Call for Papers - PRICAI 96 NLP Workshop

Call for Papers

Workshop on
Future Issues for Multilingual Text Processing

4th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Cairns, Australia, 27 August 1996

This workshop has two primary goals. First, it aims to foster communication between the various individuals and research groups who have been working in the field of Natural Language Processing in the Pacific Rim area; and second, it aims to promote discussion of key issues for this community as a whole. Our aim is to take advantage of the particularly rich linguistic environment in this geographical area, in combination with a workshop atmosphere to promote discussion of future issues and requirements for multilingual research and applications in NLP.

We would like to receive papers of two kinds. Technical papers on all aspects of multilingual text processing are welcome, including but not limited to papers on the following topics:

• the typological variety of the languages to be treated
• the impact of differences in the writing systems used
• the scope for mixed language systems
• Machine Translation (MT) and tools for Machine Aided Translation (MAT)
• multilingual text generation
• multilingual natural language analysis
• the creation and use of mono-lingual and multi-lingual dictionaries and corpora.

However, we also particularly welcome papers of a more speculative nature than would normally be presented in the technical sessions of a conference: we want to encourage authors to take a step back from their current research and ask themselves---and others---about the advantages and pitfalls of extending what they currently do so that they can deal with multilinguality in the future. What does multilinguality mean for your research? What imperatives does it create for the field as a whole? What goals should we set ourselves with respect to multilinguality in language processing? We want papers that are likely to interest and excite the audience and provoke intense discussion.

Organization

The format envisaged is that of a one-day workshop, with presentations organized in clusters determined on the basis of submissions received. The workshop will be kept small, with no more than 40 participants. We intend the schedule to contain discussion periods long enough to allow real exchange of ideas. We hope to foster the workshop atmosphere by having the written versions of the accepted presentations circulated a few weeks in advance of the event, thus enabling the presenters to relate their work as much as possible to that of the others and also allowing non-presenting participants to prepare questions for discussion.

Submission Format

Authors should submit a two page abstract of their intended presentation to the address below. This abstract should make very clear what the contribution of the work is to the field. No constraints are imposed on formatting at this stage, although some regularity will be imposed later for producing the proceedings. Abstracts will be reviewed by the members of the organising committee. Submissions (preferably ASCII, via e-mail) should be sent before 26 April 1996 to:

Dr Dominique Estival
Department of Linguistics
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria 3052
Australia
tel: +61-3-9344-4227
fax: +61-3-9349-4326
e-mail: D.Estival@linguistics.unimelb.edu.au

Schedule

1 March 1996 Call for papers issued
26 April 1996 Two-page abstracts due
31 May 1996 Notification of acceptance or rejection
10 July 1996 Final camera ready versions of papers due
19 July 1996 Deadline for registration
27 August 1996 The workshop

Note that it is a condition imposed by the PRICAI conference organisers that only people who register for the main conference will be allowed to register for this workshop. There will be a workshop registration fee of A$60, if paid by the registration deadline of 19th July; after this date, the late registration fee is $100.

Organizing committee

Dr Robert Dale, Microsoft Research Institute, Sydney, Australia
Dr Dominique Estival, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Dr Christian Matthiessen, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Dr Fred Popowich, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver BC, Canada
Professor Junichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan