Information Retrieval List Digest 488 (January 24, 2000) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-488.txt IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 January 24, 2000 Volume XVII, Number 4 Issue 488 ****************************************************************** I. QUERIES 1. Information Retrieval Agents II. JOBS 1. Dalhousie U.: CS: Tenure-Track Faculty Positions 2. City University, London: Research Assistants, CS 3. Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland: Research Assistant, CS III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. Electronic Markets: CFPapers B. Meetings 1. 7th International Symposium on Social Communication 2. ACL-2000: CFPapers 3. ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop on Syntactic and Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing Systems: CFPapers 4. CIA-2000: Final Reminder: CFPapers 5. ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop on Automatic Summarization: 2nd CFPapers 6. SIGIR 2000: CFPanel & Demonstration Proposals 7. HICSS Minitrack: Digital Documents - Understanding & Communication IV. PROJECTS C. Awards, Fellowships, Grants, & Scholarships 1. NSF SMETE Digital Library Solicitation ****************************************************************** I. QUERIES I.1. Fr: Giovanni Azúa García Re: Information Retrieval Agents Hi all, I'm working in making a MAS approach for creating an "Intelligent Search Engine" to index primarily relational databases and later URLs and files. I think it would be a very valuable tool and would increase the flexibility of having Relational Database advantages together with documental facilities like fast retrieval of relevant information. I'm planning to add intelligence to it using AI approaches by means of a Inference Machine maybe or some other way of reasoning and learning: Statistical approaches, ANN, Text Mining, Inductive Logic etc. Thus create more than just grammatical or syntactical relations like could be synonyms or family words, formally called word classes in the IR field. For example, if I search for "red dogs", it won't match something that talks about "Crimson Dobermans", but that might have been exactly what I was looking for - it requires the search engine to "understand" something of the "meaning" of the search terms, rather than just applying a brute-force index to them. The "understanding" is given by smart approaches to establish semantic relations between words or even maybe expressions. I'm planning also to customize searches based on user preferences having initially an effective weighting function for word-class and documents as result of automatic text analysis that could be improved based on users selections, formally called feedback. In the first place I wonder if anyone of you know about standards for Data Structures and the famous Inverted File structure for IR. For example, I think it could be a good approach for fast retrieval of words to have as a Data Structure a Red-Black tree (I would like to hear comments about this) and have each word pointing to a map establishing word-word syntactic and semantic relations creating a class of words (again formally called thesauri) then improving the user queries. I want to find out also the best way for serializing all this information for fast loading and have the best backing time. I have seen MICROISIS has six files for its inverted file. I would greatly appreciate if you point me to some resources on Internet like a Java/C/C++ library of classes freely available, for example, to have in little development time an Z39.50 or WAIS standard client running. At least to have the framework with the very basic features of a search engine. This help would be greatly appreciated. I'm also interested in finding any kind of open source project related to this or anyone interested in exchanging code and ideas with me in the subject please e-mail me privately. Thanks in advance, Giovanni BCs. Giovanni Azúa García Bachelor in Computer Science Banking and Economic Information Center Central Bank of Cuba ICQ# 20725388 e-mail: Giovanni@bc.gov.cu BCs. Giovanni Azúa García Bachelor in Computer Science Banking and Economic Information Center Central Bank of Cuba ICQ# 20725388 e-mail: Giovanni@bc.gov.cu ****************************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Mike Shepherd Re: Dalhousie U.: CS: Tenure-Track Faculty Positions Dalhousie University Faculty Positions in Computer Science Dalhousie University invites applications for tenure track positions at all levels within the new Faculty of Computer Science. The Faculty has a combined complement of 23 faculty positions and approximately 600 undergraduate majors and 135 master's and doctoral students. The expansion and development of the Faculty is a priority for the University. The Faculty will continue to experience considerable growth over the next few years in all aspects; faculty complement, student enrollment, funding levels and facilities. The Faculty recently moved to a new building and has secured significant infrastructure funding for 2000 and 2001. New research laboratories are planned, and initiatives involving multidisciplinary research projects with university and industrial partners are under development. As an example a new Master of electronic Commerce degree is now offered in collaboration with the Faculties of Law and Business. Applicants should have a Ph.D in Computer Science or related area and show a strong commitment to and aptitude for teaching and research. Rank and salary will be commensurate with qualifications. The major research foci of the Faculty are Network Centric Computing and Software Engineering. Individuals with expertise in these and related areas, such as, networking, HCI, distributed applications, etc., are especially encouraged to apply. Successful candidates will be required to teach in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, to establish research programs, to contribute to the administration of the Faculty and will also be encouraged to establish significant industrial connections. Dalhousie University is located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is the largest city in Atlantic Canada and affords its residents outstanding quality of life. Applications should include a curriculum vitae and the names and complete addresses of three references. They should be addressed to: The Chair, Appointments Committee Faculty of Computer Science Dalhousie University 6050 University Avenue Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada B3H 1W5 E-mail: appointments@cs.dal.ca URL: { HYPERLINK "http://www.cs.dal.ca" }www.cs.dal.ca Applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until all available positions are filled. In accordance with Canadian immigration requirements, priority will be given to Canadian citizens and permanent residents of Canada. Dalhousie University is an Employment Equity and Affirmative Action employer. The University encourages applications from qualified Aboriginal peoples, persons with a disability, racially visible peoples, and women. ********** II.2. Fr: Andy MacFarlane Re: City University, London: Research Assistants, CS Research Assistants £18,420 to £21,049 per annum Fixed term for 12 months (extendable) Applications are invited for two Research Assistant posts to work on an EC Fifth Framework funded project, which is concerned with the development of advanced Web-based information retrieval and management tools. Post 1 - The successful candidate is expected to have demonstrated ability in server-side Web applications development, including database connectivity. Technical skills needed include C/Perl, UNIX development, and working knowledge of server API development. Some knowledge of information retrieval principles, or previous experience of implementing Internet search tools, is required. Ref: INFS/3/I Post 2: - The successful candidate is expected to have demonstrated ability in software design using C and UNIX. Candidates with a PhD or research experience in Information Retrieval or a related area will be given priority. Ref: INFS/7/I More information about the posts can be found on: http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/jobs.html Informal enquires may be made to Dr. Murat Karamuftuoglu: Tel: 020 7477 8382, Email: hmk@soi.city.ac.uk. For further particulars and an application form, send a postcard to Emily Crofts, Personnel Department, City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB or send an email to: E.L.Crofts@city.ac.uk, detailing your name, address and the relevant post reference number. Deaf people can reach us through the minicom on 0171 4778931. Closing date: 9 February 2000. ********** II.3. Fr: Fionn Murtagh Re: Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland: Research Assistant, CS A Research Assistant position will be available soon in Computer Science, The Queen's University of Belfast, in the area of visualization of user behavior in information spaces. Please let Fionn Murtagh (address below) know of your interest in this position. A short description of the work to be undertaken follows. The European (5th Framework) project "IRAIA - Getting Orientation in Complex Information Spaces as an Emergent Behavior of Autonomous Information Agents", which will last for two years, will be starting in March 2000. "Information retrieval systems of the future will be huge information repositories, distributed all over the world. Even the users will contribute to these repositories by communicating their experiences to other users who follow their footsteps. IRAIA's design metaphor focuses on the ants' system for communicating information. Navigating the web should allow people to leave pointers for those who might also navigate along the same paths." QUB work in this project will include the development of an architecture of different layers of abstraction that support the construction of a coordinate system based on ontologies and investigation of user behavior. Such user profiling will be based on information visualizations such as Kohonen self-organizing feature maps or similar active maps based on linkage graphs. These will be interfaced to the agent (CORBA, EJB) environment used. In more open research, the fact that map visualizations are used means that we will also seek to relate and exploit intriguing technologies used in digital image transmission - thinwire transmission technologies, and foveation-based strategies, based on multiscale transforms. Prof. F. Murtagh, School of Computer Science, The Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/~F.Murtagh f.murtagh@qub.ac.uk Centre for Image and Vision Systems http://www.qub.ac.uk/ivs ****************************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: Brigette.Buchet@unisg.ch Re: Electronic Markets: CFPapers EM: Electronic Markets: 10:4 Editor-in-Chief: Beat F. Schmid Guest Editors: Ulrike Lechner Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva Yao-Hua Tan Dear Colleagues: EM -- Electronic Markets: The International Journal of Electronic Commerce & Business Media is a key forum for advancing the understanding and practice of electronic markets and commerce. The objective in this issue is to explore community building and community development, i.e., community management as a key success factor in the digital economy. It differentiates business models in the digital economy from traditional ones. These communities may be constituted as Internet shops, portal sites, groupware systems, electronic auctions or billboards. Product-centered communities as well as communities of interest are relevant for electronic marketing, as for example the reader communities at Amazon.com, The Well, or Dreamworks. Another example are communities that form value chains, such as single product manufacturing consortia or flexible consumer-driven organization of global supply chains. Further examples are topic and technology oriented communities such as Open EDI trading communities, Open Trading on the Internet (OTP), or EDI/XML, in addition to the community-oriented programming of Linux. As the mentioned examples show, online communities differ in their orientation. The features, that all types of communities share are common interests, practices, languages and ontologies with common semantics as well as normative issues. The new type of online community is driven by platforms that make use of the new digital media. Moreover, there is a close connection between platform design, community management, and business models. The successful business model is the one that recognizes and structures the goals and values of the community and the successful platform is the one that supports these with services. For example, in the setting of supply chain management, services and quality of these services are essential values, whereas in the case of online selling communities, rating systems or recommendation systems are pivotal. We are calling for papers that address communities, their platforms and community-related business models as critical success factors in the digital economy. In particular strategies, frameworks, platforms and visions that support the management of communities are of interest. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 1. Community-related business models 2. Design principles for community platforms 3. Case studies and topologies of online communities 4. Best practices and lessons learned Some of the papers will be culled from two minitracks of HICSS 2000 "Communities in Electronic Commerce: Concepts, Models and Formal Aspects" and "Community Supporting Platforms". EM accepts short papers up to 2500 words, or long papers up to 5000 words. Please refer to the Contributors' section for more information at http://www.electronicmarkets.org/ The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2000. Regarding Electronic Markets in general or other topics, please contact Brigette Buchet, Executive Editor at em.editors@netacademy.org. For more information or to submit a paper, please contact any one of the Guest Editors listed below: Ulrike.Lechner@unisg.ch Katarina Stanoevska@unisg.ch Yao-Hua.Tan@fac.fbk.eur.nl EM - Electronic Markets Editorial Office: Editor-in-Chief: mcm institute for Media and Professor Beat F. Schmid Communications Management Executive Editor: University of St.Gallen Brigette Buchet Mueller-Friedberg-Strasse 8 Assistant Editors: CH-9000 St.Gallen | J ohannes Haus Phone 0041/71/224 27 74 eMail: em.editors@netacademy.org Fax 0041/71/224 27 71 http://www.electronicmarkets.org/ ********** III.B.1. Fr: leonel@lingapli.ciges.inf.cu Re: 7th International Symposium on Social Communication SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON SOCIAL COMMUNICATION CENTER OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS On its 30th Anniversary SANTIAGO DE CUBA JANUARY 23-26, 2001 The Center of Applied Linguistics of the Santiago de Cuba's branch of the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment, is pleased to announce on the occasion of its 30 Anniversary, the Seventh International Symposium on Social Communication. The event will be held in Santiago de Cuba January 23rd through the 26th, 2001. This interdisciplinary event will focus on social communication processes from the points of view of Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Medicine, Voice Processing, Mass Media, and Ethnology and Folklore. The Symposium will be also sponsored by: .. University of Oriente, Cuba .. Higher Institute for Medical Sciences, Santiago de Cuba .. Pedagogical University 'Frank Pais', Santiago de Cuba .. Information for Development Agency, Cuba .. University of Twente, The Netherlands .. National Council of Scientific Research, Italy .. University of Leon, Spain .. University of Malaga, Spain .. University of Granada, Spain .. Humboldt University, Germany Authors will be allowed to present only one paper pertaining to the following disciplines: 1. Applied Linguistics: - Spanish and foreign language teaching - Spanish as a second language - Phonetics and Phonology - Lexicology and Lexicography - Morphology and Syntax - Sociolinguistics - Psycholinguistics - Textual Linguistics and Pragmalinguistics - Terminology - Translations 2. Computational Linguistics: - Software related to linguistic research - Automated grammatical tagging of texts - Automated dictionaries - Software related to the teaching of mother tongues and foreign languages - Related issues 3. Voice Processing: - Research related to Cry Analysis - Applications of analysis, synthesis and voice-recognition - Artificial intelligence and voice processing 4. Medical specialties related to speech and voice and with Social Communication in general: - Logopedy and Phoniatry - Neurology - Otorhinolaringology - Stomatology - Child Psychiatry - Pediatrics - Cronobiology 5. Mass Media: - Linguistic research related to the speech of journalists, actors and radio and television announcers. - Textual Analysis of radio and television programs, and of print and electronic media articles 6. Ethnology and Folklore: - Research related to Social Communication Activities that will take place within the event are: - Pre-Symposium seminars - Discussion of papers in commissions - Master conferences - Workshops - Posters PRE-SYMPOSIUM SEMINARS The Symposium will be preceded by two seminars that will be taught by prestigious specialists to be announced. The seminars will take place Monday, January 22nd of 2001 and will focus on the following subjects: - Spanish as a second language - Latest trends in Computational Linguistics Participants should say in advance what pre-symposium seminars they want to take part in. WORKSHOP A workshop entitled 'Applied Linguistics in the Spanish-speaking World' will be held on the occasion of the 30th Anniversary of the Center of Applied Linguistics. MASTER LECTURES During the symposium four master lectures will be delivered by: - Prof. Dr. Anton Nijholt, Professor and Researcher, Twente University, Enschede, Holland. - Dr. Hiroto Ueda, Professor and Researcher, Department of Spanish, Tokyo University, Japan. - Dr. Mercedes Cathcart Roca, Professor and Researcher, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba. - Dr. Manuel Vilares Ferro, Professor and Researcher, Vigo University, Spain. ABSTRACTS The deadline of submission of paper abstracts is July 1st, 2000. They should not exceed 250 words. Notification of acceptance of a paper by the Symposium's Scientific Committee will be sent before July 30th, 2000. PAPERS To enable the Organizing Committee to include the Proceedings as part of the Symposium's documentation, accepted papers must be sent before September 1st, 2000, with the following requirements: 1. The paper will not exceed 5 pages including graphics, footnotes and bibliography. 2. It should be written using Word 6.0 or Word 7.0 for Windows and sent to the Symposium's Executive Secretary either via e-mail (attachment) or by mailing a 3½-inch diskette. 3. Each page must be written in an A4 (mail type) format with left, right, top, and bottom margin of 2.5 cm. 4. The paper must be written in one of the event's official languages: Spanish, English or French. Instructions for paper submission: 1. Write down the authors' names, one under the other, at the left top of the first page, all in Arial bold capital letters, 10 points (Word 6.0 or 7.0). Under the authors' names should appear in bold (only initials capital letters) the institution, city, country and e-mail address if available. 2. In a separate line, at the center, the title of the paper must be written in Arial bold, Italics, 11 points size letters. 3. The text will follow -not in bold- with the same Arial letter, 10 points size and leaving one space between lines. 4. Paragraphs will have no indentation. Spaces between paragraphs will be of 3 points. 5. Section titles will be written in Arial bold, and sub-sections titles will be written in Arial Italic. 6. Footnotes will appear at the end of each page in Arial 9 points size letters. Presentation time will be 15 minutes and 5 minutes for discussion. Authors must advise in advance if they will need a tape recorder, video set, computer or other kind of equipment for presentation. POSTERS Posters should be 1 meter wide and 1.2 meter high. Authors will be responsible of displaying them in the morning of the presentation. Abstract submission should include the word POSTERS. For proceedings, follow instructions above. Notice: unlike full papers, posters will not exceed 3 pages. All mail or inquiries should be addressed to: Dr. Eloina Miyares Bermudez Secretaria Ejecutiva Comite Organizador VII Simposio Internacional de Comunicacion Social Centro de Linguistica Aplicada Apartado Postal 4067, Vista Alegre Santiago de Cuba 4, Cuba 90400 Telephones: (53-226) 42760 or (53-226) 41081 Fax: (53-226) 41579 E-mail: leonel@lingapli.ciges.inf.cu http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/Cuba/index.html OFFICIAL LANGUAGES: Spanish, English and French IMPORTANT REMINDERS - Abstract Submission deadline: July 1st, 2000 - Notification on paper's approval by Scientific Committee: July 30, 2000 - Delivery of papers either by e-mail or by mail using 3½-inch diskette: Sept. 1, 2000 - Pre-Symposium seminars: Jan. 22, 2001 - 7th International Symposium on Social Communication: Jan. 23-26, 2001 ********** III.B.2. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: ACL-2000: CFPapers ACL 2000 Call For Papers 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 3--6 October, 2000 Hong Kong The Association for Computational Linguistics invites the submission of papers for its 38th Annual Meeting. 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. 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; multi-lingual processing, 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; tools and resources; and evaluation of systems. Papers submitted to the Thematic Sessions are more narrowly targeted at specific topics. The list of Thematic Sessions is as follows: T1: NLP and Open-Domain Question Answering from Text T2: Machine Learning and Statistical NLP for Dialogue T3: Text Summarization T4: Theoretical and Technical Approaches for Asian Language Processing -- Similarities and Differences among Languages Further information on the individual themes and topics appropriate to each can be obtained from the ACL-2000 conference website (http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/). 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 the Student Workshop submissions. Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and 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 on the title page. (See Submission Format below.) Reviewing The reviewing of the papers submitted to the General Sessions and the Thematic Sessions will be blind. Reviewing of papers submitted to the General Sessions will 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 (both General Sessions and Thematic Sessions) will be made by the Conference Program Committee. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three reviewers. Submission Procedure The format of submissions is the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions. Papers may not exceed 3200 words (exclusive of title page and references). Papers outside the specified length are subject to be rejected without review. We strongly recommend the use of ACL latex style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. These will be available from the ACL-2000 Conference Website (http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/). These style files include a place for the paper ID code (see below) and word count and allow for a graceful transition to the style required for publication. A description of the format will also be available in case you are unable to use these style files directly. If you are unable to access this webpage, please send email to acl2k@cis.udel.edu. The reviewing of papers submitted to the General Session or the Thematic Sessions will be blind. Hence the title page and paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity (e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...") should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". You must first register your submission. This can be done by filling out an electronic form that will be accessible from the conference webpage http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/ after February 15, 2000. The form requires a specification of the title and authors of the paper, as well as a preliminary abstract and list of keywords. Submitting the form will return to you via email a paper ID code which must appear on your submission. Also, please use the paper ID code in all correspondences with the program committee co-chairs. If you have any difficulty using the electronic registration form, please send email to acl2k@cis.udel.edu with all of the title page information (see below) plus the authors' names and affiliations. As reviewing will be blind, a separate title page and identification page will be required. The title page should include the following information: Title: Paper ID Code: (generated upon paper registration) Topic Area: one or two general topic areas Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area Which Session: T1, T2, T3, T4, or G (you must choose one) Word Count, excluding title page and references: Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify): Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines) T1, T2, T3, and T4 correspond to the four Theme Sessions and G corresponds to the General Session. A paper can be submitted to at most one session. The identification page should contain all of the information in the title page, but in addition must include the authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses. The format for the identification page should be as follows: Title: Paper ID Code: (generated upon paper registration) Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses Topic Area: one or two general topic areas Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area Which Session: T1, T2, T3, T4, or G (you must choose one) Word Count, excluding title page and references: Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify): Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines) Submissions must be received by April 7th, 2000. Late submissions (those arriving on or after April 8th) will be rejected without review. The Program Committee is not responsible for postal delays or other mailing problems. Six (6) paper copies (printed on both sides of the page if possible) including the title page should be submitted to the following address: ACL-2000 Submission c/o K. Vijay-Shanker 103 Smith Hall Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 USA Two of the six copies must have the identification page attached. In addition, strictly for the purposes of partially-automated routing of papers to area chairs and reviewers, authors should send an electronic version of the paper (without the identification page) to acl-routing@cis.udel.edu. Please include the paper ID code in the subject line of your email. Latex, postscript, pdf, Microsoft word and plain text are all acceptable formats for the electronic version. The electronic version should also be received by April 7, 2000. Please note that as the electronic version will only be used to assist the PC in distributing the papers to appropriate reviewers, this supplementary electronic version in no way replaces the required hardcopy submissions. If you have any difficulty in submitting the electronic version, please send mail to the pc co-chairs at acl2k@cis.udel.edu. Acknowledgment of receipt of the hardcopy submission will be emailed soon after receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email) around June 15, 2000. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice. Authors of accepted papers will have to submit a signed copyright release statement along with the final camera-ready papers. The dates here pertain only to the General Sessions and Thematic sessions. Paper registration deadline: March 31, 2000 Paper submissions deadline: April 7, 2000 Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2000 ACL 2000 Conference: October 3--6, 2000 Submission Questions Authors unable to comply with the above submission procedure should contact the program committee co-chairs sufficiently ahead of the submission deadline so that alternate arrangements can be made. 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. Changning Huang (PC Co-Chair) K. Vijay-Shanker (PC Co-Chair) Microsoft Research, China CIS Department 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.3. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: ANLP/NAACL2000 Workshop: CFPapers Syntactic and Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing Systems Workshop to be held in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000 Sunday, April 30 2000 Seattle, Washington. 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 14 Notification of acceptance of panels : February 21 Notification of acceptance of papers : February 28 Camera ready papers due: March 13 ********** III.B.4. Fr: Matthias Klusch Re: CIA-2000: Final Reminder: CFPapers Final Reminder CIA-2000 Workshop EXTENDED Deadline: FEBRUARY 7, 2000 As a result of several requests, the deadline for the submission of research papers for the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents CIA-2000, to be held in Boston, July 7-9, 2000 has been extended to Monday, February 7, 2000. Further details are available in the Web at http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2000.html Dr. Matthias Klusch DFKI GmbH German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 66123 Saarbruecken, Germany Phone: +49-681-302-5297, Fax: +49-681-302-2235 http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/, klusch@dfki.de ********** III.B.5. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: ANLP/NAACL2000 Workshop: 2nd Call for Papers Second Call for Papers Workshop on Automatic Summarization (pre-conference workshop in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000) website: http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/was-anlp2000 sponsored by ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) MITRE Corporation Sunday, April 30, 2000 Seattle, Washington, USA I. OVERVIEW The problem of automatic summarization poses a variety of tough challenges in both NL understanding and generation. A spate of recent papers and tutorials on this subject at conferences such as ACL/EACL, AAAI, ECAI, IJCAI, and SIGIR point to a growing interest in research in this field. Several commercial summarization products have also appeared. There have been several workshops in the past on this subject: Dagstuhl in 94, ACL/EACL in 97, and the AAAI Spring Symposium in 98. All of these were extremely successful, and the field is now enjoying a period of revival and is advancing at a much quicker pace than before. ANLP/NAACL'2000 is an ideal occasion to host another workshop on this problem. The Workshop on Automatic Summarization program committee invites papers addressing (but not limited to): Summarization Methods: use of linguistic representations, statistical models, NL generation for summarization, production of abstracts and extracts, multi-document summarization, narrative techniques in summarization, multilingual summarization, text compaction, multimodal summarization (including summarization of audio), use of information extraction, studies and modeling of human summarizers, improving summary coherence, concept fusion, use of thesauri and ontologies, trainable summarizers, applications of machine learning, knowledge-rich methods. Summarization Resources: development of corpora for training and evaluating summarizers, annotation standards, shared summarization tools, document segmentation, topic detection, and clustering related to summarization Evaluation Methods: intrinsic and extrinsic measures, on-line and off-line evaluations, standards for evaluation, task-based evaluation scenarios, user studies, inter-judge agreement Workshop Themes: 1. Multilingual Text Summarization 2. Generation for Summarization 3. Topic Identification for Summarization 4. Multidocument Summarization 5. Evaluation and Test/Training Corpora 6. Integration with web and IR access II. IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission deadline: February 4, 2000 Notification of acceptance for papers: March 1, 2000 Camera ready papers due: March 13, 2000 Workshop date: April 30, 2000 III. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION Submissions must use the ACL latex style (http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/was-anlp2000/latex/index.html) or Microsoft Word style WAS-submission.doc (both available from the Automatic Summarization workshop web page). Paper submissions should consist of a full paper (5000 words or less, including references). Please send submission questions to cyl@isi.edu Submission Procedure: Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS Word form of your submission to: cyl@isi.edu. The Subject line should be "ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". Because reviewing is blind, no author information is included as part of the paper. An identification page must be sent in a separate email with the subject line: "ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP ID PAGE" and must include title, all authors, theme area, keywords, word count, and an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will not be accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author shortly after receipt. ********** III.B.6. Fr: James Allan Re: SIGIR 2000: CFPanel & Demonstration Proposals Call for panel and demonstration proposals for SIGIR 2000 Athens, Greece July 24-28, 2000 Now that the paper submission deadline for SIGIR has passed, it is time to think about other things you might do there. Start fleshing out those interesting ideas for panel presentations/discussions, or imagining how you can spruce up that interesting IR system that you would love to demonstrate. We need your proposals by February 11th. Proposals for panel sessions should be sent by prospective moderators. Panels should address issues of interest to the general information retrieval community, and should be designed to stimulate lively debate between panelists and audience. Panel proposals (2-3 pages) must include: 1. complete contact information for the moderator. 2. the rationale for addressing this topic as a panel. 3. the names and affiliations of the panel members. 4. a description of how the panel will be structured, with emphasis on how general participation will be encouraged. Abstracts of panel presentations will appear in the proceedings. Past panels have included: * (1999) Applying user research directly to information systems design * (1998) Tools for searching the Web * (1997) "Real world" information retrieval Demonstrations offer first-hand experience with Information Retrieval systems, whether advanced operational systems or research prototypes. The demonstration proposal should indicate how the demonstration illustrates new ideas, should provide the technical specifications of the system and should include references to other literature. The hardware, software, and network requirements should be indicated in a separate cover letter. A one-page abstract describing each demonstration accepted will be published in the proceedings. SIGIR 1999 had 16 demonstration systems, and SIGIR 1998 had 10, all covering a wide range of topics and ideas. Panel and Demonstration proposals must be sent in ASCII or PostScript via email by February 11, 2000 to James Allan (allan@cs.umass.edu). ********** III.B.7. Fr: Mike Shepherd Re: HICSS Minitrack: Digital Documents - Understanding & Communication CALL FOR PAPERS Digital Documents - Understanding and Communication A Minitrack of the Digital Documents Track 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences Maui, Hawaii January 3-6, 2001 The explosion of digital documents on the internet and in the workplace has led to an increasing need for computer systems that help us not only manage the documents but also manage our understanding of these documents and their relationships. This minitrack focuses on how one gains an understanding of a digital document and how that information is communicated. It encompasses retrieval and text analysis methods, including summarization, categorization and genre theory and detection. In addition, we welcome papers on visualzation methods that increase understanding of document content and genre. We solicit papers from workers in computer science, text analysis and linguistics and information retrieval as well as from researchers in psychology, HCI and sociology. For preliminary contact, send an abstract of your proposed paper to the co-chairs by April 3. Final papers will be due for submission on June 5, 2000, and contributors will be notified by September 1 of their acceptance. James W. Cooper Michael Shepherd IBM T J Watson Research Center Dalhousie University jwcnmr@watson.ibm.com shepherd@cs.dal.ca ****************************************************************** IV. PROJECTS IV.C.1. Fr: Clifford Lynch Re: NSF SMETE Digital Library Solicitation The solicitation for NSF's Digital Library for Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education (SMETE) has just come out. This is an important initiative to develop a major educational resource as well as to advance our understanding of how to build digital libraries. You can find information on this at the following URL: http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf0044 Clifford Lynch Director, CNI ****************************************************************** 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. 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