Subject: ISCApad #27 Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:07:53 +0100 From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ISCApad number 27 August 14th, 2000 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, This month's ISCApad includes announcements of future workshops and conferences, a report from an ICASSP attendee, two job descriptions, and a request for information on Central Auditory Processing Disorder: - Future events: - HyLo 2000 Workshop on Hybrid Logics (Bringing Them All Together) Birmingham, Great Britain, August 14-18, 2000 http://hylo2000.hylo.net - 1st SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue Including Theme Session On: Principles For Dialogue System Evaluation (In conjunction with ACL-2000) Hong Kong, October 7-8, 2000 http://www.sigdial.org/sigdialworkshop/ - COCOSDA Workshop 2000 (see extended announcement below) Beijing, China, Oct 21, 2000 - CELE-Twente Workshops on Natural Language Technology "Learning to Behave" Workshop series on (Human-)Agent Interaction and Agent Learning Oct 18-20, 2000 "Interacting Agents" (Enschede, The Netherlands) Nov 22-24, 2000 "Internalising Knowledge" (Ieper, Belgium) - Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications (see below) AAAI Fall Symposium 2000 Menlo Park, USA, November 3-5, 2000 - MIR 2000 - International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval Los Angeles, USA, November 4, 2000 http://www.nii.ac.jp/mir2000/ - GFS 2000 Multimodalità e Multimedialità nella Comunicazione XI Giornate di Studio del Gruppo di Fonetica Sperimentale Universita' di Padova - Palazzo del Bo' - Aula NIEVO 29 Nov. - 1 Dec. 2000 http://nts.csrf.pd.cnr.it/gfs2000/ - IWCS-4 (see extended announcement below) Fourth International Workshop on COMPUTATIONAL SEMANTICS Tilburg, The Netherlands, January 10-12, 2001 http://cwis.kub.nl/~fdl/research/ti/Docs/IWCS/iwcs.htm - NAACL-2001 (see extended announcement below) Language Technologies 2001: 2nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the ACL Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 2-7, 2001 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/naacl2001.html - ORAGE 2001 ORAlity and GEstuality Aix-en-Provence, France, June 18 - 22, 2001 Deadline for the submission of abstracts: September 15, 2000 http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~gevoix/ORAGE2001 - Participation report from an ISCA granted participant (Febe de Wet) at ICASSP 2000, June 6-9 2000, Istanbul, Turkey Available on the ISCA webpage for grants - Job offers: (see below) - Temporary Lecturer in Speech Processing at Cambridge Univ. - Research and Teaching Assistant positions at Graz Univ. of Technology - Request for info on: Central Auditory Processing Disorder or auditory processing Please Reply-To: Cchomin@aol.com ISCA greetings, Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================ COCOSDA Workshop 2000 Oct 21, Sat, Beijing, China Call for Participation/Presentations (Apologies if you receive multiple copies) COCOSDA is an international organization for coordinating the globalized efforts in language resources and speech technology evaluation. The annual workshops of COCOSDA have been held as satellite events of ICSLP on even years and Eurospeech on odd years. This year the workshop will be on Oct 21, Sat, right after ICSLP 2000 at Beijing. COCOSDA is organized with a structure which reflects the two dimensions of its functionalities: "Topic Domains" and "Regional Programs". The former considers the dynamic technology environments, while the latter addresses the regional differences and activities. Four topic domains have been established: Evaluation of Speech Understanding/Dialogue Systems, Multi-Modal Corpora, Corpus Annotation Tools and Local Languages. Six regional programs are currently present: North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Latin America and Africa. The COCOSDA Workshop 2000 will be organized to address all issues relevant to COCOSDA. You are invited to participate and submit proposals for presentations at the workshop. The preliminary program draft of the workshop is given below. It includes pre-organized reports for all the topic domains and regional programs mentioned above and other relevant reports/discussions, but also reserves time for presentations from the open-call submissions. This initial program draft will be re-organized after the submissions are received and reviewed. For example, if there are more good presentations submitted from the open-call, the pre-organized reports may be condensed. A "Workshop Notes" will be published including written materials for the reports/presentations. The proposals for presentation including a title, a summary of 200-500 words, names of speaker/authors, affiliation and contact, should be sent electronically to: Lin-shan Lee, Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Convenor, COCOSDA lsl@iis.sinica.edu.tw on or before Aug 31 2000, indicated as a "COCOSDA submission". The proposals will be reviewed and the final Workshop program distributed by Sept 15. COCOSDA Workshop 2000 Oct 21, Sat, Beijing, China Preliminary Program Draft (Subject to Modifications) 9:00-9:10 Opening Advisors of COCOSDA 9:10-9:20 Recent Development of COCOSDA ---- A Progress Report Lin-shan Lee 9:20-10:00 Topic Domain Reports 1. Overview on Recent Activities in Speech Understanding and Dialogue Systems Evaluation (20 min) Wolfgang Minker 2. Overview on Recent Activities in Multi-Modal Corpora (20 min) Satoshi Nakamura 10:00-10:40 Regional Reports 1. Overview of Current Activities in Latin America (20 min) Elsa Mora 2. Language Resources and Technology Developments in Africa (20 min) Justus Roux 10:40-11:00 Coffee Break 11:00-12:30 Presentations from Open-call Submissions 12:30-2:00 Lunch 2:00-2:40 Topic Domain Reports 3. Overview on Recent Activities in Corpus Annotation Tools (20 min) Steven Bird 4. Overview on Recent Activities in Local Languages (20 min) Dafydd Gibbon 2:40-3:40 Regional Reports 3. Survey of Current Activities in Oceania (20 min) Bruce Millar 4. Overview of Recent Activities in Europe (20 min) Joseph Mariani 5. Overview of Recent Activities in Asia (20 min) Shuichi Itahashi 3:40-4:00 Break 4:00-4:20 Report of ELSNET/ACL Workshop on Infrastructures for Global Collaboration Julia Hirschberg 4:20-5:00 General Discussions - Ways Ahead All ============================================================================ Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications Registration Announcement AAAI Fall Symposium 2000 November 3-5, 2000 Endorsed by SIGDIAL, the Special Interest Group on Dialogue of the Association for Computational Linguistics OVERVIEW The goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers working on all aspects of building computational models of effective tutorial dialogues for any level of education, or for corporate/military training. Aspects of central concern include dynamic curriculum and conversational planning, user modeling (often called student modeling in this domain), mixed-initiative dialogue management, text planning and generation, discourse-level language understanding, and robust sentence-level understanding. The overall focus of this symposium will be the question of how to build dialogue based ITSs. We received a wide range of high quality papers that will be distributed to all workshop participants in the Working Notes. The list of accepted papers is now available on-line. In order to encourage group interaction we are organizing the entire workshop around panel discussions, demo sessions, and poster sessions. A preliminary schedule is included below. We are also encouraging all participants to bring a poster describing their work. In order to ensure that we can provide an adequate number of poster boards and easles, we are suggesting that interested participants email either Carolyn Rose (rosecp@pitt.edu) or Reva Freedman (freedrk@pitt.edu) to indicate their plans with respect to bringing a poster. PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE Friday, November 3 9:00 am - 10:30 am Session 1: Why is natural language important in ITSs? 10:30 am - 11:00 am Break 11:00 am - 12:30 pm Session 2: Tutorial dialogue analysis 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm Session 3: Natural language understanding 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm Break 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Session 4: Demos I 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm Reception Saturday, November 4 9:00 am - 10:30 am Session 5: Architectures I 10:30 am - 11:00 am Break 11:00 am - 12:30 pm Session 6: Architectures II 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm Session 7: Poster session 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm Break 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Session 8: Demos II 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm Plenary Session Sunday, November 5 9:00 am - 10:30 am Session 9: Natural language generation 10:30 am - 11:00 am Break 11:00 am - 12:30 pm Session 10: Where do we go from here? LOCATION The symposium will be held at the Sea Crest Oceanfront Resort and Conference Center in North Falmouth, MA (Cape Cod), highly regarded by participants at the 1999 Fall Symposia. Sea Crest is approximately two hours from the Boston and Providence airports. Excellent bus transportation is available from the Boston airport via Bonanza Bus (508-548-7588). REGISTRATION INFORMATION Registration is on a fisrt come, first served basis. To register, please fill out the registration form (available on the Web at http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fssregform.pdf)., and send it along with payment to: 2000 Fall Symposium Series AAAI 445 Burgess Drive Menlo Park, CA 94025 Telephone: (650) 328-3123* Fax: (650) 321-4457* Email: fss@aaai.org* To register oneline for one of the above symposia, please complete the online registration form available at http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fssregform.html. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION Please send email to either of the co-chairs, Carolyn Rose (rosecp@pitt.edu) or Reva Freedman (freedrk+@pitt.edu) or see the symposium website at http://www.pitt.edu/~itsdial/its-symp.html. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE * Carolyn Penstein Rose (Co-chair), University of Pittsburgh * Reva Freedman (Co-chair), University of Pittsburgh * Vincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University * Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware * Michael Glass, Illinois Institute of Technology * Art Graesser, University of Memphis * Nancy Green, University of North Carolina/Greensboro * Pamela W. Jordan, University of Pittsburgh * James Lester, North Carolina State University * Susan McRoy, University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee * Ronnie Smith, East Carolina University * Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University ============================================================================ Fourth International Workshop on COMPUTATIONAL SEMANTICS (IWCS-4) January 10-12, 2001, Tilburg, The Netherlands Sponsored by SIGSEM, the ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS The Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence Unit at Tilburg University will host the Fourth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-4), that will take place from 10-12 January 2001. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in any aspects of the computation of meaning in natural language or in language-based multimedia objects. TOPICS OF INTEREST Topics of interest for the workshop will be computational aspects of formal semantic theories as well as theoretical issues in building natural language understanding systems, including systens where language is used in a multimedia setting. Papers are invited in areas which include, but are not limited to, the following specific topics: * working with underspecified representations of meaning * modelling and using context for interpretation * the relations between semantics and pragmatics * dynamic interpretation in text and dialogue * interpretation and games * computational lexical semantics * interpretation and inference * meaning in multimedia objects * interpretation and optimality * speech acts and interpretation * incrementality and monotonicity in interpretation * knowledge representation and reasoning in meaning computation SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS Authors are asked to submit an original paper of maximally 5000 words by September 15, 2000, by email in Postscript form. All submitted papers that are received in time will be refereed by the programme committee and may be accepted for full presentation at the workshop and publication in the proceedings, or for a short/poster presentation and publication of a 2-page abstract. We also aim at publishing a selection of accepted papers in book form. Accepted papers should be submitted in final form in LaTeX; guidelines for the preparation of manuscripts will soon be available at the IWCS web pages: http://pi0239.kub.nl/~sigsem/iwcs4.html For initial submission email a Postscript version of the paper to: Computational.Semantics@kub.nl by September 15, 2000. ORGANISING COMMITTEE Harry Bunt Reinhard Muskens Huub Prust Ielka van der Sluis Elias Thijsse IMPORTANT DATES 15 September 2000 Submission of papers 15 October 2000 Notification of acceptance 15 November 2000 Final papers due 10-12 January 2001 Workshop FURTHER INFORMATION Conference Secretariat: Anne Adriaensen Department of Linguistics Tilburg University PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg The Netherlands Email: Computational.Semantics@kub.nl Phone: +31-13 466 30 60 Fax: +31-13 466 31 10 WWW: http://cwis.kub.nl/~fdl/research/ti/Docs/IWCS/iwcs.htm ============================================================================ PRELIMINARY NAACL-2001 ANNOUNCEMENT Language Technologies 2001: 2nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics June 2-7, 2001 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ===== ORGANIZATION General Conference Chair: Lori Levin (Carnegie Mellon University) Program Chair: Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute) Local Arrangements Chair: Alon Lavie (Carnegie Mellon University) ===== CO-LOCATED EVENT EMNLP-2001: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing ===== IMPORTANT DEADLINES Electronic submission notification deadline: Nov 6, 2000 Hardcopy paper submission deadline: Nov 9, 2000 ===== CONFERENCE SCHEDULE Tutorials: Jun 2, 2001 Workshops (including Student Research Workshop):Jun 3-4, 2001 Co-located conference (EMNLP-2001): Jun 3-4, 2001 Main conference: Jun 5-7, 2001 ===== FURTHER INFORMATION NAACL-2001: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/naacl2001.html Student Research Workshop: http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~aclstu/naacl01-student/ EMNLP-2001: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~yarowsky/emnlp-2001.html NAACL: http://www.aclweb.org/naacl ============================================================================ University of Cambridge Department of Engineering Temporary Lecturer/Assistant Lecturer in Speech Processing Applications are invited for the post of Temporary Lecturer or Assistant Lecturer in the area of Speech Processing. The person appointed will join the Speech, Vision and Robotics (SVR) Group and their main duty will be to assist with the teaching of the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language. They will also be expected to pursue research and supervise graduate level project work. The successful candidate will have a higher degree or equivalent experience in a relevant area. The SVR Group has an international reputation in the speech area. It has excellent facilities including extensive computing support, and all of the major speech databases needed for experimental work. This is therefore an excellent opportunity to gain experience in both research and teaching within one of the world's leading research groups. The pensionable salary scale (under review) for Lecturers is 20811 to 32095 UKL per annum and for Assistant Lecturers is 17238 to 22579 UKL per annum. Appointment will be from 1 October 2000 for 1 year initially, renewable for a further two years. Further particulars and an application form can be obtained from the Secretary of the Faculty Board of Engineering, Department of Engineering, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ, Tel 01223 332615, Fax 01223 766364, Email: fb-office@eng.cam.ac.uk. Alternatively, contact Professor Steve Young directly by email sjy@eng.cam.ac.uk or phone 01223 332752. The University follows an equal opportunies policy. ============================================================================ 2 RESEARCH AND TEACHING ASSISTANT Positions NONLINEAR SIGNAL PROCESSING AND SPEECH COMMUNICATION [Attn: short deadline - applications due August 23, 2000] Graz University of Technology (www.tu-graz.ac.at) has established a new Nonlinear Signal Processing Laboratory led by Prof. Gernot Kubin. Research and teaching activities will focus on: * Theory and algorithms for Nonlinear Signal Processing: nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, and information theory, adaptive systems and neural networks. * Applications in Signal Processing for the Internet: speech communication (recognition and coding), broadband access (xDSL, mobile), network signal processing (voice over IP). The diversity of topics calls for a high degree of interaction across disciplines and with industrial research partners. The group has two immediate openings for research and teaching assistants ("Universitaetsassistent"). A strong background in signal processing as well as an excellent first degree in EE/CS (equivalent to the 5-year Diploma of Engineering/Dipl.-Ing. curriculum) are required. Successful candidates are expected to work towards a Doctor of Engineering degree (often in cooperation with international partners), supervise student projects, and to develop and teach laboratory and problems classes. Fluency in English or German is a must. Entry-level gross yearly salaries are on the order of EUR 26,000 with a teaching bonus of approx. EUR 4,200 starting from the second year. Contracts may be extended up to 4 years. The laboratory is housed in the award-winning architecture of Riegler & Riewe (www.aaf.or.at/aaf/steiermark/landesarchitekturpreis/ 1998/rieglerriewe.html). Contemporary art and culture are strong in Graz (www.graztourism.at) which is the second largest city of Austria located in the south-eastern province of Styria at the cross-roads of major contintental-European cultures. It enjoys a vibrant student life with three universities and excellent leisure time opportunities in the larger Alps-Adriatic region. UNESCO has included the historic centre of Graz in its World Heritage List and Graz will be the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2003. Applications with a detailed CV must be sent to the Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering O.Univ.-Prof.Dipl.-Ing.Dr. Manfred Rentmeister Kopernikusgasse 24 A-8010 Graz, Austria no later than August 23, 2000. Graz University of Technology is an equal opportunity employer. For further information, please contact Prof. Gernot Kubin at +43-699-10721996, g.kubin@ieee.org. ============================================================================ All additional information at the ISCA web-site: http://www.isca-speech.org The ISCA secretariat can be contacted at: info@isca-speech.org Requests concerning membership, Speech Communication and ordering Proceedings should be forwarded to the Secretariat. For message distribution at ISCA list contact: public@isca-speech.org Short messages will be forwarded on a monthly scheme basis to all ISCA members. =============================================================================