Subject: acl / coling workshop on translingual information management

! ! ! ! submission deadline march 23 ! ! ! ! coling-acl998 workshop on translingual information management current levels and future abilities august 16 , 1998 ( following acl / coling-98 ) university of montreal , montreal ( quebec , canada ) call for papers description - - - - - - - - - - the development of natural language applications which handle multi-lingual and multi-modal information is the next major challenge facing the field of computational linguistics . over the past 50 years , a variety of language-related capabilities has been developed in areas such as machine translation , information retrieval , and speech recognition , together with core capabilities such as information extraction , summarization , parsing , generation , multimedia planning and integration , statistics-based methods , ontologies , lexicon construction and lexical representations , and grammar . the next few years will require the extension of these technologies to encompass multi-lingual and multi-modal information . extending current technologies will require integration of the various capabilities into multi-functional natural language systems . however , there is today no clear vision of how these technologies could or should be assembled into a coherent framework . what would be involved in connecting a speech recognition system to an information retrieval engine , and then using machine translation and summarization software to process the retrieved text ? how can traditional parsing and generation be enhanced with statistical techniques ? what would be the effect of carefully crafted lexicons on traditional information retrieval ? this workshop is a follow-on to an nsf - sponsored workshop held in conjunction with the first international conference on language resources and evaluation in granada , spain ( may 1998 ) , at which an international panel of invited experts will consider these questions in an attempt to identify the most effective future directions of computational linguistics research - - especially in the context of the need to handle multi-lingual and multi-modal information . the follow-on acl workshop is intended to open the discussion to the computational inguistics community as a whole . the workshop will include ample time for discussion . a report summarizing the discussions at granada will be available before the acl workshop . topics - - - - - the workshop will focus on the following fundamental questions : 1 . what is the current level of capability in each of the major areas of the field dealing with language and related media of human communication ? 2 . how can ( some of ) these functions be integrated in the near future , and what kind of systems will result ? 3 . what are the major considerations for extending these functions to handle multi-lingual and multi-modal information , particularly in integrated systems of the type envisioned in ( 2 ) ? in particular , we will consider these questions in relation to the following areas : o multi-lingual resources ( lexicons , ontologies , corpora , etc . ) o information retrieval , especially cross-lingual and cross-modal o machine translation o automated ( cross-lingual ) summarization and information extraction o multimedia communication , in conjunction with text o evaluation and assessment techniques for each of these areas o methods and techniques ( both statistics-based and linguistics - based ) of pre-parsing , parsing , generation , information acquisition , etc . we invite submissions which report on work in these areas . all papers should clearly identify how the work addresses the issues and questions outlined above . submissions - - - - - - - - - - only hard-copy submissions will be accepted . authors should submit six ( 6 ) copies of the full-length paper ( 3500-5000 words ) . submissions should be sent to : nancy ide department of computer science vassar college 124 raymond avenue poughkeepsie , new york 12604-0520 usa style files and templates for preparing submissions can be found at http : / / coling-acl 98 . iro . umontreal . ca / styles . html the official language of the conference is english . important deadlines - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - submission deadline : march 23 , 1998 notification date : may 15 , 1998 camera ready copy due : june 15 , 1998 scientific committee - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - charles fillmore university of california berkeley , usa robert frederking carnegie mellon university , usa ulrich heid university of stuttgart , germany eduard hovy information sciences institute , usa nancy ide vassar college , usa lauri karttunen ( tentative ) rank xerox research , france kimmo koskenniemi university of helsinki , finland mun kew leong national university of singapore joseph mariani limsi / cnrs , france mark maybury the mitre corporation , usa sergei nirenburg new mexico state university , usa akitoshi okumura nec , japan martha palmer university of pennsylvania , usa james pustejovsky brandeis university , usa peter schaueble eth , switzerland oliviero stock irst , italy felisa verdejo uned , spain piek vossen university of amsterdam , netherlands wolfgang wahlster dfki , germany organizers - - - - - - - - - robert frederking , carnegie mellon university , usa eduard hovy , isi , university of southern california , usa nancy ide , vassar college , usa information - - - - - - - - - - information on the workshop can be found at http : / / www . cs . vassar . edu / ~ ide / translingual . html inquiries may be addressed to the organizers : robert frederking < ref @ nl . cs . cmu . edu > eduard hovy < hovy @ isi . edu > nancy ide < ide @ cs . vassar . edu >
