Call for Participation
The IMPACTS workshop aims at studying, discussing, and clarifying the
relationships between NLG technologies and applications. The workshop
addresses
- researchers and developers in NLG,
- current and potential users of NLG applications,
- the reusability of modules within NLG systems,
- the interplay between statistical and rule-based NLG,
- the relation between summarization and NLG,
- the use of corpora and the evaluation of NLG systems.
IMPACTS will be an ideal opportunity to discuss current issues and
future prospects in Natural Language Generation with prominent
researchers in the field, in the stimulating environment of Schloss
Dagstuhl.
The Workshop
The workshop will consist of three types of sessions: presentation of
submitted papers, an invited talk and several "burning issues" sessions.
In order to implement our concept of a discussion-intensive event, we
have invited four "burning issues" presentations taking up the main
topic of the workshop. They will initiate interesting discussions, possibly
within smaller groups, and last two hours up to half
a day. A panel session will sum up all discussions.
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Sessions will be chaired by Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Research),
Eduard Hovy, Daniel Marcu (both ISI, Univ. of California, Los Angeles)
and Chris Mellish (Univ. of
Edinburgh, UK); more details can be found
here. The
invited talk will be given by David McDonald (Brandeis University, USA).
Accomodation and Registration
Please register soon; as Schloss Dagstuhl has limited capacity,
registration will be on a first come, first serve basis.
All participants will stay at Schloss Dagstuhl. Cost is DM 450
(approx. US$ 210) per person, including full board, in single rooms
with a shower. Please register directly with the organizers using the
registration form
The early registration fee (before July 1, 2000) is DM 170 (approx. US$
80) and includes a copy of the proceedings. Late registration will cost
DM 220 (approx US$ 100).
Dates and Travel
IMPACTS will take place from July 26-28, 2000 at the International Conference
and Research Center for Computer Science at Schloss Dagstuhl (find out how to get there). Arrival is on Tuesday,
July 25. The workshop will take until Friday, July 28, after lunch.
IMPACTS immediately precedes the events of COLING 2000 taking place in Luxembourg,
Saarbrücken, and Nancy. Schloss Dagstuhl is situated in the Saarland, allowing
participants to reach the COLING tutorials on July 29 conveniently.
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Workshop Registration and Reservation Form
Please use the registration form and either
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Program
The program.
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Here is more about Burning Issues and their Chairs.
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Call for Papers
The tension between theoretical work and its implementation has often been
considered fruitful. In the field of Natural Language Generation, it is
now complemented by another tension, the one between technologies and applications:
"I have invented a new technique for NLG!" - "What is its impact
on applications?"
"I have built a new NLG application!" - "What is its impact on the
technology?"
Much of NLG technology is based on a theoretical understanding of the
process of language generation, whereas the applications strongly
rely on practical requirements. There are not many theoretically well-motivated
technologies that can straightforwardly be employed within specific applications.
For this workshop, we adopt a broad notion of application by including
pieces of software containing NLG technology that currently are used by
others in order to solve real-world tasks.
Some NLG application developers find it preferable to not reuse existing
technology. This is often due to the lack of solutions for the knowledge
bottleneck and for the input formation bottleneck: NLG technology
lacks the power of dealing with external conceptual lexical knowledge
bases, and it also lacks standards of representing inputs at a suitable
specificity.
The "IMPACTS" workshop aims at studying, discussing, and clarifying
the relationships between NLG technologies and applications. The workshop
addresses
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researchers and developers in NLG,
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current and potential users of NLG applications,
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providers of large conceptual lexicons usable by NLG,
and
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developers of systems that deal with the input specificity problem.
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We invite original and unpublished contributions from all areas of NL generation,
either from the technological side or from the applications point of view.
They must state clearly how they relate to the respective counterpart,
hence addressing one of the above questions. Moreover, we welcome contributions
discussing methods for improving the correspondence between applications,
application types, and technologies, addressing both the above questions.
"IMPACTS" is supported by SIGGEN:
It has been approved as a "SIGGEN NLG Workshop," as defined in SIGGEN's
policy. The proceedings will be published both electronically through
the Computation and Language
Archive and as a conventional paper document carrying an ISBN or an
ISSN.
"IMPACTS" will take place from July 26-28, 2000 at the International
Conference and Research Center for Computer Science at Schloss Dagstuhl.
It immediately precedes the events of COLING
2000 taking place in Luxembourg, Saarbrücken, and Nancy. Schloss
Dagstuhl is situated in the Saarland, allowing participants to reach the
COLING tutorials on July 29 conveniently.
Dates
26.-28. July 2000: Workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl
15. June 2000: Camera-ready copies
20. May 2000: Notification of acceptance
01. April 2000: Deadline for submissions
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Programme Committee
John Bateman, University of
Bremen, Germany
Tilman Becker, DFKI Saarbrücken,
Germany
(Program Co-Chair)
Stephan Busemann, DFKI Saarbrücken,
Germany
(Program Co-Chair)
Robert Dale, Language Technology
Pty Ltd and
Macquarie University, Australia
Laurence Danlos, LORIA, France
Michael Elhadad, Ben-Gurion
University, Israel |
Eduard Hovy, ISI, University
of Southern
California, USA
Richard Kittredge, CoGenTex
Inc., USA
Inderjeet Mani, Mitre Corporation,
USA
David D. McDonald, Gensym
Corporation, USA
Cecile Paris, CSIRO
Mathematical and Information
Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia
Owen Rambow, AT&T,
USA
Ehud Reiter, University
of Aberdeen, UK
Donia Scott, ITRI,
University of Brighton, UK |
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Submission Information
Submissions must be unpublished papers related to the Workshop Theme, as
described in the Call for Papers. Submissions should be in the Springer
LNCS
format and may be up to 10 pages, based on the style files for LaTeX
and MS Word.
Submission Questions
Questions regarding the submission procedure should be sent to impacts@dfki.de.
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Submission Procedure
All submissions must be sent in electronic form: send the PostScript or
MS Word form of your submission (zipped, if large) to: impacts@dfki.de.
The Subject line should contain Conference Submission. Late submissions
will not be accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first
author shortly after receipt. In exceptional cases, an author unable to
comply with the above submission procedure should contact one of the Program
Co-Chairs sufficiently before the submission deadline so alternative arrangements
can be made. |
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Related Links
"May
I Speak Freely?" Between Templates and Free Choice in Natural Language
Generation
First
International NLG Conference
COLING 2000
SIGGEN |
Contact
Tilman Becker, DFKI GmbH
Stephan Busemann, DFKI GmbH |
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