning * Multi-Agent Systems * Natural Language Processing * Neural Networks * Nonmonotonic Reasoning * Ontologies * Perception * Philosophical Foundations * Planning * Probabilistic Networks * Qualitative Reasoning * Reactive Control * Real-time Systems* Reasoning about Actions and Change * Reinforcement Learning * Resource-Bounded Reasoning * Reuse of Knowledge * Robotics * Scheduling * Search* Signal Understanding * Spatial Reasoning * Speech Processing * Temporal Reasoning * Text Mining * Theorem Proving * Uncertainty in AI * User Modeling * Verification and Validation of Knowledge-Based Systems* Virtual and Augmented Reality * Vision FORMATTING GUIDELINES It is highly recommended to submit papers using the final camera-ready formatting style. Submissions must not exceed five pages in camera-ready format. Submissions of unformatted papers are limited to 6000 words including footnotes, figure captions, tables, appendices, and bibliography. Each half-page of figures will be counted as 600 words. (Please note that for some papers five camera-ready pages may be considerably less than 6000 words in practice.) Over-length submissions will be rejected without re- view. Authors submitting unformatted papers must include a word count on their paper. Latex style files to support formatting of submissions will be available. Final versions of accepted papers will be required to conform strictly to the formatting requirements specified in the ECAI 2000 style guide (not available yet). Each accepted paper will be allocated five pages in the proceedings. SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Submission is a two-stage process. Authors are asked to submit a brief summary of their paper by 2 February 2000. The strongly preferred submission method is to use the web-based summary submission form. Submitted summaries will be assigned a unique tracking number that should be marked on the full paper submission. Authors without access to the web should send a summary including the title, authors, contact address and abstract for the paper (maximum 200 words), plus keywords drawn from the above list (plus other keywords if appropriate) to the ECAI 2000 Program Chair (by email or postal mail). The summary information and the tracking number should also be included with the paper itself, on a separate sheet of paper. (Authors not able to use the web-based submission form may omit the tracking number). Submission of the paper is in hard copy form only, fax or electronic submissions will not be accepted. Six copies of the paper (each including the summary sheet) should be sent by postal mail or courier service to the ECAI 2000 Program Chair at the address below. The deadline for receipt of papers is 4 February 2000. Papers received after this date will not be reviewed. Notification of receipt of full papers will be mailed to the corresponding author soon after receipt. Address for submission Werner Horn ECAI 2000 Program Chair Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI) Schottengasse 3 A-1010 Vienna Austria Email: ecai2000@ai.univie.ac.at Tel: +43-1-4277-63114 Fax: +43-1-4277-9631 Summary form http://www.ecai2000.hu-berlin.de/summary.html (not available yet) Multiple submissions policy ECAI 2000 will not accept any paper that at the time of submission is under review for, or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Authors are also expected not to submit their papers elsewhere during the review period. These restrictions apply only to journals and conferences and not to workshops or similar specialized meetings with limited audiences. The title page should include a statement that the paper is not under review or accepted for publication in another conference or journal. REVIEW PROCEDURE All submissions will be subject to academic peer review by the ECAI 2000 Program Committee under the chairmanship of the ECAI 2000 Program Chair. The ECAI 2000 Program Chair has final authority over the review process and all decisions relating to acceptance of papers. Review criteria include originality of ideas, technical soudness, significance of results, and quality of presentation. Notification of acceptance or rejection of submitted papers will be mailed to the corresponding author by 28 April 2000. CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS The conference proceedings will be published and distributed by IOS Press. The authors will be responsible for producing camera- ready copies of papers, conforming to the ECAI 2000 formatting guidelines, for inclusion in the proceedings. The deadline for receipt of the camera-ready copy is 29 May 2000. Note that at least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference to present the paper. ECAI 2000 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by Humboldt University Berlin on behalf of Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI). PAIS 2000 SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS ECAI is pleased to announce its Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS 2000) sub-conference. The PAIS 2000 Program Committee invites authors to submit application papers. IMPORTANT DATES 2 Feb 2000 Deadline for PAIS paper summaries 4 Feb 2000 Deadline for papers 28 Apr 2000 Notification of acceptance 29 May 2000 Camera-ready copies of papers 23-25 Aug 2000 PAIS 2000 This event, associated with ECAI 2000 is created to specifically highlight significant successful applications of Intelligent Systems (IS) technology. The purpose of the event is to provide a forum for industry practitioners to learn about the power and applicability of selected IS techniques and share experience on the applicability, development and deployment of intelligent systems in industry. This will be the largest showcase in Europe of real application using Intelligent Systems technology and the ideal place to meet with those working to make successful IS-based applications. The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems event will present papers describing successful applications of Intelligent Systems. Papers are selected to highlight critical areas of success (and failure) and to present the benefits and lessons of value to other developers. Submitted papers should make these points clear. Papers should contain sections covering the following information: Descriptive Title and Abstract: These should convey clearly and simply what the application is and its operational status. Do use a title that makes it clear to a reader what the application is. Don't use a clever or an obscure title. Problem description: This should describe the problem that the application solves, stating the objectives of the application and explaining why an Intelligent Systems solution was required. If other solutions were tried and failed, briefly outline these solutions with reasons for failure. Application description: This should describe the solution to the problem, with technical details on design and implementation. It should describe any methodological approach used, detail the key IS techniques used and if appropriate show how they were integrated with conventional techniques. If commercial tools were used they should be identified and reasons for their selection given. Application building: This should describe the size and skill make-up of the project team, how long is took to build and the costs involved. How it was/will be installed and introduced to the users, with details of any training required. Describe any plans for maintenance, in particular how the knowledge is expected to change over time, and any features to aid the updating of knowledge, etc. Application benefits: Were potential benefits identified before building the application and have these been realised or are likely to be realised? Has the application been in use and, if so, how often has it been used and by how many users? What further long term benefits are expected? What future plans have been made for its enhancement and use? For PAIS 2000, a paper is acceptable even if it describes a system which has not yet been installed, PROVIDED the application is original AND the paper discusses the aspects and issues that would help someone thinking of implementing a similar system in their own organisation. It must concisely describe and scope the problem tackled, saying why it is hard, and why IS techniques are needed. It should also make clear the status of the system, and should discuss such things as the project duration and effort, how the project was justified and the expected benefits estimated, any problems encountered, the performance of the final system and the reactions of users. The review procedure is different and separate from the ECAI technical conference. Papers will be evaluated by experienced application developers, based on the above criterion. Accepted papers will be published in the ECAI proceedings. FORMATTING GUIDELINES It is highly recommended to submit papers using the final camera-ready formatting style. Submissions must not exceed five pages in camera-ready format. Submissions of unformatted papers are limited to 6000 words including footnotes, figure captions, tables, appendices, and bibliography. Each half-page of figures will be counted as 600 words. (Please note that for some papers five camera-ready pages may be considerably less than 6000 words in practice.) Overlength submissions will be rejected without re- view. Authors submitting unformatted papers must include a word count on their paper. Latex style files to support formatting of submissions will be available. Final versions of accepted papers will be required to conform strictly to the formatting requirements specified in the ECAI-2000 Style Guide. Each accepted paper will be allocated five pages in the proceedings. SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Submission is a two-stage process. Authors are asked to submit a brief summary of their paper by 2 February 2000. The strongly preferred submission method is to use the web-based PAIS summary submission form. Submitted summaries will be assigned a unique tracking number that should be marked on the full paper sub- mission. Authors without access to the web should send a summary including the title, authors, contact address and abstract for the paper (maximum 200 words), plus a set of indicative keywords to the ECAI 2000 Program Chair (by email or postal mail). The summary information and the tracking number should also be included with the paper itself, on a separate sheet of paper. (Authors not able to use the web-based submission form may omit the tracking number). Submission of the paper is in hard copy form only, fax or electronic submissions will not be accepted. Six copies of the paper (each including the summary sheet) should be sent by postal mail or courier service to the ECAI 2000 Program Chair at the address below. The deadline for receipt of papers is 4 February 2000. Papers received after this date will not be reviewed. Notification of receipt of full papers will be mailed to the corresponding author soon after receipt. Address for submission Werner Horn PAIS 2000 Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI) Schottengasse 3 A-1010 Vienna Austria Email: pais2000@ai.univie.ac.at Tel: +43-1-4277-63114 Fax: +43-1-4277-9631 Summary form http://www.ecai2000.hu-berlin.de/pais-summary.html (not available yet) REVIEW PROCEDURE All submissions will be subject to review by a team of experienced application developers in the PAIS 2000 Program Committee under the chairmanship of the PAIS 2000 Program Chair, Rob Milne. The PAIS 2000 Program Chair has final authority over the review process and all decisions relating to acceptance of papers. Notification of acceptance or rejection of submitted papers will be mailed to the corresponding author by 28 April 2000. CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS Accepted PAIS 2000 papers will appear in a special section of the ECAI conference proceedings and will be published and distributed by IOS Press. The authors will be responsible for producing camera-ready copies of papers, conforming to the ECAI 2000 formatting guidelines, for inclusion in the proceedings. The deadline for receipt of the camera-ready copy is 29 May 2000. Note that at least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference to present the paper. PAIS 2000 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by Humboldt University on behalf of Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI). ECAI 2000 Publicity Office c/o Markus Hannebauer eMail: hannebau@first.gmd.de GMD FIRST phone: +49-30-6392 1866 Kekulestr. 7 fax: +49-30-6392 1805 12489 Berlin GERMANY ********** III.B.4. Fr: David Carmel Re: CoopIS'2000: 2nd CFPapers Call for Papers - CoopIS'2000 Fifth IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems In Cooperation with VLDB'2000 Neptune Hotel Eilat, Israel, September 6-8, 2000 http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/coopis2000.html What is CoopIS ? CoopIS is the leading conference for system cooperation. Cooperation among systems has gained substantial importance in recent years: electronic commerce, virtual enterprises, and the middleware paradigm are just some examples of this area. Several levels of cooperation are present: * The subject matter is the foundation and implementation of cooperation among systems. * The CoopIS area is a meeting of disciplines that provide concepts and techniques. The relevant disciplines are: collaborative work, distributed databases, distributed computing, electronic commerce, human-computer interaction, multi-agent systems, information retrieval, and workflow systems. * The CoopIS series provides a forum for well-known researchers, that are drawn from the stature and the tradition of these conference series, and has a leading role in shaping the future of the cooperative information systems area. Opportunities for informal meetings between the conference delegates will be enhanced with a series of social events, including pre-conference exploration of Eilat, in-conference tour of the surrounding desert, and post-conference excursion that will enable easy connection for those continuing to VLDB'2000 in Cairo. CoopIS'2000 is the seventh conference in the series and the fifth conference organized by the International Foundation on Cooperative Information Systems (IFCIS). It is sponsored by the International Foundation in Cooperative Information Systems (IFCIS), and the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa (other sponsors pending). It replaces the erstwhile international workshops on Interoperability in Multidatabase Systems (IMS) and the conference series on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS & ICICIS). The conference will be held in Eilat, A resort town and bustling port, combining sea and desert, Eilat lies at Israel's southernmost tip. Sixty minutes by plane from Tel-Aviv, Eilat is situated between the wondrous scenery of the deep azure Red Sea and the multitude Edom Mountains and is a paradise for sea-sports fans. Important dates: Submission Intention Notice Deadline March 13, 2000 Paper Submission Deadline March 27, 2000 Acceptance Notification May 29, 2000 Final Version Due June 26, 2000 Early registration deadline July 31, 2000 The Conference September 6-8, 2000 Who should submit papers ? Papers are solicited in two categories: regular research papers and industrial experience papers. The category should be clearly identified. Regular research papers should contain original research concepts and results in one or more technologies relevant to cooperative information systems. Industrial experience papers should describe technical or key business issues and lessons learned in developing, applying, and deploying relevant technologies, highlighting aspects of cooperation and interoperation. Submitted papers should not be longer than 5000 words. Submissions should be unpublished and should not be under consideration by another conference or journal. A few papers will be selected for publication, after appropriate expansion and review, in the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. One of the main themes will be information services in the 21st century, and we particularly welcome papers related to this theme. We also encourage the submission of all topics related to cooperative information systems, including (but not limited to) the following: * Agent Technology * Business Intelligence Frameworks * Business Process Modeling * Communication infrastructure for collaboration * Computer-supported Cooperative work * Cooperative Information System Architectures * Cooperative Information System foundations * Cooperative Transactions * Cooperative Transactions * Digital Libraries * Distributed Problem Solving * Distributed GIS * Distributed Multimedia Systems * Distributed Object Management * Distributed Warehousing and mining * Electronic Commerce * Enterprise Knowledge management * Event Based Systems * Engineering Distributed systems * Federated and Multi-database systems * Human-Computer Interaction for cooperation * Information Filtering * Information Resource Discovery * Information Retrieval * Information, Data and knowledge Modeling * Integration and Interoperability * Legacy Data Access and Management * Mediators, Wrappers * Middleware Technology * Meta-data and Repositories * Multi-agent Systems * Mobile Computing for Cooperation * Organizational Aspects of Cooperative * Semantic Interoperability Systems (including virtual organizations) * Web-based Information Systems * Web-based Services * Workflow Systems Papers Submission Papers will be submitted in an electronic fashion (Postscript or PDF files) to both program chairs. A pre-submission intention notice to both program chairs with the paper's authors, title, and classification is requested. The CoopIS'2000 team: General Chairs Avigdor Gal Michele Missikoff Rutgers University, USA IASI-CNR, Italy E-mail: avigal@rci.rutgers.edu E-mail: missikoff@iasi.rm.cnr.it Program Chairs Opher Etzion Peter Scheuermann IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, Northwestern University, USA Israel E-mail: opher@il.ibm.com E-mail: peters@ece.nwu.edu Publicity and Proceedings Chair David Carmel IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, Israel E-mail: carmel@il.ibm.com ********** III.B.5. Fr: Richard Hill Re: ASIS 2000: CFParticipation CALL FOR PARTICIPATION Knowledge Innovations: Celebrating Our Heritage, Designing Our Future ASIS 2000 Annual Conference Chicago, Illinois November 13-16, 2000 Poised on the edge of the new millennium, ASIS finds itself at an exciting point in the evolution of information science and technology. We have made enormous strides in collecting, organizing, and dissemination information, but the increased potentialities only underscore the need for continued developments. At this meeting, we will look at where we are today, how we got here, and where we are going. We will celebrate our rich information heritage and our decades of accomplishment and consider how best to use the first principles of information science to guide our work in the century ahead. Our ability to transform data into information, and then into usable knowledge, can change the face of work, education, and life. We have increasing capacity to generate or gather, model, represent and retrieve more complex and cross disciplinary data and ideas from new sources and at varying scales. The transformational power of information can only be capitalized upon through knowledge acquisition, classification, utilization and dissemination research, tools and techniques. "Knowledge management" has a substantial and growing body of theory and practice. This conference will look at current (and imminent) knowledge creation, acquisition, navigation, retrieval, management and dissemination practicalities and potentialities, their implementation and impact, and the theories behind developments. We will review the processes, technologies and tools. We will also look at the appropriate or necessary operational policies, relevant legal issues (laws, legislation and the EU Directive), and international and domestic policies and regulations. Following the successful topical arrangement for the 1999 meeting, the 2000 conference will again feature five tracks: * Knowledge Discovery, Capture and Creation (track coordinators Don Kraft and Bonnie Lawlor)- capturing tacit knowledge, data mining, collaboration, expert directories, intelligent systems employing usage patterns (e.g. search strategies) etc. * Classification and Representation (coordinators Merri Beth Lavagnino and Gary Marchionini) - interface design, metadata, information visualization, taxonomies, clustering, indexing, vocabularies and automatic indexing, etc. * Information Retrieval (coordinators Bill Hersh and Louise Su) - search engines, intelligent agents, browsing v. searching, navigation, knowledge/information architecture, data mining, etc. * Knowledge Dissemination (coordinators Julie Hurd and Bob Willard) - communication, publishing (including internet vs. intranet vs. Extranet), push v. pull, etc. * Social, Behavioral, Ethical, and Legal Aspects (coordinators Bonnie Carroll and Barbara Wildemuth) - information acceptance vs. rejection, behavior modifications, policies and politics, value assessments, corporate and national information cultures, knowledge seeking behavior, training for effective utilization, managing knowledge management, legislative and judicial issues. The bulk of the conference sessions will be arranged into these tracks, but additional topics may be proposed and will be incorporated in the meeting as special sessions. For more information on individual tracks, contact the track coordinators by sending a message to ASIS00@asis.org [zero, zero] with the subject line indicating "contact 'track name' ". TYPES OF SUBMISSIONS: We are soliciting three types of submissions - contributed papers, technical sessions, and special sessions. In all three categories, electronic submissions are strongly encouraged and should be submitted to AM00@asis.org [zero, zero]. If electronic submission is not possible two paper copies should be sent to each address below. Contributed Papers To submit a paper, submit the title and a draft of the proposed paper. Submissions must include the name, position, complete address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address of the author(s). All proposals are due by January 15, 2000. Papers will be reviewed, and notification of acceptance will be made no later than March 15, 2000. Camera-ready copy for the Proceedings will be due by May 15, 2000. Note that this is a change in procedures, and that a full draft of the paper is required as the initial submission. This allows time for a more rigorous review of papers. Contributed papers will be grouped by topic and presented in sessions of 3-4 papers. Contributed papers may be combined into technical sessions at the discretion of the track coordinators. Technical Sessions Technical sessions can be developed by individuals, by ASIS Special Interest Groups (SIGs), by outside organizations, or collaboratively among different individuals or groups. To submit a proposal, send the following information: * Title * Sponsor(s) * Name, address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address of the contact person who coordinate the session * Names, positions, and affiliations of presenters and other session participants such as moderators, reactors, etc. * 500 word descriptive abstract of the session * Track or tracks that the session fits into * Proposals for technical sessions must be received by February 1, 2000. Notification of acceptance will be made no later than March 15, 2000. Information for the technical program will be due by May 15, and camera-ready copy for the proceedings will be due by July 1, 2000. Individual technical session papers may be submitted to be refereed for inclusion in the Proceedings in full text rather than as abstracts, and if this is desired the deadline for submission of the paper is May 1, 2000. Special Sessions The program committee welcomes submissions from individuals or organizations for innovative types of sessions - debates, group participation sessions, demonstrations, tutorials, historical reenactments or other elements that would add to the celebration of our heritage and consideration of our future. To submit a proposal, send in a session title, a 500-word descriptive abstract, and information about the contact person (name, address, phone and fax numbers, email address). Proposals for special sessions must be received by February 1, 2000. Notification of acceptance will be made no later than March 15, 2000. Information for the technical program will be due by May 15, and camera-ready copy for the proceedings will be due by July 1, 2000. WHERE TO SUBMIT Electronic submissions are strongly encouraged and should be submitted to AM00@asis.org. If electronic submission is not possible, two paper copies should be sent to: Nancy K. Roderer Richard Hill, Executive Director National Library of Medicine American Society for Information Science 8600 Rockville Pike 8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501 Bethesda MD 20894 Silver Spring, MD 20910 Nancy_roderer@nlm.nih,gov rhill@asis.org ********** III.B.6. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: ACL 2000: Preliminary CFPapers 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 3--6 October, 2000 Hong Kong 1. Paper Sessions 1.1 Topics of Interest As was the case with last year's ACL conference, the technical sessions of the conference will be of two kinds. There will be General Sessions as well as a number of special Thematic Sessions organized around themes proposed by members of the computational linguistics community. The Thematic Sessions will run as parallel sessions, resulting in smaller and more focussed audiences. When you submit a paper to the conference, you will need to consider whether you want to present the paper in the General Sessions or in one of the Thematic Sessions, which will be listed in the final call for papers (due to come out around January 20, 2000). The conference will also feature a student workshop, tutorials, workshops, and demos. Separate calls for these will be issued shortly. For the General Sessions, papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to: pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology and morphology; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language; language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction; corpus-based language modeling; machine translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; approaches to coordinating the linguistic with other modalities in multi-media systems; message and narrative understanding systems. 1.2 Requirements Requirements are the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions; a separate Call for Student Workshop papers will provide the information on requirements for papers submitted to the Student Sessions. Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work and they should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. A paper accepted for presentation at the ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this immediately after the title material on the first page. 1.3 Submission and Reviewing Procedure The format of submissions is the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions. Authors should submit preliminary versions of their papers for review, not to exceed 3200 words (exclusive of references). The submission procedure will be the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions. Electronic submissions can not be accepted. Further details on the submission procedure will be provided in the final call for papers (due to come out around January 20th, 2000). See the separate Call for Student Workshop Papers for information on submission details for papers submitted to the Student Workshop. Reviewing of papers submitted to the General Sessions will, as in previous years, be managed by an international Conference Program Committee consisting of Area Chairs, each of whom will have the assistance of a team of reviewers. Reviewing of papers for the Thematic Sessions will be managed by the chairs of the Thematic Sessions, with the assistance of teams of reviewers; final decisions on the technical program content (both General Sessions and Thematic Sessions) will be made by the Program Committee. Note that reviewing of papers will be blind. 1.4 Schedule Submissions must be received by April 7th, 2000. Electronic submissions will not be accepted. Late submissions (those arriving on or after April 8th) will be returned. Acknowledgements will be emailed soon after receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email) on June 15, 2000. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice. 2. Venue and Local Organization The conference will be held in Hong Kong from October 3rd through 6th, 2000. The Local Arrangements Committee is chaired by Dekai Wu; the local arrangements information will be posted soon. 3. Timetable The dates here pertain only to the General Sessions and Thematic sessions: see the separate Calls for Student Workshop Papers, Tutorial Proposals and Workshops for the timetable associated with those elements of the conference. Preliminary Call issued: December 15, 1999 Final Call for Papers issued: January 20, 2000 Paper submissions deadline: April 7, 2000 Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2000 ACL 2000 Conference: October 3--6, 2000 All queries regarding the General Sessions and Thematic sessions of ACL-2000 should be sent to acl2k@cis.udel.edu; this forwards to both PC co-chairs. Chang-Ning Huang (PC Co-Chair) K. Vijay-Shanker (PC Co-Chair) Microsoft Research, China Dept. of Computer Science 5F, Beijing Sigma Center University of Delaware No.49, Zhichun Road Newark, DE 19716, USA Beijing 100080, P.R.C cnhuang@microsoft.com vijay@cis.udel.edu Tel: (86-10)6261-7711 -5760 Tel: +1 302 831 1952 Fax: (86-10)8809-7305 Fax: +1 302 831 8458 Hitoshi Iida (General Chair) Aravind K. Joshi (Honorary Chair) Speech and Language Information Department of Computer and Processing Lab Information Sciences SONY Computer Science Labs, Inc. University of Pennsylvania Tokyo 141-0022, Japan Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA iida@csl.sony.co.jp joshi@linc.cis.upenn.edu Tel: +81 3 5448 4380 Tel: +1 215 898 0359 Fax: +81 3 5447 1942 Fax: +1 215 573 9247 ********** III.B.7. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: 6th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies: CFParticipation IWPT 2000 6th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies http://ecate.itc.it:1025/iwpt2000.html Sponsored by ACL/SIGPARSE 23-25 February, 2000 Trento, Italy INVITED SPEAKERS * Eric Brill (Microsoft Research - NLP group) Automatic Grammar Induction: Combining, Reducing and Doing Nothing * Martin Kay (Xerox PARC) Guides and Oracles for Linear-Time Parsing * Giorgio Satta (University of Padua) Parsing Techniques for Lexicalized Context-Free Grammar Models IWPT 2000 continues the tradition of biennial workshops on parsing technology organised by SIGPARSE, the Special Interest Group on Parsing of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). This workshop series was initiated by Masaru Tomita in 1989. The first workshop, in Pittsburgh and Hidden Valley, was followed by workshops in Cancun (Mexico) in 1991; Tilburg (Netherlands) and Durbuy (Belgium) in 1993; Prague and Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic) in 1995; and Boston/Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1997. REGISTRATION INFORMATION To register, use the registration form available on the IWPT 2000 web pages at the URL http://ecate.itc.it:1025/iwpt2000/registration.html and send it to the IWPT 2000 secretariat (whose address is on the web page above) by fax or regular mail. FURTHER INFORMATION Further details about the workshop (accommodation, tourist information, etc) can be found on the web pages of IWPT 2000 at the URL http://ecate.itc.it:1025/iwpt2000.html. The list of accepted papers is available at the URL http://ecate.itc.it:1025/iwpt2000/accepted.html. For questions about the workshop programme email iwpt2000@cogs.susx.ac.uk; for questions about the local arrangements email iwpt2000@itc.it. ********** III.B.8. Fr: John McNaught Re: Workshop on Information Extraction meets Corpus Linguistics at LREC 2000 Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2000) Athens, Greece Pre-Conference Workshop Announcement and Call for Participation INFORMATION EXTRACTION MEETS CORPUS LINGUISTICS Tuesday, 30th May 2000 FULL DETAILS AT: http://www.ccl.umist.ac.uk/events/iemcorp.html Workshop description (summary) This workshop seeks to explore how Information Extraction and Corpus Linguistics can each benefit from the techniques of the other. The goals of information extraction and of corpus linguistics have thus far had little in common. However, both are concerned with processing large bodies of text. It is timely to explore how one can contribute to the other. Key topics (indicative list) * How much can IE help corpus linguistics? * How much can corpus linguistics help IE? * What techniques are shared? What techniques from one field can be turned to use in the other? * Is IE-type partial annotation in corpus linguistics useful? * How feasible is it to offer different customised views over large-scale corpora with IE techniques? * What needs to be done in standardising IE annotations to enable reuse by corpus linguists? * How can corpus evidence help to guide IE systems? Important dates Deadline for workshop abstract submission: 22nd January 2000 Notification of acceptance: 25th February 2000 Final version of paper for workshop proceedings: 9th April 2000 Workshop: 30th May 2000 Organising Committee John McNaught (UMIST, UK) Bill Black (UMIST, UK) Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Italy) Luca Gilardoni (Quinary SpA, Italy) Tony McEnery (University of Lancaster, UK) Contact person for the workshop John McNaught Department of Language Engineering UMIST PO Box 88 Sackville Street Manchester M60 1QD UK E-mail: jock@ccl.umist.ac.uk Tel: +44.161.200.3100 Fax: +44.161.200.3099 Submissions An 800 word abstract in English should be submitted by e-mail to McNaught (jock@ccl.umist.ac.uk), in plain ASCII text format. Each submission should show: title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, postal address, telephone and fax numbers. FULL DETAILS AT: http://www.ccl.umist.ac.uk/events/iemcorp.html ********** III.B.9. Fr: Lionel Clement Re: TAG+5: 2nd CFPapers TAG+5 International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms May 25 - 27, 2000 Jussieu, Paris, France The fifth workshop on tree-adjoining grammars and related frameworks (hence the + after TAG) will be held at the University of Paris 7, from May 25 to May 27 2000, sponsored by ATALA (Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues).Previous workshops were held at Dagstuhl (1990), UPenn (1992), Univ. Paris 7 (1994) and UPenn (1998). Original submissions on all aspects of TAGs (linguistic, mathematical, computational, and applicational) are invited, as well as those relating TAGs to other frameworks, lexicalized (dependency grammars, categorial grammars...), tree-based (DTG, TFG, GB...) or feature-based (LFG, HPSG...). As in the past, there will be some invited talks on other grammar formalisms which have interesting relationships to TAGs. ABSTRACTS: You can submit papers for three kinds of presentations: long talks (25 minutes + 5 min for discussion), short talks (10 min + 5) and/or tool demonstrations. Please note that an author (or a given set of co-authors) should not submit more than one paper. Submissions will be anonymous, and should therefore not include the author's name, nor any self-reference. Abstracts should be no longer than 4 pages. 2 hardcopies should be sent by surface mail to: TAG+5 UFRL, Université Paris 7 TALaNa, case 7003 2, place Jussieu F-75251 Paris cedex 05 A separate identification page (with the following information : title of the paper, author's name, affiliation, postal address, email address, fax and telephone number) should also be included. Please also indicate if you submitted your abstract to other conferences. Also a postcript file should be sent to tag+@linguist.jussieu.fr. Please indicate "tag+5 submission" in the subject field. Important : all postcript files MUST be in an A4 format Proceedings including extended versions of accepted abstracts will be available at the workshop. Languages of the workshop: English and French If you do not want to submit an abstract, but would like to attend, we would appreciate if you could send a message. If you would like to present a demo, please let us know as soon as possible, including information about required hardware and software. DATES: Deadline for submissions: January 22 Notification of acceptance: March 3 Deadline for camera-ready extended abstract: April 15 Workshop Dates: May 25 to May 27 CONTACT ADDRESS TAG+5 UFRL, Université Paris 7 TALaNa, case 7003 2, place Jussieu F-75251 Paris cedex 05 phone: +33 1 44 27 53 70 fax: +33 1 44 27 79 19 email: tag+@linguist.jussieu.fr web: http://talana.linguist.jussieu.fr/~alex/TAGPLUS/ ********** III.C.1. Fr: Philip A. Bralich Re: Free ESL Conversion Software The following is an announcement concerning new ITS (interactive tutoring system) software for conversational English as a Second Language. As such software is important for researchers who participate in these lists we are making it available for free to all those who would contact us with a request for the software and a 3 or 4 sentence description of the research interests that would be benefited by using this software. Until now there have been no ESL software products to help students practice their CONVERSATION skills. But now, based on a patented new theory of grammar, it is possible for students to practice their ESL conversation skills with a 3-D tutor. His name is "Roswell" and the program is called "Roswell Teaches English". He is a cute alien from outer space and he offers six chapters of six lessons each in tasks and skills that are targeted to high basic and low intermediate students. Just two examples are lessons on ordering at a fast food restaurant and going through customs. It's a great supplement for classroom work or a great tool to practice with on your own. Roswell can actively engage the student in question and answer exchanges based on the material in the students workbook. He can both ask and answer questions within the lessons. The workbook/manual provides plenty of guidance for the students to get involved. The student types in questions and answers and Roswell responds with a generated voice and synchronized lip movements. A great practice environment for all students. Roswell's knowledge base and grammar skills will be updated every six months. In addition, the technology in Roswell Teaches English can be used for a variety of educational programs in fields of study that are based on factual information such as the sciences, history, and geography. Try this new software and enter the latest era in interactive computing. Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)539-3924 bralich@hawaii.edu http://www.ergo-ling.com ****************************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, California Digital Library, 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA. 94607-5200. Send subscription requests and submissions to: nancy.gusack@ucop.edu Editorial Staff: Nancy Gusack nancy.gusack@ucop.edu Cliff Lynch (emeritus) cliff@cni.org The IRLIST Archives is set up for anonymous FTP. Using anonymous FTP via the host hibiscus.ucop.edu, the files will be found in the directory /data/ftp/pub/irl, stored in subdirectories by year (e.g., data/ftp/pub/irl/1993). Search or browse archived IR-L Digest issues on the Web at: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/idom/irlist/ These files are not to be sold or used for commercial purposes. Contact Nancy Gusack for more information on IRLIST. 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