CALL FOR PAPERS Workshop on Applied Interlinguas: Practical Applications of Interlingual Approaches to NLP (pre-conference workshop in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000) Sunday, April 30, 2000 Seattle, Washington, USA The organizing committee wishes to invite submissions to the Workshop on the Practical Applications of Interlingual Approaches to NLP which will be held on Sunday, April 30, 2000, in conjunction with the ANLP-NAACL2000. Interlingual approaches to NLP have been developed within the field of Machine Translation. The central goal is to analyze natural language expressions in terms of a representation language that will capture those aspects of a communication which permit the generation of an equivalent expression in some other language (that is, a representation of the communicative intent of the utterance). An interlingual representation of some utterance should ideally represent what was said by whom and to whom and relevant information about where, when, why and how it was said. The representations are usually very rich and extremely knowledge intensive. Many aspects of such representation systems are unknown or underdeveloped. Often, though not invariably, the lexicon of an IL representation will be drawn from the names of nodes in an Ontology, representing classes, events, or concepts. The syntax of the IL prescribes how these nodes are combined into an utterance representation. An IL-based approach to Machine Translation then specifies how a source language sentence can be analyzed into an IL representation and how this representation can then generate a natural language output. This workshop will focus on these latter two aspects of the IL approach: the syntax of the IL and the techniques used to analyze and generate natural language. The uses of an Ontology outside of Knowledge-based Machine Translated is a related, but slightly different subject. To date, such approaches have been essentially theoretical (although a number of limited applications exist). One of the criticisms of such approaches is that they are impractical -- requiring too much hand-coding or too deep a knowledge-representation to be useful. However, several examples of IL specifications are available. For example, there is the Text Meaning Representation of the Mikrokosmos Knowledge-based Machine Translation system at the Computing Research Laboratory (http://crl.nmsu.edu/Research/Projects/mikro/index.html). the IL used in ISI's GAZELLE MT project (http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/interlingua.html) IL representations of a Spanish text produced by the KANT system at the Language Technologies Institute (http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/IRW/) (http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Research/Kant) IL representation developed for a speech-to-speech system dealing with travel planning by the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR) (http://www.c-star.org) Interlingual approaches offer powerful semantics-based and pragmatics-based solutions to any number of NLP problems (disambiguation, reference resolution, interpretation of figurative speech to name a few). This workshop will focus on methods for making interlingual approaches tractable within specific, well-defined tasks not only for machine translation but for a range of NLP applications. The goal of the workshop is to stimulate interest in more cognitive research in NLP while focusing such work on near term, practical applications. Papers are invited on: - methods for developing (or extending) underlying knowledge sources, - techniques for processing in the face of knowledge-poor sources or gaps in knowledge sources, - interlingual approaches to particular NLP tasks (reference resolution, disambiguation, interpretation of ellipsis, etc.), - interlingual approaches to different NLP applications (MT--including speech-to-speech translation, Information Extraction, Summarization, NL generation, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, etc.). Since there is limited work on the application of IL approaches to NLP currently, concept design papers are encouraged. Preference will be given to actual research projects focusing on actual processing problems and exploiting extant sources, but any contribution should clearly focus on one of the topics above. The workshop will consist of 6 30-minute presentations, each followed by a half-hour discussion, beginning with two informal 6-minute critical responses from reviewers followed by a short rebuttal by the author and open discussion. Ideally, the critical responses will also be available by the March 1 acceptance date, but in no case later than March 31. All critiques and rebuttals received by March 13 will be included in the proceedings. The remainder will be made available at the workshop itself. The Journal of Machine Translation will consider the results of the workshop for publication in a special issue in 2001. In addition, the contributions will be published as an NAACL workshop proceedings. The program committee (and initial discussants) includes: Bonnie Dorr UMIACS-UMd David Farwell CRL-NMSU Stephen Helmreich CRL-NMSU Eduard Hovy ISI-USC Kevin Knight ISI-USC Lori Levin LTI-CMU Teruko Mitamura LTI-CMU Keith Miller MITRE Sergei Nirenburg CRL-NMSU Mari Olsen Microsoft Boyan Onyshkeyvch DOD Florence Reeder MITRE Harry Somers UMIST Yorick Wilks USheffield The workshop is sponsored in part by the Special Interest Group on Interlinguas of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. For further information about this series of workshops see: http://crl.nmsu.edu/Events/FWOI/index.html. Dates Submission of papers: February 4, 2000 Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2000 Submission of Final Copies: March 13, 2000 Critiques of Accepted Papers: March 31, 2000 Author's Rebuttals: April 21, 2000 Workshop: April 30, 2000 The dates related to the preparation of a special issue of the Journal of Machine Translation will be made public at the workshop. Paper Requirements Submissions must use the ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style (both available from the ANLP-NAACL2000 Conference web page -- http://www.gte.com/AboutGTE/gto/anlp-naacl2000/). Paper submissions should consist of a full paper (5000 words or less, including references). Please send papers and submission questions to shelmrei@crl.nmsu.edu. Cost There will be a registration fee of $50.00 per person. A banquet for the participants and guests will be organized separately for Sunday evening.