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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION / PRE-REGISTRATION
The 12th ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication
INFORMATION FUSION IN NATURAL LANGUAGE SYSTEMS
hosted by the University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
3 - 14 July 2006
http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/view/Main/ELSNET06
In order to pre-register candidates are required
to send a statement of interest to participate in
the summer school, a curriculum vitae and a title
for a contribution to the "student" session as
well as courses of interest, to:
elsnet06@nats.informatik.uni-hamburg.de
PRE-REGISTRATION IS OBLIGATORY FOR THE PARTICIPATION AT THE SUMMER SCHOOL
COURSES
¢ Information fusion for command and control,
Pontus Svenson (FOI Stockholm, Sweden)
¢ Audio visual speech recognition, Rainer
Stiefelhagen (University Karlsruhe, Germany)
¢ XML integration of natural language processing
components, Ulrich Schäfer, (DFKI, Germany)
¢ Hybrid Parsing, Kilian Forth and Wolfgang
Menzel (University of Hamburg, Germany)
¢ Ontologies for information fusion, Luciano Serafini, (ITC-IRST Trento, Italy)
¢ Syntax semantics integration in HPSG, Valia Kordoni, (DFKI Germany)
¢ Hybrid approaches in machine translation,
Stephan Oepen (University of Oslo, Norway)
¢ Ensemble based architectures, Hans van Halteren
(University of Nijmengen, Holland)
¢ Information fusion in multi-document
summarization, Ani Nenkova (Stanford University,
USA)
Courses will have the duration of one week. Some
of them will include practical exercises
PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME
¢Pre-registration deadline 30.05.2006
¢Notification of acceptance 10.06.2006
¢Payment Deadline 30.06.2006
¢Summer school 3.07 - 14.07.2006
Rationale
Information Fusion is an everyday necessity in
complex speech and language systems although it
is rarely noticed as such. Systems in this area
are always composed of individual components
which need to co-operate towards a common goal.
The reason for such modularisation is obvious:
due to the many different layers and knowledge
sources usually involved, system components need
to be developed independently by different people
with different areas and degrees of
specialization. Moreover, there might be the
option or even the necessity to train such
components on vastly different kinds of data
sets. Often it is the case that a range of
solution alternatives exists for one and the same
processing task, each of them providing a partial
and unreliable but perhaps complementary
contribution to the overall behaviour of the
system. Here, the problem arises of how to
achieve a synergy between such competitive
approaches, even for tasks where the desired
processing result is no longer a trivial one.
Since all available solutions for speech and
language processing are approximations to a
conveyed ideal, system design has to account for
the inherent uncertainty of processing results on
all levels. this makes system integration a
problem of information fusion, which can be
considered as solved in some cases but it is
still an open research issue in others: for
speech recognition the contributions of the
acoustic models and the language model need to be
adjusted properly, whereas in translation a
target sentence has to be composed of partial
structures produced by e.g. an example-based
component and a deep-linguistic one. Other
examples can be taken from more ambitious task
like the integration of acoustic (speech and
noise) and visual data (lip movements, hand
gestures and facial expressions) in complex
multimodal environments.
It is always astonishing to notice, how little
effort humans spend to integrate the available
information from such a diversity of sources.
Even more, multimodal information processing in
many cases leads to a facilitatory effect in the
sense that using evidence from a range of sensory
channels is faster than relying on a single one.
This, obviously, is contrary to the behaviour of
all the techniques we currently have at our
disposal when designing a complex speech and
language system. Therefore, the summer school
will depart from a survey of phenomena and
mechanisms for information fusion. It continues
with studying various approaches for sensor-data
fusion in technical systems, like robots. Finally
it will investigate the issue of information
fusion from the perspective of a range of speech
and language processing tasks, namely
¢ speech recognition and spoken language systems
¢ machine translation
¢ distributed and multilingual information systems
¢ parsing
¢ multimodal speech and language systems
How different these application areas might look,
the underlying principles of and the approaches
towards information fusion seem to be comparable
if not even highly similar. It is the goal of the
summer school to highlight such similarities and
to inspire the cross-disciplinary transfer of
ideas and solutions
FEES
====
The registration fee will cover tuition, course
notes, coffee and tea breaks the welcome and the
farewell parties.
Students: 125 ¤
Academic Staff 250 ¤
Employees of Industry 500 ¤
The registration fee does not include
accommodation or meals. Participants from ELSNET
sites receive a 20% reduction.
The organisers can provide accommodation in
student campus for prices between 280 - 300 Euro/
2 weeks. Registration for only part of the school
is not possible.
A small number of scholarships (full or partial)
will be available. Please indicate if you intend
to apply . When applying please keep in mind that
full-cost scholarships (including travelling and
accommodation) will be granted only in very well
motivated cases
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Walther v. Hahn
Wolfgang Menzel
Cristina Vertan
University of Hamburg, Dept. of Computer Science
Natural Language Systems Division
Vogt-Kölln Str. 30
D-22527, Germany
e-mail:
{vhahn, menzel, vertan}@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
Tel: +49 40 428832533
Fax: +49 40 428832515
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Elisabeth Andre, University of Augsburg, Germany
Nils Ole Bernsen, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Robert Dale, Macquarie University Sydney, Australia
Günther Görz, University of Erlangen, Germany
Björn Granström, KTH Stokholm, Sweden
Walther v. Hahn , University of Hamburg, Germany
Jan Hajic, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Steven Krauwer, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
-- Dr. Cristina Vertan Natural Language Systems Division Computer Science Department University of Hamburg Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 22527 Hamburg GERMANYTel. 040 428 83 2519 Fax 040 428 83 2515
http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~cri -- Dr. Cristina Vertan Natural Language Systems Division Computer Science Department University of Hamburg Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 22527 Hamburg GERMANY
Tel. 040 428 83 2519 Fax 040 428 83 2515
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