Information Retrieval List Digest 490 (February 7, 2000) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-490.txt IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 February 7, 2000 Volume XVII, Number 6 Issue 490 ****************************************************************** II. JOBS 1. Ergo Linguistic Technologies: Honolulu, HI: 1 Linguist and 2 ESL Curriculum Developers 2. www.thirdvoice.com: IR Expert III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. JASIS ToC: 51:4 B. Meetings 1. ANLP/NAACL2000: CFDemos 2. Communicating Agents: CFParticipation 3. CoopIS'2000: 3rd CFPapers 4. SIGIR 2000: Last CFPanel & Demonstration Proposals 5. ANLP/NAACL2000: 2nd Workshop CFPapers 6. AMTA-2000: CFParticipation ****************************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Philip A. Bralich Re: Ergo Linguistic Technologies: Honolulu, HI: 1 Linguist and 2 ESL Curriculum Developers Ergo Linguistic Technologies currently has job openings for one linguist (full-time) and 2 full-time or 4 part-time (80 hours per week) ESL curriculum developers to work on Software and Internet ITS (Interactive Tutoring Systems) tools. To learn more about the company and the tools you will be working with go to http://www.ergo-ling.com. The Ergo working environment is comfortable and a little casual but it is working with state of the art NLP tools and software. Located at the Manoa Innovation center in Honolulu we are convenient to the University of Hawaii for those with on-going research interests. We also have a beautiful location as well as access to restaurants and shopping. We cannot pay a relocation allowance but the lifestyle in Hawaii is worth the effort to work here. Job descriptions follow: Linguist: Knowledge of Syntax and a knowledge of English Grammar required. Must also be proficient in standard software applications (Word Processors, Internet, Spread Sheets, etc.) Experience teaching ESL grammar classes a plus. Job will entail working with programmers and curriculum developers to improve lexicographical, syntactic, and standard grammar tools made from the Ergo parser. The main project is the development of interactive tutors which use a 3-D character to do interactive question and answer exchanges with users in the areas of ESL, Geography, and Biology. The use of in-house tools as well as standard software required. Temporary for now (six to twelve month project), perhaps long term. ESL Curriculum Developers: Experience teaching ESL and in Curriculum development. Must have a good eye for English grammar. The position entails designing and writing curriculum for Interactive tutors. Job will entail working with programmers and linguists to improve lexicographical, syntactic, and standard grammar tools made from the Ergo parser. The main project is the development of interactive tutors which use a 3-D character to do interactive question and answer exchanges with users in the area of ESL for a stand alone software product and for the Internet. Contact me by email or at the following numbers. Resumes may be sent by email, fax, or regular mail but all jobs start as soon as possible. Phil Bralich 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 ********** II.2. Fr: Scott Ratcliff Re: JASIS ToC: 51:4 Journal of the American Society for Information Science JASIS VOLUME 51, NUMBER 4 JASIS, Volume 51, Number 4 Special Topic Issue: Digital Libraries: Part 2 Guest Editor: Hsinchun Chen CONTENTS Introduction to the Special Topic Issue, In This Issue Hsinchun Chen 311 A Spoken Access Approach for Chinese Text and Speech Information Retrieval Lee-Feng Chien, Hsin-Min Wang, Bo-Ren Bai, and Sun-Chein Lin 313 Determining the Publication Impact of a Digital Library Nancy R. Kaplan and Michael L Nelson 324 Combination and Boundary Detection Approaches on Chinese Indexing Christopher C. Yang, Johnny W.K. Luk, Stanley K. Yung, and Jerome Yen 340 Kristin M. Tolle and Hsinchun Chen 352 Content and Knowledge Management in a Digital Library and Museum Jian-Hua Yeh, Jia-Yang Chang, and Yen-Jen Oyang 371 Previews and Overviews in Digital Libraries: Designing Surrogates to Support Visual Information Seeking Stephan Greene, Gary Marchionini, Catherine Plaisant, and Ben Shneiderman 380 Digital Libraries: Situating Use in Changing Information Infrastructure Ann Peterson Bishop, Laura J. Neumann, Susan Leigh Star, Cecelia Merkel, Emily Ignacio, and Robert J. Sandusky 394 The ASIS home page contains the Table of Contents and brief abstracts as above from January 1993 (Volume 44) to date. The John Wiley Interscience site includes issues from 1986 (Volume 37) to date. Guests have access only to tables of contents and abstracts. Registered users of the interscience site have access to the full text of these issues and to preprints. We are still working on restoring access for ASIS members as "registered users." Richard Hill American Society for Information Science 8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501 Silver Spring, MD 20910 (301) 495-0900 FAX: (301) 495-0810 http://www.asis.org ********** III.B.1. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: ANLP/NAACL2000: CFDemos Call for Proposals: Software Demonstrations Program Demonstrations Chair: Jeff Reynar Microsoft Corporation jreynar@microsoft.com Call The ANLP-NAACL2000 Program Committee invites proposals for the Demonstrations Program for ANLP-NAACL 2000, to be held at the Westin Hotel in Seattle, Washington, USA, May 1-3, 2000. The goals of this program are to encourage both the early exhibition of research prototypes and the demonstration of mature systems (commercial sales and marketing activities are not appropriate in the Demonstration program, and should be arranged as part of the ANLP-NAACL2000 Exhibit Program). Areas of Interest We would like to encourage the submission of proposals for demonstrations of software related to all areas of computational linguistics. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: Natural language processing systems, including Dialogue systems and interfaces Machine translation systems and translation aids Message and narrative understanding systems Language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction systems Application systems using embedded language technology components Reusable components (parsers, generators, speech recognizers, etc.) Software tools for facilitating computational linguistics research Software for demonstrating or evaluating computational linguistics research Aids for teaching computational linguistics concepts Format for Submission Demo Proposals consist of the following parts, which should all be sent to the Demo Chair (electronic submissions preferred). An abstract of the technical content to be demonstrated, not to exceed two pages, including title, authors, full contact information, references and acknowledgements. (This will be published in an addendum to the proceedings, so please submit in camera ready format.) A detailed description of hardware and software requirements expected to be provided by the local organizer. Demonstrators are encouraged to be flexible in their requirements (possibly with different demos for different logistical situations). Please state what you can bring yourself and what you absolutely must have provided. We will do our best to provide equipment and resources but nothing can be guaranteed at this point beyond space and power. Please contact the demo chair at one of the addresses below for any specific questions. A "Script Outline" of the demo presentation, including accompanying narrative, and either a web address for accessing the demo or visual aids (e.g. screen-shots, snapshots, or sketches). No more than 6 pages, total. Submissions Procedure Proposals should be submitted as soon as possible, but before March 15th, to the ANLP-NAACL2000 Demonstrations Chair. Please submit your proposals and any inquiries to: Jeff Reynar Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052-6399 Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance to computational linguistics, innovation, scientific contribution, presentation, and user friendliness, as well as potential logistical constraints. Other Details Further details on the timing and format for the demonstrations sessions will be determined and provided at a later date. We anticipate charging a $40 fee for presenting demos, to help defray costs. Important Dates Submission Deadline for Demo Proposal: 15 March 2000 Notification: 1 April 2000 Conference Dates: 1-3 May 2000 ********** III.B.2. Fr: Bernhard Schroeder Re: Communicating Agents: CFParticipation Communicating Agents Workshop of the GLDV special interest group on generation and parsing in morphology, syntax and semantics, IKP, University of Bonn, Feb 15, 2000 http://www.gldv.org/Veranstaltungen/WS_Feb00/ In the focus of this workshop will be approaches to the formal description and to the implementation of communicating agents. List of lectures Anton Benz: Perspectives and derived extensions of dialogue acts Rodolfo Delmonte: Parsing preferences and lingustic strategies Roland Hausser: A new data structure for representing propositional content Jan-Torsten Milde: Der kommunikative Agent Lokutor Christof Monz: Ambiguous communication in a multi-agent system Bernd S. Müller: Remarks on concept formation for cognitive robotics Paul Piwek: Constraint-based Dialogue Modelling: Indirect Speech Acts Henk Zeevat: Discourse markers as speech act markers Please register before Feb 8, 2000, if possible. Organizing Comittee Roland Hausser, University of Erlangen Hans-Christian Schmitz, University of Bonn Bernhard Schroeder, University of Bonn Contact Bernhard Schroeder Institut für Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik Universität Bonn Poppelsdorfer Allee 47 D-53115 Bonn Germany E-Mail B.Schroeder@uni-bonn.de Phone +49 228 735621 Fax +49 228 735639 ********** III.B.3. Fr: carmel@il.ibm.com Re: CoopIS'2000: 3rd 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 which 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 & ICIS). 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 PD 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 Rutgers University, USA E-mail: avigal@rci.rutgers.edu Michele Missikoff IASI-CNR, Italy E-mail: missikoff@iasi.rm.cnr.it David Carmel Information Retrieval and Organization, IBM - HRL E-mail: carmel@il.ibm.com Phone: 972-4-8296223, Fax: 972-4-8296114 Address: IBM, Haifa Research Lab, Matam, Haifa 31905, Israel ********** III.B.4. Fr: James Allan Re: SIGIR 2000: Last CFPanel & Demonstration Proposals LAST CALL for panel and demonstration proposals for SIGIR 2000 Athens, Greece July 24-28, 2000 We need your proposals by February 11th Proposals (2-3 pages) 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. 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. See http://sigir2000.aueb.gr/ for more information. 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.5. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: ANLP/NAACL2000: 2nd Workshop CFPapers Second Call for Papers Workshop on Reading Comprehension Tests as Evaluation for Computer-Based Language Understanding Systems Thursday, May 4th, 2000, Seattle, Washington, USA (post-conference workshop in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000) Reading Comprehension tests, such as the one below, are designed to help evaluate a reader's understanding of a text passage. How Maple Syrup is Made Maple syrup comes from sugar maple trees. At one time, maple syrup was used to make sugar. This is why the tree is called a "sugar" maple tree. Sugar maple trees make sap. Farmers collect the sap. The best time to collect sap is in February and March. The nights must be cold and the days warm. The farmer drills a few small holes in each tree. He puts a spout in each hole. Then he hangs a bucket on the end of each spout. The bucket has a cover to keep rain and snow out. The sap drips into the bucket. About 10 gallons of sap come from each hole. 1. Who collects maple sap? (Farmers) 2. What does the farmer hang from a spout? (A bucket) 3. When is sap collected? (February and March) 4. Where does the maple sap come from? (Sugar maple trees) 5. Why is the bucket covered? (to keep rain and snow out) Such tests exist in many languages, have human performance benchmarks associated with them, and come in a variety of types (short-answer, multiple choice) and levels of difficulty. In addition, they are generally written to make each story and set of questions self-contained, in order to require as little outside knowledge as possible to answer the questions. The focus of the proposed workshop will be to explore the following questions: - Can such exams be used to evaluate computer-based language understanding effectively and efficiently? - Would they provide an impetus and test bed for interesting and useful research? - Are they too hard for current technology? - Or are they too easy, such that simple hacks can score high, although there is clearly no understanding involved? The most direct method of exploring these questions is to choose a set of tests and build a system that takes these tests. Some preliminary results indicate that such tests are tractable, but not trivial and that linguistic processing is helpful (Hirschman, et al. ACL-99). A test set, evaluation routines, prototype system, and documentation are available upon request to light@mitre.org. We hope that a number of submissions will present results based on actual reading comprehension systems. In addition, we encourage submissions that report on other kinds of tests or similar tests in other languages, or that address our list of questions by other means. Note that submissions are encouraged that describe work in progress with preliminary empirical results. Invited speaker: Karen Kukich (Educational Testing Service) "NLP Tools for Identifying Reading Comprehension Skills" Format for Submission Authors are asked to submit previously unpublished papers only; workshop proceedings will be published. Our target submission length is 2000 words but both shorter and longer submissions will also be considered. Electronic submission of postscript will be accepted. Hard copy submissions should include 4 copies of the paper. Since the papers will be reviewed anonymously, please do not place the author name on the paper. Instead include a separate title page with title, abstract, author, and e-mail address. Unless requested otherwise, notification of acceptance will be sent electronically to the first author. Parallel submission is unproblematic; however if your paper is accepted to this workshop and you decide to present it here, we will ask you to withdraw it from any other events. Important Dates Deadline for submission: February 11th, 2000 Notification of authors: March 1st, 2000 Final versions due: March 10th, 2000 Address for Submission and Further Information Marc Light The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Rd. M/S K329 Bedford, MA 01730 USA Phone: 1-781-271-5579 light@mitre.org (The mailing list, read-comp@linus.mitre.org, has been set up to discuss reading comprehension tests as evaluation for computer-based language understanding systems. It is open subscription and unmoderated. To subscribe, send email to majordomo@linus.mitre.org with 'subscribe read-comp' in the body.) Program Committee: Eric Brill Eugene Charniak Mary Harper Marc Light (chair) Ellen Riloff Ellen Voorhees ********** III.B.6. Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen Re: AMTA-2000: CFParticipation RELIMINARY CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas AMTA-2000 Conference Cuernavaca, Mexico October 10-14, 2000 Envisioning Machine Translation in the Information Future The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is happy to announce the plans for the fourth biennial conference, planned for October 10-14 at Mision del Sol, near Cuernavaca, Mexico. The theme of AMTA-2000 is "Envisioning MT in the Information Future." The focus will be on the articulation of future visions of MT: in the '00 decade, the 21st century, and even in the third millennium. Ubiquitous, instant internet access will be available very soon from a host of appliances and apparel. Later on, ways of thinking about the universe of information will transcend our current metaphors of networks, clients, servers, and communication. How will these and other possible paths into the future affect our exponential need for translation? Will the process of translation become transparent? How long before we each have a true babelfish in our ear? Will the quality ceiling finally be broken by incremental improvements, or by an as yet unimagined breakthrough? Will translation even be necessary - will globalization lead to a single language, or will translation allow for the growth of local languages? Every current topic in multilingual information processing is germane to this discourse, especially as it points the way to the near term and long term role of MT in the information world of the future. As in the past, the conference will feature a lively and engaging variety of invited speakers, panel discussions, demonstrations, workshops, tutorials, and technical papers by researchers, developers, and users. AMTA invites everyone interested in machine translation to participate in this conference - developers, researchers, users, professional translators, managers, marketing experts - anyone who has a stake in the vision of an information world in which language issues become transparent to the information consumer. We especially invite users to share their experiences, developers to describe what is happening in the internet marketplace, researchers looking to new capabilities, and visionaries to describe the future. Colleagues from Latin America who are involved in or interested in MT or other human language technologies, are especially welcome to participate and submit papers, workshops, tutorials, and demonstrations. We also welcome and encourage participation by members of AMTA's sister organizations, AAMT in Asia and EAMT in Europe. We also urge people working in related areas in information processing to participate as well. For complete information about the conference, please see the web site at: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/conferences/ David Farwell, General Chair John S. White, Program Chair ****************************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, California Digital Library, 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA. 94607-5200. 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