*********************** CALL FOR PAPERS ***************************** Machine learning and statistical NLP for dialogue A Thematic Session of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/ Motivation ---------- The theme addresses the question to what extent the traditional approach to developing dialogue systems can be supplemented by automatic data-driven techniques from ML and statistical NLP. The crucial advantage of such techniques is that they do not require the development of a formal model beforehand, but instead extract relevant knowledge directly from annotated data. The aim of this theme session is to bring representatives of linguistically-oriented and computationally-oriented groups together, to foster exchange between those who provide the theoretial tools for successful application of ML and statistical NLP techniques, those who work on discourse and dialogue theory, and those who build actual dialogue systems. Topics: ------- * theoretical challenges: - combining data-driven and logic-based approaches to dialogue - suitability of dialogue system components for incorporation of Machine Learning (ML) and statistical modeling - consequences of incorporating data-driven modules for dialogue system architecture - application and applicability of state-of-the-art Machine Learning and statistical NLP techniques to (components of) dialogue systems - complexity and tractability - comparison of approaches such as Winnow / SNoW, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Rule Induction, Belief Nets, Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), Memory-Based Learning (MBL), Maximum Entropy Modeling, Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), Transformation-Based Learning, Hidden Markov Modeling (HMM) * methodological issues: - evaluation of dialogue system components based on ML/statistical NLP development of benchmark data sets for dialogue-related ML and statistical NLP - creating dialogue corpora for ML and statistical NLP: corpus definition, markup, corpus collection, corpus annotation, (semi-)automatic annotation tools and schemes * Application and applicability of state-of-the-art Machine Learning and statistical NLP techniques to (components of) dialogue systems: - speech recognition and synthesis, - dialogue management, - language interpretation and generation - coreference processing - error detection techniques - repair and clarification - robust interfaces Chairs: Antal van den Bosch, University of Tilburg Emiel Krahmer, IPO, Eindhoven University of Technology Maria Wolters, University of Bonn Homepage: http://ilk.kub.nl/acl00-theme/ Programme Committee: - David Aha, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC - Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp - Julia Hirschberg, AT&T Labs-Research - Diane Litman, AT&T Labs-Research - Katharina Morik, University of Dortmund - Massimo Poesio, HCRC/University of Edinburgh - Thomas Portele, Philips Research Laboratories - Stephen Pulman, SRI International/University of Cambridge - Bernhard Schroeder, University of Bonn - Marc Swerts, IPO, Eindhoven University of Technology - Jacques Terken, IPO, Eindhoven University of Technology Submission Information: Papers may not exceed 3200 words (exclusive of title page and references); papers outside the specified length are subject to be rejected without review. We strongly recommend the use of ACL latex style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for the ACL 2000 conference, available from http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/Latex/index.html. Deadlines: * 31. 3. 2000: electronic notification of submission (paper registration form: http://www.cis.udel.edu/%7Eacl2k/prereg.html) * 7. 4. 2000: deadline for receipt of hardcopy ACL-2000 Submission c/o K. Vijay-Shanker 103 Smith Hall Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ACL 2000 Call For Papers 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 3--6 October, 2000 Hong Kong The Association for Computational Linguistics invites the submission of papers for its 38th Annual Meeting. As was the case with last year's ACL conference, the technical sessions of the conference will be of two kinds. There will be General Sessions as well as a number of special Thematic Sessions organized around themes proposed by members of the computational linguistics community. For the General Sessions, papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to: pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology and morphology; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language; language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction; corpus-based language modeling; multi-lingual processing, machine translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; approaches to coordinating the linguistic with other modalities in multi-media systems; message and narrative understanding systems; tools and resources; and evaluation of systems. Papers submitted to the Thematic Sessions are more narrowly targeted at specific topics. The list of Thematic Sessions is as follows: T1: NLP and Open-Domain Question Answering from Text T2: Machine Learning and Statistical NLP for Dialogue T3: Text Summarization T4: Theoretical and Technical Approaches for Asian Language Processing -- Similarities and Differences among Languages Further information on the individual themes and topics appropriate to each can be obtained from the ACL-2000 conference website (http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/). Requirements Requirements are the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions; a separate Call for Student Workshop papers will provide the information on requirements for the Student Workshop submissions. Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. A paper accepted for presentation at the ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this on the title page. (See Submission Format below.) Reviewing The reviewing of the papers submitted to the General Sessions and the Thematic Sessions will be blind. Reviewing of papers submitted to the General Sessions will be managed by an international Conference Program Committee consisting of Area Chairs, each of whom will have the assistance of a team of reviewers. The Area Chairs are: Key-Sun Choi Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea Walter Daelemans University of Antwerp, Belgium Dan Jurafsky University of Colorado, USA Yuji Matsumoto Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan Johanna Moore University of Edinburgh, UK Martha Palmer University of Pennsylvania, PA Ellen Riloff University of Utah, USA Giorgio Satta Universita` di Padova, Italy Reviewing of papers for the Thematic Sessions will be managed by the chairs of the Thematic Sessions, with the assistance of teams of reviewers. Final decisions on the technical program (both General Sessions and Thematic Sessions) will be made by the Conference Program Committee. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three reviewers. Submission Procedure The format of submissions is the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions. Papers may not exceed 3200 words (exclusive of title page and references). Papers outside the specified length are subject to be rejected without review. We strongly recommend the use of ACL latex style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. These are available from the ACL-2000 Conference Website (http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/). These style files include a place for the paper ID code (see below) and word count and allow for a graceful transition to the style required for publication. A description of the format is also available in case you are unable to use these style files directly. If you are unable to access this webpage, please send email to acl2k@cis.udel.edu. The reviewing of papers submitted to the General Session or the Thematic Sessions will be blind. Hence the title page and paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity (e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...") should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". You must first register your submission. This can be done by filling out an electronic form that is accessible from the conference webpage (http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/). The form requires a specification of the title and authors of the paper, as well as a preliminary abstract and list of keywords. Submitting the form will return to you via email a paper ID code which must appear on your submission. Also, please use the paper ID code in all correspondences with the program committee co-chairs. If you have any difficulty using the electronic registration form, please send email to acl2k@cis.udel.edu with all of the title page information (see below) plus the authors' names and affiliations. As reviewing will be blind, a separate title page and identification page will be required. The title page should include the following information: Title: Paper ID Code: (generated upon paper registration) Topic Area: one or two general topic areas Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area Which Session: T1, T2, T3, T4, or G (you must choose one) Word Count, excluding title page and references: Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify): Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines) T1, T2, T3, and T4 correspond to the four Theme Sessions and G corresponds to the General Session. A paper can be submitted to at most one session. The identification page should contain all of the information in the title page, but in addition must include the authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses. The format for the identification page should be as follows: Title: Paper ID Code: (generated upon paper registration) Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses Topic Area: one or two general topic areas Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area Which Session: T1, T2, T3, T4, or G (you must choose one) Word Count, excluding title page and references: Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify): Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines) Submissions must be received by April 7th, 2000. Late submissions (those arriving on or after April 8th) will be rejected without review. The Program Committee is not responsible for postal delays or other mailing problems. Six (6) paper copies (printed on both sides of the page if possible) including the title page should be submitted to the following address: ACL-2000 Submission c/o K. Vijay-Shanker 103 Smith Hall Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 USA Two of the six copies must have the identification page attached. In addition, strictly for the purposes of partially-automated routing of papers to area chairs and reviewers, authors should send an electronic version of the paper (without the identification page) to acl-routing@cis.udel.edu. Please include the paper ID code in the subject line of your email. Latex, postscript, pdf, Microsoft word and plain text are all acceptable formats for the electronic version. The electronic version should also be received by April 7, 2000. Please note that as the electronic version will only be used to assist the PC in distributing the papers to appropriate reviewers, this supplementary electronic version in no way replaces the required hardcopy submissions. If you have any difficulty in submitting the electronic version, please send mail to the pc co-chairs at acl2k@cis.udel.edu. Acknowledgment of receipt of the hardcopy submission will be emailed soon after receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email) around June 15, 2000. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice. Authors of accepted papers will have to submit a signed copyright release statement along with the final camera-ready papers. The dates here pertain only to the General Sessions and Thematic sessions. Paper registration deadline: March 31, 2000 Paper submissions deadline: April 7, 2000 Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2000 ACL 2000 Conference: October 3--6, 2000 Submission Questions Authors unable to comply with the above submission procedure should contact the program committee co-chairs sufficiently ahead of the submission deadline so that alternate arrangements can be made. All queries regarding the General Sessions and Thematic sessions of ACL-2000 should be sent to acl2k@cis.udel.edu; this forwards to both PC co-chairs. Changning Huang (PC Co-Chair) K. Vijay-Shanker (PC Co-Chair) Microsoft Research, China CIS Department 5F, Beijing Sigma Center University of Delaware No.49, Zhichun Road Newark, DE 19716, USA Beijing 100080, P.R.C cnhuang@microsoft.com vijay@cis.udel.edu Tel: +86 10 6261-7711 -5760 Tel: +1 302 831 1952 Fax: +86 10 8809-7305 Fax: +1 302 831 8458 Hitoshi Iida (General Chair) Aravind K. Joshi (Honorary Chair) Speech and Language Information Department of Computer and Processing Lab Information Sciences SONY Computer Science Labs, Inc. University of Pennsylvania Tokyo 141-0022, Japan Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA iida@csl.sony.co.jp joshi@linc.cis.upenn.edu Tel: +81 3 5448 4380 Tel: +1 215 898 0359 Fax: +81 3 5447 1942 Fax: +1 215 573 9247