IR-L Digest, Vol.XVI, No.19, Issue 455

[Nancy Gusack Crawford <nancy.gusack@ucop.edu>]

IRLIST Digest                                       ISSN 1064-6965
May 17, 1999
Volume XVI, Number 19
Issue 455

******************************************************************
  I. QUERIES
        1. Bug in Frakes' stemmer?
        2. Ramifications of Embedded Multimedia in E-Journals
        3. Response to [I.2.]
        4. Response to [I.3.]
 II. JOBS
        1. European Media Laboratory: IR Researchers
III. NOTICES
     A. Publications
        1. AIM-J: Special Issue "Knowledge-Based Information
           Management in Intensive Care and Anaesthesia"
        2. JAIR Article: "Learning to Order Things"
        3. [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] EDUCAUSE Washington Update 5-14-99
        4. Knowledge and Information Systems: Vol 1 No 2 (1999)
     B. Meetings
        1. ACM SIGIR99 MIR Workshop
        2. EACL'99 Registration Reminder
        3. LINC-99
        4. ACL'99 & Co-Located Workshop
        5. Network Storage Symposium
        6. SCIE99, 2nd Announcement
IV. PROJECTS
     C. Awards, Fellowships, Grants, & Scholarships
        1. MURI Announcement on Tutorial Dialog/Discourse
******************************************************************
I. QUERIES
I.1.
Fr: Robert McArthur <mcarthur@dstc.edu.au>
Re: Bug in Frakes' stemmer?

Frakes et al. have source code for the Porter stemmer written in C.

I think there's a 'bug' in Frakes' stemmer, stem.c.  I noticed that in the
function
        EndWithCVC
the first two lines of code are

    if ( (length = strlen(word)) < 2 )
      return( FALSE );

Now, I think that it should instead be
    if ( (length = strlen(word)) <= 2 )

                                  ^
                                  |
                      '=' added --+

If this is so, then I wonder how we can inform everyone since the code is
very well used in the IR community.

Yours
Robert McArthur
Resource Discovery Unit
Distributed Technology Research Centre
Brisbane, Australia.
**********
I.2.
Fr: Gerry McKiernan <gerrymck@iastate.edu>
Re: Ramifications of Embedded Multimedia in E-Journals

_Ramifications of Embedded Multimedia in E-Journals_

>From a brief literature review and as a result of responses received from
an earlier post, I have concluded that Embedded Multimedia in E-Journals
will become quite common within the next 2-3 years.  As more and more
libraries are providing access to E-journals either as alternatives or
substitutes for paper subscriptions and as E-journals embrace embedded
multimedia, it appears that there will be significant ramifications for
next generation WebPACs as well as personal workstations. 

While not all multimedia requires special plug-ins, the range of
multi-media is expanding rapidly and thus one can expect that library
workstations will need to have the full-range of appropriate plug-ins to
accommodate such embedded media. 

I am greatly interested in current efforts by WebPac vendors to provide
built-in default plug-ins for such media as well as information about
current library efforts to anticipate these near term developments. 

BTW: I will be preparing a contribution for a professional newsletter next
month and will attempt to provide a sketch of some noteworthy developments
relating to Embedded Multimedia in E-Journals. Among the key sites and
cites I will be incorporating are:

                  **********************************

Institute of Physics (IOP)

> Here at Institute of Physics Publishing we positively encourage 
> authors to submit multimedia material with a view to enhancing 
> the readers' understanding of a paper (see our 'Notes for Authors' 
> at http://www.iop.org/Journals/nfa/node22.html)  
> 
> Submissions of this kind are increasing steadily - good examples 
> can be found in the following titles (demonstrations are available 
> at the URLs given).
> 
> Nanotechnology -- http://www.iop.org/Journals/na/
> 
> Combustion Theory and Modelling -- http://www.iop.org/Journals/ct/
> 
> New Journal of Physics -- http://njp.org/

                  **********************************

Terry A Brooks / University of Washington / Graduate School of Library 
and Information Science

> I recently wrote a grant to OCLC proposing to investigate
> the enhanced writing functionalities provided by embedded multimedia,
> etc.  The grant application is at
> 
> http://weber.u.washington.edu/~tabrooks/Documents/OCLCGrant.htm 

                  **********************************

_Internet Journal of Chemistry_

An e-journal with great embedded multimedia is the _Internet Journal of
Chemistry_ at:

        http://www.ijc.com/multimedia.html
        http://www.ijc.com/

[It has a separate left-hand frame index with a "Multimedia"
index! [Impressive!]]

                  **********************************

_Internet Archeology_

         Here is a sitation to an excellent review article I learned
about from my earlier posting 

  http://intarch.ac.uk/news/eva97.html

     It details the early experience with embedded multimedia in an 
Internet journal of archaeology.

                  **********************************

Multimedia Information Retrieval

  Of special note in a broader context in a research proposal awarded 
to Mark Rorvig, Associate Professor with the School of Library and
Information Sciences at the University of North Texas that will seek to
develop and refine a retrieval system for 'composite' formats of text,
image, and sound.  A description of the proposal is available at:

                 http://archive.lis.unt.edu:2000/fall801/intel.htm

                  **********************************
                        
In addition, I now searched the INSPEC database and identified a good dozen
or so articles, papers related to Embedded Multimedia  in E-Journals which
I will read and weave into my newsletter review  [I wish to personally
thank Adam Philippidis from IEEE for recommending a key work published last
year by the IEEE: Socioeconomic Dimensions of
Electronic Publishing Workshop (1998 : Santa Barbara, California). IEEE,
1998.  [OCLC: 40391589]

Thanks again to all who responded!

As Always, Any and All contributions, queries, critiques, comments,
questions, concerns, etc., etc. regarding this
post are Most Welcome.

  Regards,

/Gerry McKiernan
Theoretical Librarian
Iowa State University 
Ames IA 50011
gerrymck@iastate.edu 
**********
I.3.
Fr: Anthony.Watkinson <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>
Re: Response to Gerry McKiernan's submission, I.2.

It is very encouraging to learn that the opportunities represented by the
extra functionalities available on the Internet are being taken up by some
communities but there are still significant barriers to the use by authors
of multimedia. In particular the SuperJournal project could not extract
multimedia components from authors of articles in the journals it was
putting up in its clusters in spite of some serious attempts to advertise
the facility and encourage potential authors. It seems to me that until
authors write articles with the presumption that there will be a choice of
journals available to them as potential publishers of articles including
multimedia and also that there is some standardisation of what the
publishers of these journals will accept, enthusiasts only will offer these
components of their overall message to their readers. There is also the
unresolved problems of archiving: doubts about archiving as a reason for
not writing articles for electronic journals is cited frequently by author
organisations and in casual discussions. This all sounds Luddite but I
would counsel that the take-up of multimedia may be slower than anticipated
or indeed hoped for.
**********
I.4.
Fr: Gerry Mckiernan <GMCKIERN@gwgate.lib.iastate.edu>
Re: Response to Anthony Watkinson's submission, I.3.

Thanks (again)  for your interest in my posting.

I believe it is encouraging and that much will be seen and much remains to
be seen [:-)] with embedded multimedia in e-journals.

I believe that the incorporation of embedded multimedia can be facilitated
by the promotion (development?) of integrated multimedia authoring systems.
But here, there is he essential question of skill and time. [Could it be
that creation of multimedia adjuncts will be the next stage of scholarly
writing? / scholarship?]
[Stay Tuned {:-)]

Thanks again for your comments!

Regards,
/Gerry McKiernan
Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011
gerrymck@iastate.edu

BTW: You may be interested in an *excellent* article on Embedded Multimedia
that appeared two years ago in  the _Journal of Electronic Publishing_
published by the  University of Michigan Press written by Keith L. Seitter
and Judy Holoviak entitled:

_Earth Interactions_:  Transcending the Limitations of the Printed Page"
at: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-01/EI.html

The  Subtitle Says It All!
******************************************************************
II. JOBS
II.1.
Fr: Claudia Spahn <Claudia.Spahn@eml.villa-bosch.de>
Re: European Media Laboratory: IR Researchers

The Human Language Technology and the Personal Memory group at the European
Media Laboratory in Heidelberg are seeking several researchers to work in
the areas of information retrieval, information extraction, domain ontology
building, and human computer interfaces. 

1.   A researcher with experience in terminological ontology building,
knowledge representation languages, reasoning, lexical / knowledge
acquisition from corpora. The appointee will work in close collaboration
with the team of Bio-Informatics (molecular biology) of EML and the
Department of Information Science of Tokyo University. We require someone
who has a PhD in NLP or in CS with a demonstrated ability to do independent
research. Preference will be given to applicants who can demonstrate
practical abilities in the building of domain ontologies and who have a
strong NLP background. 

2. A researcher to work on natural language interfaces with excellent
knowledge in object-oriented software development (e.g., Java) and XML. The
appointee should have experience in GUI programming.
Experience in dialog modeling and discourse structure would be an
advantage. The successful candidate will be responsible for designing and
implementing an interactive interface for information retrieval, database
integration and ontological integration. The candidate will join an
interdisciplinary team of computational linguists, computer scientists and
domain experts who will use the designed interface for practical purposes.  

3. A researcher with strong interests in the area of NLP and in particular
in statistical NLP. The candidate should have excellent programming skills.
The candidate should be familiar with the theory and implementation of
finite-state automata, finite-state transducers and robust parsing
techniques. The candidate is expected to work on areas such as semantic
information retrieval, document classification, and clustering.

4. A Computer Scientist with strong background in one or more of the
following areas: adaptive user interfaces, dialog management for
human-computer interaction, context and situation modeling. We expect the
candidates to have significant experience in object-oriented software
development (e.g., Java), machine learning, and databases. Successful
candidates should have a PhD or professional experience the field.
Successful candidates will join a multi-disciplinary group and will
participate in projects that aim at building user-oriented computer systems
such as mobile tourism information systems. These projects are embedded
into a network of collaborations with national and international research
partners from industry and academia. 

We offer competitive salaries, depending on professional experience and
scientific achievements. The positions are available for 3 years, with the
possibility of renewing the appointment depending on performance, and
availability of funding. 

EML is a newly established private research laboratory that primarily does
contract research for the Klaus Tschira Foundation. It engages in research
in the manifold uses of information technology, its primary interest being
the development of new ways to increase the usefulness of such technology
for the individual and for society.  Scientists from many different
disciplines and countries work together at the EML, in particular, there is
a regular exchange between the EML and national and international
institutions. You will experience a challenging and stimulating
international work environment here. In addition, the EML is located in one
of the most beautiful old mansions of Heidelberg.

Should you be interested in working with us please send your application
including full CV and relevant material attesting your qualifications by
11th of June 1999 to our secretary, c/o Bärbel Mack,
Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 33, D-69118 Heidelberg.

For further information, please contact our web-site www.eml.org.
******************************************************************
III. NOTICES
III.A.1.
Fr: Silvia Miksch <silvia@ifs.tuwien.ac.at>
Re: AIM-J: Special Issue "Knowledge-Based Information
    Management in Intensive Care and Anaesthesia"

CALL FOR PAPER SUBMISSIONS
SPECIAL ISSUE of the JOURNAL
"ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN MEDICINE"
(published by Elsevier)
Theme: Knowledge-Based Information Management in Intensive
Care and Anaesthesia.
Guest-Editors: Michel Dojat, Silvia Miksch and Jim Hunter
INSERM Grenoble (FR), IFS Vienna (AT), Aberdeen U. (UK)

Manuscript deadline: November 1 1999

email: michel.dojat@ujf-grenoble.fr


OBJECTIVE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE
The care of critically ill patients in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and
during Anaesthesia is becoming increasingly complex. Clinicians are
required to rapidly interpret and respond to a large number of clinical
parameters, selecting appropriate treatment for the patient among many
different options. New measurement technology has increased the demand for
improved information management, as has the need to monitor and assess the
quality of care provided. Designing computerized systems to assist clinical
staff in monitoring, diagnosis and therapy planning tasks is a challenging
goal that requires the modeling of several levels of knowledge. The
objective behind this special issue is to report on state-of-the art of
theoretical and methodological developments for knowledge-based information
management in intensive care and anesthesia.

Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:
· quality control and assessment
· clinical guidelines and protocols
· computational methods for intelligent data analysis
· effective and efficient real-time monitoring (including intelligent
  alarming)
· decision support
· fusion of data from heterogeneous sources
· multi-agent design, distributed architecture
· uncertain and temporal reasoning
· knowledge acquisition from physiological data
· information visualization
· information retrieval

GUIDELINES & SCHEDULE
All manuscripts will be evaluated according to their originality, technical
quality and clarity of presentation by at least two independent referees
who are authorities in the field.

A manuscript should be about 20 pages excluding tables and figures but
including the list of references. Manuscripts should be prepared in
accordance with the journal "submission guidelines",that are available on
request, and may also be retrieved from http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/aimed.

Three copies of a manuscript should be sent by surface mail before November
1st, 1999 to:

Michel Dojat
INSERM U438 "RMN Bioclinique"
CHU de Grenoble Pavillon B
BP 217
38043 Grenoble Cedex 9
Phone: 33 4 76 76 57 48
Fax: 33 4 76 76 58 96
email : mdojat@ujf-grenoble.fr

Electronic submissions (to mdojat@ujf-grenoble.fr) are strongly encouraged
in PDF or PS format only.

Perspective authors are strongly encouraged to contact the guest editor at
the address above and to declare their intention to participate in the
special issue as early as possible. To this end, please submit by email a
tentative title and a short summary before September 1st, 1999.

IMPORTANT DATES
September 1, 1999     Submission of tentative title and abstract to 
                      Declare intention to submit paper
November 1, 1999      Receipt of full papers
January 31, 2000      Notification of acceptance
March 1, 2000         Receipt of final-version of manuscripts
November 2000         Publication of AIM special issue
**********
III.A.2.
Fr: Steve Minton <jairmail@ISI.EDU>
Re: JAIR Article: "Learning to Order Things"

Readers of this mailing list may be interested in the following article,
which was just published by JAIR:

Cohen, W.W., Schapire, R.E., and Singer, Y. (1999)
  "Learning to Order Things", 
   Volume 10, pages 243-270.

Available in PDF,PostScript and compressed PostScript.
For quick access via your WWW browser, use this URL:
http://www.jair.org/abstracts/cohen99a.html
More detailed instructions are below.

Abstract: There are many applications in which it is desirable to order
rather than classify instances. Here we consider the problem of learning
how to order instances given feedback in the form of preference judgments,
i.e., statements to the effect that one instance should be ranked ahead of
another.  We outline a two-stage approach in which one first learns by
conventional means a binary preference function indicating whether it is
advisable to rank one instance before another. Here we consider an on-line
algorithm for learning preference functions that is based on Freund and
Schapire's 'Hedge' algorithm.  In the second stage, new instances are
ordered so as to maximize agreement with the learned preference function.
We show that the problem of finding the ordering that agrees best with a
learned preference function is NP-complete.  Nevertheless, we describe
simple greedy algorithms that are guaranteed to find a good approximation.
Finally, we show how metasearch can be formulated as an ordering problem,
and present experimental results on learning a combination of 'search
experts', each of which is a domain-specific query expansion strategy for a
web search engine.

The article is available via:
   
 -- comp.ai.jair.papers (also see comp.ai.jair.announce)

 -- World Wide Web: The URL for our World Wide Web server is
       http://www.jair.org/
    For direct access to this article and related files try:
       http://www.jair.org/abstracts/cohen99a.html

 -- Anonymous FTP from either of the two sites below.

    Carnegie-Mellon University (USA):
        ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/project/jair/volume10/cohen99a.ps
    The University of Genoa (Italy):
        ftp://ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it/pub/jair/pub/volume10/cohen99a.ps

    The compressed PostScript file is named cohen99a.ps.Z (229K)

 -- automated email. Send mail to jair@cs.cmu.edu or
jair@ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it with the subject AUTORESPOND and our automailer
will respond. To get the Postscript file, use the message body GET
volume10/cohen99a.ps (Note: Your mailer might find this file too large to
handle.) Only one file can be requested in each message.

For more information about JAIR, visit our WWW or FTP sites, or send
electronic mail to jair@cs.cmu.edu with the subject AUTORESPOND and the
message body HELP, or contact jair-ed@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov.
**********
III.A.3.
Fr: EDUCAUSE <EDUCAUSE@EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Re: [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] EDUCAUSE Washington Update 5-14-99

EDUCAUSE: Transforming Education Through Information Technologies
http://www.educause.edu

EDUCAUSE WASHINGTON UPDATE --- MAY 14, 1999

IN THIS ISSUE:

HOUSE TELECOMMUNICATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE CHAIR PLANS TO EASE RBOC
LONG-DISTANCE RESTRICTIONS

SENATE TECHNOLOGY SUBCOMMITTEE APPROVES INTERNET GAMBLING BILL; SEN.
FEINSTEIN PROMISES AMENDMENT TO CLARIFY ISP ROLE

FCC CHAIR REQUESTS E-RATE BE FUNDED TO FULL LEVEL AS CONGRESSMEN
REINTRODUCE LEGISLATION TO ALTER PROGRAM'S FUNDING MECHANISM

HOUSE TELECOMMUNICATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE CHAIR PLANS TO EASE RBOC
LONG-DISTANCE RESTRICTIONS
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Written from EDUCAUSE'S Washington office, "The EDUCAUSE Washington Update"
is a free service of EDUCAUSE, an international nonprofit association
dedicated to transforming higher education through information technologies.

Anyone may subscribe to the Update by sending e-mail to
listserv@listserv.educause.edu with "subscribe update firstname lastname"
in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send a "signoff update" command
to the same address. If you would like more information about the Update or
would like to offer comments or suggestions, please contact Garret Sern at
gsern@educause.edu.
**********
III.A.4.
Fr: Xindong Wu <xwu@gauss.Mines.EDU>
Re: Knowledge and Information Systems: Vol 1 No 2 (1999)

Knowledge and Information Systems: An International Journal
ISSN 0219-1377
by Springer-Verlag
Home Page: http://kais.mines.edu/~kais/
Volume 1 Number 2 (1999): Table of Contents

Critical Reviews
 - Agent-Based Systems for Intelligent Manufacturing: A
   State-of-the-Art Survey, by Weiming Shen and Douglas H. Norrie

Regular Papers

- On Modeling and Verification of Temporal Constraints in Production
   Workflows, by Olivera Marjanovic and Maria E. Orlowska

- Making Database Schema Hierarchical for Visual Access to Databases,
   by Ping-Kuen Chen and Gwo-Dong Chen

- Scan: A Hierarchical Algorithm for Similarity Search in Databases
   Consisting of Long Sequences, by Chung-Sheng Li, Philip S. Yu, and
   Vittorio Castelli

Short Papers

- IMC: A Method for Interval Calculus in Matrix, by Shichao Zhang and
   Chengqi Zhang

A subscription form and other accepted papers  are available on the journal
home page (http://kais.mines.edu/~kais/).
**********
III.B.1.
Fr: Zhongfei Zhang <zhongfei@cedar.buffalo.edu>
Re: ACM SIGIR99 MIR Workshop

ACM SIGIR'99 Post-Conference Workshop on
Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
Berkeley, CA, August 15 - 19, 1999
Call For Participation

Background
This workshop is a follow-up to last year's very successful workshop on the
same topic. Since the field is advancing so rapidly, it was felt that an
annual workshop would be worthwhile. 

The focus is on the required functionality, techniques, and evaluation
criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems. Researchers have
been investigating content-based retrieval from non-text sources such as
images, audio and video. Initially, the focus of these efforts were on
content analysis and retrieval techniques tailored to a specific media;
more recently, researchers have started to combine attributes from various
media. The goal of multimedia IR systems is to handle general queries such
as "find outdoor pictures or video of Clinton and Gore discussing
environmental issues". Answering such queries requires intelligent
exploitation of both text/speech and visual content. Multimedia IR is a
very broad area covering both infrastructure issues (e.g. efficient storage
criteria, networking, client-server models) and intelligent content
analysis and retrieval. Since this is a one-day workshop, we have chosen
three focus areas in the intelligent analysis and retrieval area. 

About the workshop
The first focus of this workshop is on integrating information from various
media sources in order to handle multimodal queries on large, diverse
databases. An example of such a collection would be the WWW. In such cases,
a query may be decomposed into a set of media queries, each involving a
different indexing scheme. The interaction of various media sources that
occur in the same context (e.g., text accompanying pictures, audio
accompanying video) is of special interest; such interaction can be
exploited in both the content analysis and retrieval phases. 

The second focus deals with examples of research using content and
organization of multimedia information into semantic classes. Users pose
and expect a retrieval to provide answers to semantic questions. In
practice this is difficult to achieve. Building structures that encode
semantic information in a fairly domain independent and robust manner is
extremely difficult. A quick review of computer vision research over the
last few years points to this difficulty. In many cases, image content can
be used in conjunction with user interaction and domain specificity to
retrieve semantically meaningful information. However, it is clear that
retrieval by similarity of visual attributes when used arbitrarily cannot
provide semantically meaningful information. For example, a search for a
red flower by color red on a very heterogeneous database cannot be expected
to yield meaningful results. On the other hand retrieval of red flowers in
a database of flowers can be achieved using color. In context therefore,
examples of research using content and organization of multimedia
information into semantic classes will be discussed.

Many systems, particularly image and video based ones require an example
picture which can be used as a query (alternatively, the user may be
required to draw a picture). It may be unrealistic to expect an example
image to be always available. Thus, it would be useful to find ways of
generating new queries. Can NLP techniques be combined with computer vision
techniques to generate such queries? Or can multimodal retrieval techniques
be combined to create queries suitable for image, video and audio
retrieval? In general, a question is how can we create realistic queries
for realistic systems. 

The third focus of this workshop is on evaluation techniques for multimedia
retrieval. Currently, most researchers are using the standard evaluation
measures defined for text documents; these need to be extended/modified for
multimedia documents. There is also a high degree of subjectivity involved
that needs to be addressed. 

Finally, we will also devote one session to discussing MPEG-7 standards and
content. By the time of the workshop, the selection committee would have
made their choices for standards. 

We will focus on the following specific topics: 

- content analysis and retrieval from various media (text, images,
  video, audio) 
- interaction of modalities (e.g. text, images) in indexing, retrieval 
- effective user interfaces (permitting query refinement etc.) 
- evaluation methodologies for multimedia information. We have found
  that researchers pay insufficient attention to it. 
- techniques for relevance ranking 
- multimodal query formation/decomposition 
- logic formalisms for multimodal queries 
- indexing and retrieval from scanned documents - e.g extracting text  
  from images, word spotting - as a retrieval technique for both
  handwritten and printed documents. 
- testbeds for evaluating multimodal retrieval: it would be nice to
  have some resource sharing here since annotating these, and coming up
  with a good query set are difficult 

Participation
Two types of participation are expected. Those interested in making a
presentation at this workshop should submit their full papers either in
online postscript version or in hardcopy by regular mail to the address
given below. The papers should not exceed 5,000 words, including figures,
tables, and references. Those interested in participating, but not
presenting papers, should submit a statement of interest, not to exceed 500
words. This should clearly state what aspect(s) of the workshop reflect
their research interest. These will be used to select panelists. Both types
of submissions are due on Friday, June 18th. Decisions will be made no
later than Friday, July 2nd. In the case of paper submission, the final
camera-ready papers are due on July 23rd. Working notes will be made
available to all participants at the workshop. All the submissions should
be sent to: 

Dr. Rohini K. Srihari 
CEDAR/SUNY at Buffalo 
UB Commons 
520 Lee Entrance, Suite 202 
Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583 
Email: rohini@cedar.buffalo.edu 
Phone: (716) 645-6164 ext. 102 Fax: (716) 645-6176 

Timetable
Paper or statement of interest submission: June 18th, 1999. 
Decision:                                  July 2nd, 1999. 
Camera-Ready Paper Due:                    July 23rd, 1999 
SIGIR Conference:                          August 15 - 19, 1999 
Workshop Date:                             to be announced. 

Further information
Further questions may be directed to the address above, or go to the Web
page of this workshop at
http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/sigir99/

or the SIGIR Conference main Web Page at
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/
**********
III.B.2.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu>
Re: EACL'99 Registration Reminder

EACL '99
9th Conf. of the European Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics
Bergen, June 8-12, 1999
TAKING REGISTRATIONS NOW !
http://www.hit.uib.no/eacl99

The EACL '99 conference is this year's biggest academic event in
Computational Linguistics taking place in Europe.  Programme overview:

June 7     Pre-conference excursion to the fjords
June 8     Tutorials
June 9-11  Main sessions, student sessions, posters&demos
           Invited speakers Bruce Croft & Wolfgang Wahlster
           Exhibit & Job Fair
           Social programme (reception & banquet)
June 12    Workshops

Please consult the website for the full programme, venue and local
information, registration and hotel accommodation:
http://www.hit.uib.no/eacl99

Welcome to Bergen !

Henry Thompson & Alex Lascarides, Programme Chairs 
Koenraad de Smedt, Chair of the Local Organization Committee

Sponsors:
LINGSOFT, University of Bergen (Humanities Faculty), Bergen University
Fund, Norwegian Ministry of Education, Research and Church affairs

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
EACL'99 TUTORIALS PROGRAMME

The EACL '99 conference is this year's biggest academic event in
Computational Linguistics taking place in Europe.  There will be two
tutorial sessions on June 8th, 1999, with two tutorials each.

TIME TABLE
8:30    Registration
9:30    Start Morning Session (1 and 3 below)
11:00   Break
11:30   Morning Session continued
13:00   Lunch
14.00   Start Afternoon Session (2 and 4 below)
15:30   Break
16.00   Afternoon Session continued
17:30   End of Sessions

1. Practical Text Mining
     Lecturer: Ronen Feldman
2. Natural Language Learning with the Maximum Entropy Framework
     Lecturer: Adwait Ratnaparkhi 
3. Building Natural Language Generation Systems
     Lecturers: Robert Dale, Ehud Reiter
4. Lexicography for Computationalists
     Lecturers: Adam Kilgarriff, Michael Rundell

The URL for the tutorials programme (with abstracts and further
information) is http://ilk.kub.nl/~walter/eacl/prog.html

The URL for the EACL'99 homepage is http://www.hit.uib.no/eacl99
**********
III.B.3.
Fr: Thorsten Brants <thorsten@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE>
Re: LINC-99

EACL-99 Post-Conference Workshop on
LINGUISTICALLY INTERPRETED CORPORA (LINC-99)
June 12th, 1999, Bergen, Norway
** CALL FOR PARTICIPATION AND PRELIMINARY PROGRAM **
URL: http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/linc99/

BACKGROUND:
The need for large linguistically interpreted (annotated) corpora keeps
growing in an increasing number of applications and research tasks in the
field of computational linguistics. Many groups have started to create
corpus resources for a variety of languages and domains. These corpora are
used for a broad range of different applications and theoretical
investigations.  This workshop aims at bringing together these activities
in order to facilitate advanced and efficient corpus annotation providing
re-usable resources.

CONTRIBUTED PAPERS:
Jose Mari Arriola, Xabier Artola, Aitor Maritxalar, Aitor Soroa
"Methodology for the Analysis of Verb Usage Examples in a Context of Lexical 
  Knowledge Acquisition from Dictionary Entries"

Tamaz Varadi, Csaba Oravecz
"Morpho-syntactic ambiguity and tagset design for Hungarian"

Anne Abeille, Lionel Clement
"A tagged reference Corpus for French"

Massimo Poesio, Renate Henschel, Janet Hitzeman, Roger Kibble, 
  Shane Montague, Kees van Deemter
"Towards An Annotation Scheme For Noun Phrase Generation"

Kemal Oflazer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur
"Design for a Turkish Treebank"

John Carroll, Guido Minnen, Ted Briscoe
"Corpus Annotation for Parser Evaluation"

Ian Lewin, Pierrette Bouillon, Sabine Lehmann, David Milward, 
  Ludovic Tanguy
"Discourse Data in DiET"

Chris Brew
"An extensible visualization tool to aid treebank exploration"

Frank Keller, Martin Corley, Steffan Corley, Matthew Crocker, 
  Shari Trewin
"Gsearch: A Tool for Syntactic Investigation of Unparsed Corpora"

Tomaz Erjavec
"A TEI Encoding of Aligned Corpora as Translation Memories"
        
Josef van Genabith, Louisa Sadler, Andy Way
"Data-Driven Compilation of LFG Semantic Forms"

CONTACT:
    Thorsten Brants
    Saarland University
    Computational Linguistics, Geb. 17
    P.O.Box 151150
    D-66041 Saarbruecken
    GERMANY
    email: thorsten@coli.uni-sb.de
    URL: http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/linc99/

REGISTRATION:
    URL: http://www.hit.uib.no/eacl99/howtoregister.html
**********
III.B.4.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu>
Re: ACL'99 & Co-Located Workshop

ACL '99
37th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics
University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
June 20-26, 1999
TAKING REGISTRATIONS NOW !
http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/conf/acl99
 
The ACL '99 conference this year will offer a larger and more diversified
program than ever before.  Below is a Program Overview. Detailed
information and the entire registration brochure may be found at the
website above.  The registration brochure has also been sent to all ACL
members in hardcopy on 19th April, 1999. If you would like an emailed
version of the VERY LONG brochure, please contact Priscilla Rasmussen at
acl@aclweb.org.  We also plan to have the online registration working
(hopefully) by the end of April.
 
19 June         Registration and Tutorial Reception
20 June         Tutorials--3 morning and 3 afternoon 
21-22 June            Workshops--4 1-day and 2 2-day workshops
23-26 June            Technical, Thematic, and Student Sessions
                        (23rd and 26th Technical, 24th and 25th
                        Thematic and Student sessions); Invited
                        Speakers: Marti Hearst, Sadaoki Furui,
                        and George Miller. ACL Business Meeting
                        and Student Member Lunch Meeting.
                        Social program (Opening Reception, 22nd
                        June, and Banquet, 23rd June)

Please consult the website for the full program, venue and local
information, registration and hotel accommodation:
 
We hope to see you there!
 
Robert Dale and Kenneth Church, Program Chairs 
Bonnie Dorr, Local Arrangements Chair

CO-LOCATED MEETING: There will also be a co-located symposium,
Computer-Mediated Language Assessment and Evaluation in Natural Language
Processing, organized by Mari Broman Olsen.  This symposium will take place
Tuesday, June 22nd on the University of Maryland campus.  For further
information, please contact Mari Olsen, molsen@umiacs.umd.edu or see the
web http://umiacs.umd.edu/~molsen/acl-iall 
**********
III.B.5.
Fr: Clifford Lynch <cliff@cni.org>
Re: Network Storage Symposium

NetStore '99: Call for Participation
Network Storage Symposium (NetStore '99)
Seattle, WA
October 14 & 15, 1999
http://dsi.internet2.edu/netstore99/
NetStore '99: The End of End-to-End?
  
The Network Storage Symposium (NetStore '99) is devoted to exploring
technical issues in logistical networking: the use of storage resources as
a component of the network's communicative infrastructure. The most common
examples of logistical networking in today's global Internet are caching
and replication. NetStore '99 is targeting an expanded area of
investigation that includes more general and innovative applications of
storage resources in networking. Of particular interest are issues in the
development of the [2] Internet2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Project
(I2-DSI) and applications supported by it.

Symposium topics include but are not limited to:
- Network file system caching
- Replication of files and services
- Portable servers and object representation
- Network proximity and server load metrics
- Prediction of network resource performance
- Modeling of network services
- Network object caching
- Resolution of URIs and service requests
- Applications enabled by network storage
- Global information services infrastructure
- Remote buffer management
- Manipulation of massive data files
- Quality of service delivery of stored data
- Management of distributed sensor data

The symposium proceedings will include both submitted and invited papers.
We are in the process of negotiating for publication of selected papers in
a journal special issue.

Submissions
Extended abstracts up to five pages in length are encouraged, but due to
the short notice, one page abstracts will be accepted. Abstracts will be
accepted by e-mail only, and should be sent to Jim Plank
(plank@cs.utk.edu) in text, PostScript, or PDF format.

Deadlines
Paper abstracts due         July 1
Notification of acceptance  August 1
Final paper due             September 15

General Chair
Micah Beck, mbeck@cs.utk.edu, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Vice Chair
Terry Moore, tmoore@cs.utk.edu, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Program Co-Chairs
James S. Plank, plank@cs.utk.edu, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
**********
III.B.6.
Fr: SCIE99 <scie99@info.uniroma2.it>
Re: SCIE99, 2nd Announcement

SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT
Call for Participation
School on Information Extraction SCIE99
Frascati(Rome), June 28, July 3, 1999
http://scie99.info.uniroma2.it/

IMPORTANT DATES
Early registration deadline: May 15
Grant application deadline: May 15

The Artificial Intelligence research group of the Department of Computer
Science, Systems and Production of the University of Roma Tor Vergata
(Italy), in cooperation with the Italian Association of Artifical
Intelligence (AI*IA), is pleased to announce the second edition of the
School on Information Extraction (SCIE99), to be held in Frascati (Roma),
Italy, from June 28 to July 3, 1999.  The school provides a forum for
researchers and practitioners with different background and expertise, to
discuss ideas and describe experiences in defining and implementing IE
systems.  To maximize interaction among SCIE-99 participants, the
attendance will be limited to 80 persons. 

CONTENTS 
The school is organized as a set of lectures held by internationally renown
experts from the different disciplines concerning IE themes. These lectures
are explicitly meant to address interdisciplinary issues and will introduce
common goals, needs and problems of the different approaches. Demo sessions
on current IE technologies and systems will be also held at the school.

INVITED SPEAKERS
-Jean Pierre CHANOD (XEROX Research Centre Europe, FR)  "Finite-state
 linguistic components: the case of digital libreries" 
-Veronica DAHL (Simon Fraser Univ. Ca)  "From Speech to Knowledge" 
-Maria Teresa PAZIENZA (Univ. Rome Tor Vergata, IT)  "Engineering IE
 systems: an Object Oriented perspective"
-Harold SOMERS (UMIST, UK)  "Knowledge extraction from bilingual
 corpora" 
-John SOWA (Westchester Polytechnic Univ. USA)  "Relating Templates to
 Language and Logic" 
-Marc VILAIN (The MITRE Corporation, MA, USA)  "Multilingual IE
 systems" 
-Ellen VOORHEES (NIST, MD, USA)  "Natural Language Processing and
 Information Retrieval" 
-Yorick WILKS (Univ. of Sheffield, UK)  "Can we make Information
 Extraction more adaptive?" 

GRANTS 
Thanks to the support of the AI*IA (Italian Association of Artificial
Intelligence) and some of the sponsors, grants will be available for
advanced students and young researchers. Details at the SCIE99 web site. 

SCHOOL VENUE 
The School will be held in the pleasant atmosphere of the historic city of
Frascati (near Rome, Italy). The school will be hosted by the European
Space Agency at ESRIN establishment. Thanks to this hospitality, we hope to
reach a friendly atmosphere as in the past edition of the school, which
enabled fruitful exchanges of ideas among participants.  

Any information for SCIE-99 participation (registration fees, grants,
lectures, accommodation, etc.) may be found at the school web page
http://scie99.info.uniroma2.it

School e-mail: scie99@info.uniroma2.it 

For more details, please contact: 
prof. Maria Teresa Pazienza  
Dept. of Computer Science, Systems and Production  
University of Roma, Tor Vergata  
Via di Tor Vergata  00133 ROMA (ITALY)  
tel: +39 06 72597378 (office); 
fax +39 06 72597460;  
e_mail: pazienza@info.uniroma2.it 
**********

******************************************************************
IV. PROJECTS
IV.C.1.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu>
Re: MURI Announcement on Tutorial Dialog/Discourse

This is a call for proposals for the Multidisciplinary University Research
Initiative Program (DOD) The effort is on Tutorial Discourse and Susan
Chipman is POC.

http://www.onr.navy.mil/sci_tech/special/onrpgadh.htm

Helen M. Gigley, Ph.D.
Program Officer
Office of Naval Research
800 N. Quincy Street (342)
Arlington, VA 22217-5660
phone: (703)-696-0407
fax:      (703)-696-1212
email:  gigley@itd.nrl.navy.mil
******************************************************************
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