Workshop on Extended finite state models of language August 11-12, 1996 ECAI '96, Budapest, Hungary Organizing Committee Chair: Prof. Eva Ejerhed, Umea University Department of Linguistics University of Umea 90187 Umea, Sweden Tel: 46 (0)90 - 16 56 77 Email: ejerhed@ling.umu.se Members: Prof. Frederic Jelinek, Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing, Barton Hall, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, 21210 Tel: (410) 516-7730 Fax: (410) 516-5050 Email: jelinek@cspjhu.ece.jhu.edu Dr. Lauri Karttunen, Xerox PARC and Rank Xerox Research Center Rank Xerox Research Centre 6, chemin de Maupertuis F-38240 Meylan, France Tel: 33-76-61 50 95 Fax: 33-76-61 50 99 Email: Lauri.Karttunen@xerox.fr András Kornai IBM Almaden Research Center IBM Research Division, DPE/803 Almaden Research Center 650 Harry Road San Jose, CA 95120-6099 Tel: (408) 927-1921 Fax: (408) 927-4145 Email: kornai@almaden.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Workshop Description In spite of the wide availability of more powerful (context-free, mildly context-sensitive, and even Turing-equivalent) formalisms, the bulk of the applied work on language and sublanguage modeling, especially for the purposes of recognition and topic search, is still performed by various finite state methods. In fact, the use of such methods in research labs as well as in applied work actually increased in the past five years. The goal of the workshop is to bring together those developing and using extended finite state methods to text analysis, speech/OCR language modeling, and related CL and NLP tasks with those in AI and CS interested in analyzing and possibly extending the domain of finite-state algorithms. Submissions We invite contributions in three categories: applied, theoretical, and general. Applied papers should describe advances in extended finite state language modeling. For the purposes of the workshop, "extended" means that we do not require the formalism to be strictly finite state -- any system where the bulk of the execution time is spent in a state machine is of relevance. Systems/toolkits that go beyond the needs of a single application domain are of particular interest. Theoretical papers should analyze and possibly extend the domain or improve the performance of known finite-state algorithms or propose new ones. General papers should address the broader underlying questions of the field: what is the reason for the remarkable versatility and increasing use of finite state models? How much of the work performed by (extended) context-free models can be done by (extended) finite state means? Workshop Format To encourage a workshop atmosphere, main papers (30 minutes) will be followed by commentaries (10 minutes) and 10-20 minutes of open discussion. People interested in presenting main or commentary papers should send a preliminary note as early as possible to kornai@almaden.ibm.com with a brief description of the work they would like to present or comment on, or a brief description of their interests if they would like to participate without contributing a paper or commentary. Please note that in addition to the workshop registration fee of ECU 50, all participants are expected to register for the main ECAI conference as well (before July 1, ECU 350 for ECCAI members, ECU 400 for non-members). Important dates * Preliminary Note: ASAP * Submission Deadline: April 25 * Notification Date : May 25 * Full Paper Due : June 15 Submission Requirements Extended abstracts (max 5 pages) in plain ascii should be e-mailed to kornai@almaden.ibm.com. For the final version, see the Guidelines for Preparing a Paper for the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence but note that papers in other formats (such as plain ascii or compressed uuencoded postscript) will also be considered as long as they can be distributed to the other participants by e-mail (7 bit only) and readily printed/viewed (on generic unix boxes). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------