LINGUIST List 13.3224

Fri Dec 6 2002

Calls: NLP/Discourse Analysis

Editor for this issue: Karolina Owczarzak <karolinalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Elisabete Ranchhod, Workshop on Finite-State Methods in NLP, Budapest Hungary
2. Luuk Lagerwerf, Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse, Germany

Workshop on Finite-State Methods in Natural Language Processing

 EACL 2003

 13-14 April 2003

 Agro Hotel, Budapest, Hungary

This workshop is a follow-up to FSMNLP'98 (Ankara) and FSMNLP'01
(Helsinki) workshops, and will be a forum for researchers working on
theoretical aspects and applications of finite state methods in
natural language processing. This year's workshop will have special
themes on and sessions for "Linguistic Resources" and "Finite State
Applications for Lesser-studied Languages", so submissions from
researchers in these areas are especially welcome. In addition to
these themes, papers are invited on all aspects of finite state
techniques and their applications in natural language processing
including but not limited to: 

- tools for developing finite state resources and applications,
- theoretical aspects of algorithms for finite state machines,
- applications of finite state techniques in
- speech,
- phonology,
- morphology,
- tagging,
- parsing,
- information extraction.

Workshop format:
- April 13. Morning: tutorial, afternoon: paper presentations.
- April 14. Paper presentations.

During the first day, the tutorial and papers will be presented mainly
for an audience of (computational) linguists interested in
lesser-studied/minority languages, e.g. from the Bantu, American
Indian, Turkic, S�mi, Semitic, Austronesian etc. families. The second
day will be mainly dedicated to finite-state methods combined with
precise linguistic descriptions, e.g. lexical resources, linguistic
grammars, ambiguity-adapted text representations etc.

Audience: Graduate students and practicing linguists or computational
linguists working on or interested in finite-state technlogy and its
uses in developing tools for morphological processing, tagging,
parsing, lexicology etc. About 50 participants are expected.

Organizers:
Ken Beesley (XRCE, France), Lauri Karttunen Parc Inc., USA),
�ric Laporte (Universit� de Marne-la-Vall�e,France), Denis Maurel
(Universit� de Tours, France), Kemal Oflazer (Sabanci University, Turkey),
Elisabete Ranchhod (Universidade de Lisboa & Instituto Superior T�cnico,
Portugal), Emmanuel Roche (Teragram,USA).

Programme Committee:
I�aki Alegria (University of Basque Country), Ken Beesley (XRCE),
Steven Bird (University of Melbourne), C�drick Fairon (Universit�
catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve), Franz Guenthner (Universit�t
M�nchen), Arvi Hurskainen (University of Helsinki), Lauri Karttunen
(Parc Inc.), George Kiraz (AT & T Research), �ric Laporte (Universit�
de Marne-la-Vall�e), Denis Maurel (Universit� de Tours, France), Mike
Maxwell (Linguistic Data Consortium), Kemal Oflazer (Sabanci
University), Elisabete Ranchhod (Universidade de Lisboa & Instituto
Superior T�cnico, Portugal), Emmanuel Roche (Teragram, USA), Jean
Senellart (Systran).

Important Dates:
- Deadline for Submission of Papers: 7 January 2003
- Notification of Acceptance: 28 January 2003
- Camera-ready copies due: 13 February 2003
- Workshop: 13-14 April 2003

Submission Format:

Submissions must be electronic only, and should consist of full papers
of max. 8 pages (inclusive of references, tables, figures and
equations). Authors are strongly encouraged to use the following
stylefiles (available via
http://www.elsnet.org/workshops/format.html):
 eacl2003.sty
 MS_Word-final.rtf
 acl.bst (BibTeX bibliography style file)
 Sample LaTeX paper, Sample bibliography, Sample
makefile for latex-based build (NO WARRANTY though :)),

These formats will ease the transition to the final format, which is
essentially equivalent. Please note that if accepted, the final
camera-ready version of the paper must be formatted for A4-sized
paper. An electronic version of the paper, formatted for A4 or a
letter-size paper must be received by January 7, 23:00 GMT at the
following address:
 finite.stateuniv-mlv.fr.

 Please use gzip or plain old zip (or PKZIP) for compression to ensure
nothing is lost during the email transfer.

Registration:

 Participants pay a registration fee. They are not required to
register for the main conference as well, but if they do not they will
pay a higher registration fee. More information will be published on
the main conference page (http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03/).

Contact info:
Matthieu Constant
matthieu.constantuniv-mlv.fr
Tel.: 33 - 1 60 95 77 38
IGM, University of Marne-la-Vall�e
5, bd Descartes
77454 Marne-la-Vall�e CEDEX 2

5th International Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse
October 22th-25th, 2003

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse 2003 (MAD'03) is the fifth
in a series of small-scale, high-quality workshops that have been
organised every second year since 1995 (Egmond-aan-zee (NL), 1995;
Utrecht (NL), 1997; Edinburgh (GB), 1999; Ittre (BE), 2001). Its aim
is to bring together researchers from different disciplines, in
particular theoretical and applied linguists, computational linguists,
and psycholinguists, to exchange information and learn from each other
on a common topic of investigation: text and discourse.

Workshop Theme

In this edition of the workshop, MAD'03 aims at bringing together social
scientists and linguists by pursuing the following theme: Determination of
Information and Tenor in Texts. Topics of the workshop are exemplified by,
but not limited to, questions like:

	*	How is content (or information) extracted from text?
	*	How does one systematically infer stances from texts?
	*	What determines differences in interpretation between readers?
	*	How do (automated) discourse representations come about?
	* How can linguistic properties be put to use for analysis of
large text collections?
	*	What do co-occurrences of words tell about discourses?
	* How does text type or genre change the interpretation of text
variables?
	*	How do new media change the use of text variables and genres?

Keynote speakers
Klaus Sch�nbach, Universiteit van Amsterdam (NL)
Peter Foltz, New Mexico State University (NM)
Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Paul Deane, Educational Testing Service (NJ)

Workshop Location
The workshop and lodging will be in conference centre De Bergse
Bossen, located in the forests of Driebergen, a village near
Utrecht. Travelling by train to Schiphol Airport or the city of
Amsterdam takes less than an hour.

Workshop Design
In the workshop, about 20 people will be presenting an accepted paper
in plenary sessions. The total number of participants will be limited
to 40. Anonymous review of full papers will be carried out in order
to guarantee high quality of papers. The organisers also strive to
publish all accepted papers in workshop proceedings at the start of
the workshop. After the workshop, a selection of papers are likely to
be published in a special issue of an appropriate journal (see the
references).

Call for papers
Deadline for submission of full papers addressing one of the questions
of the workshop is May 1st, 2003. On the website of MAD03,
http://home.scw.vu.nl/~lagerwerf/Mad03Web/index.htm, specific
guidelines for submission are given.

Workshop Organisers
Luuk Lagerwerf, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL)
Wilbert Spooren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL)
Liesbeth Degand, Universit� catholique de Louvain (BE)

MAD'03 is hosted by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Netherlands
School of Communication Research (NESCoR; in the persons of Prof. Dr. J.
Kleinnijenhuis, Vrije Universiteit; Prof. Dr. P.J. Schellens, Universiteit
Twente).

Workshop Theme Description In many approaches to discourse analysis in
linguistics, and content or media analysis in social sciences, methods
have been developed to extract information from texts
systematically. Apart from extracting information, many different
approaches have also been aiming to determine the tenor of texts. In
this small-scale intensive workshop, we want to encourage discussion
between researchers from different backgrounds. 

The workshop will have significance for document design as well as
content analysis. In both cases, it is important to analyse processes
of recognition and evaluation of information in text. Also, linguistic
properties of texts may serve as cues for systematising these
processes. 

Other related areas are the fields of persuasion and argumentation,
and discourse psychology, discourse analysis, and computational
modelling of discourse processes. By using statistical approaches
based on co-occurrences, judgments of diverse aspects of texts may be
delivered automatically. Together, these approaches make it possible
to build information structures of texts, make abstracts
automatically, or disclose tendencies in the content of multiple
texts.

In each of these approaches, it is important to realize that text type
(or genre) is perhaps one of the most determining factors in
extracting information, evaluating information or examining linguistic
aspects of text. Regarding the workshop topics, this factor will be
controlled by either taking news texts as the default text type, or
taking text type itself as a topic to determine its influence on
information, tenor or linguistic aspects. The application of any of
these approaches to the design or analysis of new media provides a
very interesting extension of the topics of the workshop.

Schedule
Announcement of the workshop: December 6th, 2002
Call for papers: February 3rd, 2003
Deadline (full papers): May 1st, 2003
Notice of acceptance: July 1st, 2003
Deliverance final papers: August 1st, 2003

References
A short impression of the previous workshop MAD'01 can be obtained at:
http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/FLTR/GERM/lingne/Degand/MAD/mad-presentation.htm

Previous workshops resulted in the following publications:
- Degand, L., Y. Bestgen & W. Spooren & L. v. Waes (eds.; 2001).
Multidisciplinary approaches to discourse (pp. 183-194). M�nster: Nodus
Publikationen.
- Knott, A., J. Oberlander & T. Sanders (eds.; 2001). Special Issue: Levels
of Representation in Discourse Relations, Cognitive Linguistics 12 (3).
- Risselada, R. & W. Spooren (eds.; 1998). Special issue: Discourse markers
and coherence relations. Journal of Pragmatics 30 (2).
- Sanders, T., J. Schilperoord & W. Spooren (eds.; 2001). Text
Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
- Spooren, W. & R. Risselada (eds.; 1997). Special issue: Discourse markers.
Discourse Processes 24 (1).