I am writing in connection with the summer workshop on Language Technology
we are preparing to host at the Johns Hopkins University in the summer of
2000.
You may already have a good idea about the nature of these summer
workshops which we have hosted every year at Hopkins since 1995. If not,
I have included a short summary description. If you need additional
information, please feel free to ask me or visit our web pages at
http://www.clsp.jhu.edu.
These workshops have attempted to identify specific research topics
(suitable for a six week team exploration) on which progress is needed to
advance the state of the art in various fields of Language Technology
(such as ASR, text-to-speech, TDT, MT, information retrieval,
summarization, etc). The research topics of the participating teams in
previous workshops can serve as a good example (see below). Having
identified such topics in an organizational conference (see below), we
then attempt to get the best researchers to work on them. The purpose of
this communication is to ask you for help in identifying suitable topics.
Would you be interested and available to participate in the 2000 Summer
Workshop (July 10 - August 18, 2000)? If so, we ask that you submit a
one-page research proposal for consideration. It need only be a couple of
paragraphs detailing the problem and a rough agenda to be addressed by the
team in the 6-week period. If your proposal is chosen (by an independent
review panel), we would invite you to join us for the Organizational
Conference at Airlie, VA, November 12-14, 1999 (as our guest), for further
discussions aimed at consensus. If, at Airlie, a topic in your area of
interest is chosen as one of the four to be pursued during the summer, we
would expect the you to be available for participation (and perhaps team
leadership) in the six week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad
commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding that if a
project in your area of interest is chosen, you will take an active role
in pursuing it.
We would like to receive proposals by September 27, 1999 so that we may
begin the review process. They may be faxed (410-516-5050), sent via
return e-mail, or regular mail (CLSP, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N.
Charles St., Barton 320, Baltimore, MD 21218).
Please let us know via return e-mail whether you are interested in
submitting a proposal.
Regards,
Frederick Jelinek, Director
Center for Language and Speech Processing
Johns Hopkins University
Information on Workshop 2000
The 6-week workshop at Johns Hopkins University on language engineering
brings together teams of leading professionals and students to advance the
state of the art. The professionals would normally be university
professors and industrial and governmental researchers working in widely
dispersed locations. The graduate students will be familiar with the
field and will be selected in accordance with their demonstrated
performance. The undergraduates will be entering seniors who are new to
the field and who have shown outstanding academic promise. They will be
selected through a national search. Undergraduate participation began in
1998 with the intent of broadening the appeal of language engineering
amongst students considering graduate studies.
Proposals for research projects are being solicited from a wide range of
academic and government institutions, as well as from industry. All
proposals will be reviewed by an independent panel. Those chosen will be
presented at the Airlie conference to which both presenters and leading
researchers will be invited. Out of these presentations and the
discussion which will follow, the four research topics for WS00 will
emerge.
The primary goal of the workshop is to establish research directions and
educate students in language technology. Additional expected benefits of
the workshop are the recruitment of students into language engineering
research; the creation, collection, and dissemination of tools and data
for language engineering research; and the establishment of fruitful and
long-lasting collaborations.
Workshop 1999 investigated four topics: Statistical Machine Translation,
Language Independent Acoustic Modeling, Topic-Based Novelty Detection, and
Normalization of Non-Standard Words.