CALL FOR PAPERS (Deadline Extended: Oct 31, 2003)
 
"Recent Advances in Statistical Language Modeling - Beyond N-grams"
Special issue of ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information
Processing 
(TALIP) 
 
Guest Editors: 
Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China
Chin-Yew Lin, ISI, University of Southern California, USA
 
Website:
http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/TALIP
 
Theme:
Statistical language modeling (SLM) aims to estimate probability 
distribution of various linguistic units, such as words, sentences, 
and documents, for the purpose of many natural language applications. 
Over the last two decades, many attempts have been made to improve 
the state of the art. In this issue, we solicit papers showing recent 
advances of SLM in both theory and applications.
 
Theory:
It is ironical that the most popular language model (n-grams) uses very 
little language knowledge. In recent years, many attempts have been made

that try to "put language back into language model". But little
improvement 
has been achieved so far in realistic applications due to two major 
obstacles: (1) the number of parameters of the knowledge-based models is

usually too large to estimate; (2) the construction and use of these
models 
requires a large annotated training corpus and a decoder that assigns 
linguistic structure, which are not always available. We are seeking
ideas 
that enhance our understanding of these core problems in SLM. We
encourage 
submissions that describe principles, concepts or models on which work
in 
SLM could be based. 
 
Application:
SLM has been successfully applied in many applications such as speech 
recognition, Asian language input, information retrieval, and machine 
translation. We welcome submissions that demonstrate significant
improvement 
in performance using knowledge-based models, present novel applications
of 
SLM in new areas such as paraphrasing, question answering, and text 
summarization, or how SLM techniques are used in novel ways to improve
the 
system's performance.
 
Areas of interest include, but are not limit to:
 
-    Theory of statistical language modeling (SLM), including
o        Formal models (N-gram model, HMM, maximal entropy model,
structural 
         language model, word/class model, grammar model, etc.)
o        Parameter estimation (model smoothing/combination/adaptation)
o        Evaluation
o        Resource (tagged training data) for SLM
 
-    Applications of SLM, including the application of SLM in the areas
of
o        Paraphrasing
o        Question answering
o        Text summarization
o        Speech recognition
o        Asian language input
o        Information retrieval
o        Named entity recognition
o        Text generation
o        Machine translation
 
-    Other statistical natural language processing methods beyond the 
scope of SLM, e.g. statistical parsing, machine learning for NLP etc.
 
The tentative plan is to publish this special issue as volume 3, issue
1, 
January 2004.
 
Instructions for Submission
 
Papers should follow the style guidelines for the ACM Transactions on
Asian 
Language Information Processing
(http://www.cintec.cuhk.edu.hk/~talip/web/). 
Papers should be sent to the guest editors, by the submission date
listed below. 
The submission should be either:
 
-     Electronically to jfgao@microsoft.com. The "Subject:" line should
be: 
TALIP Special Issue Submission.
The following formats are acceptable:
 
             - Postscript
             - Adobe PDF
 
If you cannot produce an electronic version in either of these formats,
or if 
the editor informs you of a problem with your electronic submission,
then please 
follow the instructions for hardcopy submission.
 
-    Or, Three hardcopies to:
 
      Jianfeng Gao
      Microsoft Research Asia
      5F, Beijing Sigma Center 
      No. 49, Zhichun Road, Haidian District
      Beijing, 100080, P.R.C
 
      or 
 
      Chin-Yew Lin
      USC/Information Sciences Institute
      4676 Admiralty Way
      Marina del Rey, CA 90292
      USA
 
 
Important Dates
Call for Papers: April 1, 2003  
Submission of Papers: October 31, 2003 (extended!)
Notification of Acceptance: January 15, 2004
Final Version Due: March 15, 2004
Special Issue Date: June, 2004