Corpora: EMNLP/VLC-99 2nd CFP

Hongsing WONG (wong@cs.ust.hk)
Fri, 5 Mar 1999 10:24:41 +0800 (HKT)

Please distribute, thanks.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Second Call For Papers

(EMNLP/VLC-99) JOINT SIGDAT CONFERENCE ON
EMPIRICAL METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND
VERY LARGE CORPORA

Sponsored by SIGDAT (ACL's Special Interest Group for Linguistic Data and
Corpus-based Approaches to NLP)

June 21-22, 1999
University of Maryland

In conjunction with
ACL'99: the 37th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics

This SIGDAT-sponsored joint conference will continue to provide a forum for
new research in corpus-based and/or empirical methods in NLP. In addition
to providing a general forum, the theme for this year is

"Corpus-based and/or Empirical Methods in NLP for Speech, MT, IR, and other
Applied Systems"

A large number of systems in automatic speech recognition(ASR) and
synthesis, machine translation(MT), information retrieval(IR), optical
character recognition(OCR) and handwriting recognition have become
commercially available in the last decade. Many of these systems use NLP
technologies as an important component. Corpus-based and empirical methods
in NLP have been a major trend in recent years. How useful are these
techniques when applied to real systems, especially when compared to
rule-based methods? Are there any new techniques to be developed in EMNLP
and from VLC in order to improve the state-of-the-art of ASR, MT, IR, OCR,
and other applied systems? Are there new ways to combine corpus-based and
empirical methods with rule-based systems?

This two-day conference aims to bring together academic researchers and
industrial practitioners to discuss the above issues, through technical
paper sessions, invited talks, and panel discussions. The goal of the
conference is to raise an awareness of what kind of new EMNLP techniques
need to be developed in order to bring about the next breakthrough in
speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, information
retrieval and other applied systems.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Scope

The conference solicits paper submissions in (and not limited to) the
following areas:

1) Original work in one of the following technologies and its relevance to
speech, MT, or IR:
(a) word sense disambiguation
(b) word and term segmentation and extraction
(c) alignment
(d) bilingual lexicon extraction
(e) POS tagging
(f) statistical parsing
(g) dialog models
(h) others (please specify)

2) Proposals of new EMNLP technologies for speech, MT, IR, OCR, or other
applied systems (please specify).

3) Comparetive evaluation of the performance of EMNLP technologies in one
of the areas in (1) and that of its rule-based or knowledge-based
counterpart in a speech, MT, IR, OCR or other applied system.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Submission Requirements

Submissions should be limited to original, evaluated work. All papers
should include background survey and/or reference to previous work. The
authors should provide explicit explanation when there is no evaluation in
their work. We encourage paper submissions related to the conference theme.
In particular, we encourage the authors to include in their papers,
proposals and discussions of the relevance of their work to the theme.
However, there will be a special session in the conference to include
corpus-based and/or empirical work in all areas of natural language
processing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Submission Format

Only hard-copy submissions will be accepted. Reviewing of papers will not
be blind. The submission format and word limit are the same as those for
ACL this year. We strongly recommend the use of ACL-standard LaTeX (plus
bibstyle and trivial example) or Word style files for the preparation of
submissions. Six opies of full-length paper (not to exceed 3200 words
exclusive of references) should be received at the following address before
or on March 31, 1999.

EMNLP/VLC-99 Program Committee
c/o Pascale Fung
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST)
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon
Hong Kong

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Important Dates

March 31 Submission of full-length paper
April 30 Acceptance notice
May 20 Camera-ready paper due
June 21-22 Conference date

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Program Chair

Pascale Fung
Human Language Technology Center
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Science and Tehnology (HKUST)
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon
Hong Kong
Tel: (+852) 2358 8537
Fax: (+852) 2358 1485
Email: pascale@ee.ust.hk

Program Co-Chair
Joe Zhou
LEXIS-NEXIS, a Division of Reed Elsevier
9555 Springboro Pike
Dayton, OH 45342
USA
Email: joez@lexis-nexis.com

Program Committee (partial list)

Jiang-Shin Chang (Behavior Design Corp.)
Ken Church (AT&T Labs--Research)
Ido Dagan (Bar-Ilan University)
Marti Hearst (UC-Berkeley)
Huang, Changning (Tsinghua University)
Pierre Isabelle (Xerox Research Europe)
Lillian Lee (Cornell University)
David Lewis (AT&T Research)
Dan Melamed (West Law Research)
Masaaki Nagata (NTT)
Steve Richardson (Microsoft Research)
Richard Sproat (AT&T Labs--Research)
Andreas Stolcke (SRI)
Ralph Weischedel (BBN)
Dekai Wu (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)
David Yarowsky (Johns Hopkins University)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last modified : 2/27/99

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hongsing

--
 _+_  Hongsing WONG (Big5: ¶À®Ø¸Û) Human Language Technology Center, CSD, HKUST
  |     {Internet: wong@cs.ust.hk | Web: http://www.cs.ust.hk/~wong/}