Combined CFP: NeMLaP/CoNLL NLP Conferences, Workshops and Tutorial Program THE AUSTRALIAN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FORTNIGHT incorporating New Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference Computational Natural Language Learning Conference Australian Natural Language Postgraduate Workshop Sunday January 11th to Saturday 24th 1998 All around Australia ANLPF - AUSTRALIAN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FORTNIGHT The Australian NLP community is pleased to announce that it will be hosting two international NLP conferences in January 1998, and has organized a fortnight of associated activities around the country, to ensure that you are able to make the most of your trip to Australia. The NeMLaP and CoNLL conferences will be sharing tutorials and workshops: NeMLaP will focus broadly on methods and specifically on textual NLP; CoNLL conference will focus specifically on learning as it relates broadly to any aspects of linguistic theory, modelling or processing. Papers may be submitted for coordinated consideration for the two conferences and the associated workshops. Immediately following ANLPF there will an opportunity to join an ANLPF trip to the Red Centre and/or to Kangaroo Island. The annual Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW) follows in Perth (February 2 to 5), a week after ANLPF. The ACSW conference week incorporates: ACSC'98 - The 21st Australasian Computer Science Conference ACAC'98 - The 3rd Australasian Computer Architecture Conference ADC'98 - The 9th Australian Database Conference CATS'98 - The 4th Australasian Theory Symposium ANLPF will thus take you around most of Australia's major cities and sights: Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide - and if you stay on, also Kangaroo Island, Coober Pedy, Ayer's Rock and Perth. The 1998 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence will also be held in Sydney, at the PowerHouse Museum, on Sunday 11th January, and an International Human-Computer Conversation Workshop may also be held immediately before ANLPF in conjunction with that event. But... Don't read this if you can help it - hit the web straight away: http://www.cs.flinders.edu.au/research/AI/ANLPF Fuller details are available on the web, and you'll find your way around the information much more easily. But for the email addicts, we present the formal call for papers for CoNLL and NeMLaP, and summarize the timetable and submission requirements for the fortnight. TIMETABLE FOR CoNLL, NeMLaP and workshops 1997 Expressions of interest - discount if you reply by Jun 23 Workshop and Tutorial Proposals Jul 7 Submission of Conference papers Aug 31 Acceptance notification Oct 7 Email Submission of Workshop Papers Oct 8 Workshop Acceptances sent Oct 24 Email Submission of SIGNLL Group Descriptions Nov 1 Final camera ready copy due Nov 8 Earlybird/author registration deadline Nov 8 Mailing of registration package Nov 30 1998 Blue Mountains - ANLPF Tutorials Jan 11-14 Sydney - NeMLaP Main Conference Jan 15-17 Melbourne - Australian NL Postgraduate Workshop Jan 19-20 Adelaide - CoNLL Main Conference Jan 22-24 CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST - questionnaire Having developed such an ambitious and elaborate program, it would be helpful to have an better idea of how many registrants to expect, and to which parts of the program, and we therefore hereby call for expressions of interest, and ask for the return of an email questionnaire. In appreciation of their taking the time to respond, those that return their expressions of interest by June 23 will receive a special discount on registration. The questionnaire includes anticipated pricing and is available from our web site or by emailing the anlpf address below. Addresses for submissions/proposals/enquiries anlpf@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Expressions of Interest (questionnaire/questions) anlpt@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Tutorial Proposals anlpw@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Workshop Proposals and ANLPW Submissions nemlap@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Submissions to NeMLaP conll@ai.ist.flinders.edu.au - Submission to CoNLL (papers/abstract/group) NeMLaP - NEW METHODS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING The NeMLaP3 conference on New Methods in Natural Language Processing will be held in Sydney from Sunday January 11th to Saturday January 17th and will cover all kinds of new techniques or novel approaches in the area of Natural Language Processing. The main conference (Thu 15 to Sat 17) will be preceded by the joint ANLPF Tutorial Program in the nearby Blue Mountains (Sun 11 to Wed 14), which will cover all kinds of techniques and methodologies which can profitably be applied to language. NeMLaP3 will be the third in a series of conferences focusing on theories and methodologies that provide alternatives to the mainstream techniques of symbolic computational linguistics. This series of international conferences provides a forum for researchers in the broad area of new methods in NLP, i.e., symbolic and non-symbolic techniques and analogy-based, statistical and connectionist processing, to present their most recent research and to discuss its implications. Papers should present heretofore unpublished research addressing any topic involving the exploration of new techniques for NLP. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following: Example- and Memory-based MT Corpus-based NLP Bootstrapping techniques Analogy-based NLP Connectionist NLP Statistical MT/NLP Theoretical issues of sub-symbolic vs. symbolic NLP Hybrid approaches NeMLaP Invited Speakers are: Walter Daelemans, Tilburg University Christer Samuelsson, Bell Laboratories CoNLL - COMPUTATIONAL NATURAL LANGUAGE LEARNING SIGNLL, the ACL's Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning, will be holding the CoNLL98 conference on Computational Natural Language Learning in Adelaide at the end of the second week, from Thursday 22nd January till Saturday 24th January. The field of natural language learning (NLL) is not a new one; research in it has been pursued for more than forty years under various guises including Machine Learning of Natural Language, Grammatical Inference, and Psycholinguistic Modelling. The last seven years, however, have seen a growth in interest and, correspondingly, in meetings addressing this topic. CoNLL provides continuity and a unified focus for an area which is starting to become a coherent field in its own right. This will be the second event bearing the name CoNLL. Papers are sought on both applied and theoretical topics, and are not limited to any particular area, level or application of language or language technology. Papers should present heretofore unpublished research addressing any topic on the application of machine-learning methods to natural language or the computer implementation of linguistic or psycholinguistic models of language acquisition. Such topics may occur in (but are not restricted to): acquisition of grammar/syntax acquisition of phonology and/or morphology acquisition of pragmatics and discourse structure acquisition of semantic and ontological relations computational models of language acquisition computational models in cognitive linguistics computational models of universal grammar computational models in psycholinguistics computational models in neurolinguistics computational models of ontogenesis of speech and language comparative evaluation of different learning techniques theoretical models in formal lingusitics and learning theory statistical and information-theoretic classification learning speech recognition/synthesis systems learning machine translation systems learning auditory scene analysis adaptive and optimizing NLP systems computational lexicon acquisition connectionist language learning linguistic knowledge discovery automatic tagging ANLPF TUTORIAL PROGRAM The tutorial program from Sunday 11th January to Wednesday 14th January will emphasize basic and advanced methods which have been usefully applied in NLP and will include the following invited tutorials. Walter Daelemans, Introduction to Memory-based Learning Tilburg University and its application to Lexical Acquisition Christer Samuelsson, Introduction to Statistical Methods Bell Laboratories in Natural Language Processing David Dowe, Introduction to Snob, MML and Mixture Modelling Monash University Dominique Estival Introduction to Grammatical Formalisms Melbourne University for Natural Language Processing Robert Dale Introduction to Natural Language Generation Macquarie University & Microsoft Research Inst ANLPW - AUSTRALIAN NATURAL LANGUAGE POSTGRADUATE WORKSHOP + other workshops ANLPW will be the third Australian NLP Summer Workshop, traditionally held as part of the Australasian Computer Science Week. This workshop is intended to provide an opportunity for Australian PhD/Masters/Honours students to present their research and interact with each other, but papers from international students are also most welcome. The Australian NL Postgraduate Workshop will be held at Melbourne University on Monday 19th and Tuesday 20th January. Proposals for other workshops to be held during ANLPF are also invited, and should be sent to the ANLPW address above. The standard ANLPF submission format, length and instructions apply to papers submitted to workshops, but note that later deadlines apply to workshop submissions. SUBMISSION SPECIFICATIONS common to all ANLPF events Submissions are requested in PostScript in a format which is similar to ACL proceedings (final published form). Instructions, model papers and templates for various text processing systems are all available from our web pages. Hardcopy submission is possible, but an earlier deadline applies and submission must be in triplicate - the physical addresses for submission can be found in the web pages. Authors may request that their papers be considered for multiple events, but should direct their submissions to their preferred event (program committee) alone. Do not send the same paper to multiple addresses. Full Length Papers No more than 10 pages in the submission format, including figures and references. One page in this format is about 700-800 words. Versions without author information may be submitted for blind refereeing, but authors are requested to comply with the full instructions in the web pages. CoNLL Short Abstracts Up to 2 pages in the submission format, including figures and references. One page in this format is about 700-800 words. Approximately 15%-30% of the CoNLL speaking slots will be awarded to short abstracts, depending on the number and quality submitted. Each accepted short abstract will be alotted two pages in the conference proceedings. Abstracts will be processed according to the same schedule as full length papers. SIGNLL Meeting - Group Descriptions As is customary with SIGNLL sponsored events, a SIGNLL Meeting will be held at CoNLL which will give opportunity for members hear about SIGNLL plans and also to find out about other members and their groups' research. SIGNLL members may submit 1-2 page abstracts in the submission format describing their research group and its projects. One abstract per group will be included in the proceedings. 5 minute slots at the SIGNLL Meeting will be allocated to selected groups. There is a separate late deadline for group abstracts. NeMLaP PROGRAM COMMITTEE Claire Cardie, Cornell Uni, USA Walter Daelemans, Tilburg Uni, NL Robert Dale, Macquarie Uni Mark Ellison, Edinburgh Uni, UK Dominque Estival, Melbourne Uni, Australia Junichi Tsujii, Tokyo Uni, Japan Chris Manning, Sydney Uni, Australia Kemal Oflazer, Bilkent Uni, Turkey David Powers, Flinders Uni, Australia Christer Samuelsson, Bell Labs, USA Harold Somers, UMIST, UK Atro Voutilainen, Helsinki Uni, Finland Peter Wallis, DSTO, Australia Dekai Wu, HKUST, Hong Kong David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins Uni, USA Ingrid Zukerman, Monash Uni, Australia CoNLL PROGRAM COMMITTEE The SIGNLL Officers and International Advisory Committee (http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/~antal/signll/signll-home.html) in collaboration with the NeMLaP Program Committee. Coordinated refereeing will be performed for the two main conferences and approved workshops. ANLPF ORGANIZING COMMITTEE David Powers, Flinders Uni Sandra Williams, Macquarie Uni/Microsoft Research Inst Chris Manning, Sydney Uni Dominique Estival, Melbourne Uni Robert Dale, Macquarie Uni/Microsoft Research Inst Peter Wallis, Defence Sci+Tech Org