******************************* Deadline Extension ICGI-2000 ******************************* 5th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference Lisbon, Portugal September 11-13th, 2000 DEADLINE EXTENDED TO : April 20th http://algos.inesc.pt/icgi-2000 ********************************************************************** ********************************************************************** Preliminary Call for Papers ICGI-2000 5th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference Lisbon, Portugal September 11-13th, 2000 http://algos.inesc.pt/icgi-2000 SCOPE ICGI-2000 is the fifth in a series of successful biennial international conferences on the area of grammatical inference. Grammatical inference has been extensively addressed by researchers in information theory, automata theory, language acquisition, computational linguistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, computational learning theory and neural networks. This colloquium aims at bringing together researchers in these fields. Previous editions of this meeting were held in Essex, U.K.; Alicante, Spain; Montpellier, France; and Ames, Iowa, USA. LOCATION ICGI-2000 will be held in Lisbon. Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, is a modern city which is undergoing profound transformations. Known as the city of the seven hills, mother city of sailors and explorers of seas, a diamond enchased on the bank of a river, the Tagus, Lisbon has a lot to offer both in terms of history, culture and social life, both in the city itself and the nearby coast. Portugal's geographical location makes Lisbon easily accessible for travellers from all corners of the world . The conference will be located in Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Portugal's major technical university. IST is located in the center of Lisbon, with easy access to hotels, restaurants and touristic attractions. Lisbon is well served by air connections to many major European and American cities. Some direct connections to Asia also exist but are less common. Lisbon airport is located less than 15 minutes away from IST, accessible by cab or public transportation. ICGI-2000 will be held in the week immediately following ICPR 2000, which is held in Barcelona. AREAS OF INTEREST Topics of Interest The conference seeks to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of original research papers on all aspects of grammatical inference including, but not limited to: * Different models of grammar induction: e.g., learning from examples, learning using examples and queries, incremental versus non-incremental learning, distribution-free models of learning, learning under various distributional assumptions (e.g., simple distributions), impossibility results, complexity results, characterizations of representational and search biases of grammar induction algorithms. * Algorithms for induction of different classes of languages and automata: e.g., regular, context-free, and context-sensitive languages, interesting subsets of the above under additional syntactic constraints, tree and graph grammars, picture grammars, multi-dimensional grammars, attributed grammars, parameterized models, etc. * Theoretical and experimental analysis of different approaches to grammar induction including artificial neural networks, statistical methods, symbolic methods, information-theoretic approaches, minimum description length, and complexity-theoretic approaches, heuristic methods, etc. * Broader perspectives on grammar induction -- e.g., acquisition of grammar in conjunction with language semantics, semantic constraints on grammars, language acquisition by situated agents and robots, acquisition of language constructs that describe objects and events in space and time, developmental and evolutionary constraints on language acquisition, statistical modeling of natural language, etc. * Demonstrated or potential applications of grammar induction in natural language acquisition, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, information retrieval, text processing, adaptive intelligent agents, systems modelling and control, and other domains. TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE (partial) Pieter Adriaans, Syllogic/University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Pavel Brazdil, University of Porto, Portugal Michael Brent, Johns Hopkins University, USA Walter Daelemans, Tilburg University, Netherlands Pierre Dupont, Univ. de St. Etienne, France Dominique Estival, Syrinx Speech Systems, Sydney, Australia Ana Fred, Lisbon Technical University, Portugal Jerry Feldman, ICSI, Berkeley, USA Lee Giles, NEC Research Institute, USA Colin de la Higuera, EURISE, Univ. de St. Etienne, France Vasant Honavar, Iowa State University, USA Kevin Lang, NEC Research Institute, USA Laurent Miclet, ENSSAT, Lannion, France G. Nagaraja, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India Jacques Nicolas, IRISA, France Arlindo Oliveira, Lisbon Technical University, Portugal (Chair) Jose Oncina Carratala, Universidade de Alicante, Spain Rajesh Parekh, Allstate Research and Planning Center, USA Lenny Pitt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Yasubumi Sakakibara, Tokyo Denki University, Japan Arun Sharma, University of New South Wales, Australia Giora Slutzki, Iowa State University, USA Esko Ukkonen, University of Helsinki, Finland Enrique Vidal, U. Politecnica de Valencia, Spain Thomas Zeugmann, Kyushu University, Japan CONFERENCE FORMAT The conference will include oral and possibly poster presentations of accepted papers, a small number of tutorials and invited talks. All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings. The proceedings of ICGI-2000 will be published by Springer-Verlag as a volume in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, a subseries of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. SUBMISSION OF PAPERS Prospective authors are invited to submit a draft paper in English with the following format. The cover page should specify: - submission to ICGI-2000 - title, - category (1-8) which most closely matches the paper contents - authors and affiliation, - mailing address, phone, fax, and e-mail address of the contact author, - a brief abstract describing the work, - at least three keywords which can specify typically the contents of the work. For blind review, the paper itself should not contain explicit indication of the authors. Postscript versions of the papers should be formatted according to A4 or 8.5"x11", and the length should not exceed 12 pages excluding the cover page. The technical expositions should be directed to a specialist and should include an introduction understandable to a non specialist that describes the problem studied and the results achieved, focusing on the important ideas and their significance. All paper submissions, review and notification of acceptance will be done electronically through the conference's WWW pages http://algos.inesc.pt/icgi-2000 DEADLINES Submission of manuscripts: April 14, 2000 Notification of acceptance: May 27th, 2000 Final version of manuscript: June 28th, 2000 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE GENERAL CHAIR Arlindo Oliveira Department of Informatics Systems and Computers Research Institute (INESC) Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) Technical University of Lisbon Rua Alves Redol, 9 1000 Lisboa, PORTUGAL Phone: +351-21-3100228 Fax: +341-21-3145843 E-mail: aml@inesc.pt LOCAL ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE Ana Fred (chair) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) Torre Norte Technical University of Lisbon Av. Rovisco Pais 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal Tel: +351-21-8418469 Fax: +351-21-8418472 E-mail:afred@lisboa.lx.it.pt Ana T. Freitas Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) Systems and Computers Research Institute (INESC) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering E-mail: atf@inesc.pt SECRETARIAT Ana de Jesus Systems and Computers Research Institute (INESC) Rua Alves Redol, 9 1000 Lisboa, PORTUGAL Phone: +351-21-3100394 Fax: +341-21-3145843 E-mail: amnj@abaco.inesc.pt SPONSORS: INESC - Systems and Computers Engineering Institute IST - Instituto Superior Tecnico Contacts with additional sponsors are currently under way. Take a look at: http://algos.inesc.pt/icgi-2000. See you in Lisbon in September 2000!!