Subject: ecml ' 98 tanlps workshop : first call for paper

ecml-98 workshop : first call for papers ecml-98 workshop : towards adaptive nlp - driven systems : linguistic information , learning methods and applications organized by : r . basili , m . t . pazienza ( university of roma , tor vergata ) , italy since most of the applications , from syntactic to semantic , are lexicon driven , systematic and reliable acquisition on a large scale of linguistic information is the real challenge to natural language processing ( nlp ) . empiricist view on natural language processing and learning has become recently more attractive for a wider research community : computational linguistics , artificial intelligence , psychology then seemed to converge on a specific data-oriented perspective aiming to overcome the traditional knowledge acquisition bottleneck . it has been often noted that the limited attention paid by the machine learning community to text and speech data seems unjustified . it is thus more and more evident that empirical learning of natural language processing ( nlp ) can alleviate the nlp main problem by means of a variety of methods for the automatic induction of lexical knowledge . lexical knowledge is often hard to compile by hand , and even harder to port and reuse . nlp application systems have still a low impact on real world problems , mainly due to the costs related to reusability and customization of the required lexicons . in particular changes in the domain , causes changes in the lexical information required in the underlying natural language . empirical , symbolic machine learning methods can be perfectly suited for this task like automatic acquisition and adaptation of this klnowledge . rule induction , symbolic approaches to clustering , lazy learning , and inductive logic programming , have been already proposed by a growing community that is entering the challenge for theoretical ( i . e . methodological ) and application purposes a variety of techniques seems to be combined in order to successfully design realistic inductive systems for text processing : the target of this research are methodological and design principles for systems combining linguistic and lexical learning capabilities for large scale language processing tasks . this is what we mean with adaptive nlp - driven systems . within this research enterprise , some issues can favour a sinergistic process between nlp and ml areas : the access to large data sets , that are even increasing over time , due to the telematics facilities available nowaday ; extending the set of typical classes of ml problems to other hard cases ( particularly dense in the nlp processes ) ; adding inductive capabilities to nlp system for tasks related to specific applications ( i . e . information extraction ) . the proposed workshop is thus aiming to stimulate reasearch and discussion on the following aspects : - establishing results and evidencies on the suitability of different ml paradigms on specific levels of representation of lexical knowledge ( morphology , syntax , linguistic inference among others ) - comparison of the quantitative approaches to lexical acquisition with empirical symbolic methods - stimulating discussion on cognitive perspective of some models within a plausible architecture for language processing and learning - establishing results on the applicability of the extracted / induce knowledge within nlp systems , with respect to assessed evaluation criteria , typical of the ml and language engineering ( le ) area - case studies on adaptive nlp systems , i . e . effective nlp systems integrating linguistic inferences with inductive capabilities ( www kb at cmu , ecran ) , - critical review of existing experiences on adaptive nlp systems - establishing guidelines for an evaluation framework of adaptive nlp systems : accuracy of the linguistic process , robustness of the induction process , . . . - promote cooperation among research groups in europe and usa to exchange ideas , data and tools for design and experiment architectures for adaptive nlp systems workshop format : the workshop is expected to cover the whole day . in the first session , a part from an invited talk , we expect to cover methodological issues . papers related to advanced research on suitability of learning paradigms for the different target lexical information will be favoured . prototypical examples in this area are studies on empirical learning of tasks like pos tagging , induction of grammatical information , symbolic learning of word sense disambiguation criteria and lexical semantic information . a panel discussion is expected to close the morning session and focus on principles of suitability for learning paradigms vs . lexical levels . in the second half of the day we expect to stimulate partecipants to cover application areas , like ir and ie , by a couple of invited talks on existing adaptive systems as a basis for presenting novel aspects on integration of nlp capabilities with learning from experience ( examples , errors , performance ) . a set of at least other 3 or 4 papers is expected to concentrate on original research works that we know are currently under development in several reasearch centres in europe ( sheffield university , tilburg , rome tor vergata and torino university ) . a panel discussion on the implication of the adaptive paradigm on existing and potential nlp systems will close the workshop . program committee r . basili ( university of roma , tor vergata , italy ) m . craven ( carnegie mellon university , usa ) w . daelemans ( university of tilburg , nederlands ) m . t . pazienza ( university of roma , tor vergata , italy ) l . saitta ( university of torino , italy ) c . samuelssonn ( bell labs , at&t , usa ) y . wilks ( university of sheffield , uk ) paper submission : = = = = = = = = = = = = papers should not exceed 3000 words or 6 pages hard copy submission : three copies of the paper should be sent to : roberto basili department of computer science , systems and production university of roma , tor vergata via di tor vergata 00133 roma ( italy ) e-mail : basili @ info . utovrm . it electronic submission : electronic submission may be in either self-contained postscript or rtf formats , to basili @ info . utovrm . it for each submission - - whether hard copy or electronic - - a separate plain ascii text email message should be sent to roberto basili , containing the following information : # name : name of first author # title : title of the paper # pages : number of pages # files : name of file ( if attachments are submitted electronically ) # note : any relevant instructions # keys : keywords # email : email of the first author # abstr : abstract of the paper . . . . . . timetable : workshop announcement and call for papers : 5 january 1998 papers due : 15 february 1998 notification of acceptance : 5 march 1998 final version due : 25 march 1998 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - roberto basili department of computer science , systems and production university of roma , tor vergata via di tor vergata 00133 roma ( italy ) e-mail : basili @ info . utovrm . it tel : + 39 - 6 - 7259 7391 fax : + 39 - 6 - 7259 7460 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
