IR-L Digest, Vol.XVI, No.28, Issue 464

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

IRLIST Digest                                       ISSN 1064-6965
July 26, 1999
Volume XVI, Number 28
Issue 464

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

  I. QUERIES
        1. ERGO: Parser Integrity
 II. JOBS
        1. Penn State U.: School of Information Sciences and
           Technology: Faculty Members
III. NOTICES
     A. Publications
        1. "News from the Field" / Journal of Internet
           Cataloging: RFSubmissions
     B. Meetings
        1. Searching for Information: AI and IR Approaches
        2. NTCIR/IREX Joint Workshop: CFPapers
     C. Miscellaneous
        1. Amanda Spink Joins New Penn State School of Information
           Sciences and Technology
 IV. PROJECTS
     C. Awards, Fellowships, Grants, & Scholarships
        1. NSF Alan T. Waterman Award: Nominations Due 10/31/99
        2. Funded Studentship in Electronic Information/Publishing

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

I. QUERIES

I.1.
Fr: Karen Smith <smithkar@htdc.org>
Re: ERGO: Parser Integrity

I am a linguist working at Ergo Linguistic Technologies in Honolulu, HI. We
are currently attempting to refresh and update our collection of parsers
and parser web sites. We currently have the following parsers in our
offices: Davy Temperley, Daniel Sleator, and John Lafferty's "The Link
Grammar Parser" from Carnegie Mellon University, "LFG" from Xerox PARC,
"Apple Pie Parser" from NYU, "ENGCG Constraint Grammar Parser of English"
from Lingsoft, Inc., "The Functional Dependency Grammar Parser" of Atro
Voutilainen and Mikko Silvonen from Finland,  Georgetown University's
"Natural Language Processing Parser", Stanford University's "LinGO Parser",
Prospero Software's "Parser Version 1.0 for DOS", "The FranklinParser" from
Proximity Technology, Inc., and  "Natural Language Parser Demo" from The
University of Finland's Natural Language Processing Department. If anyone
knows of any other parsers, especially from universities or high technology
development corporations like IBM or Microsoft, please let me know.  We are
also looking for software tools that use parsers as an internal component.
We will post a complete list of these tools and the relevant websites on
our homepage on a "related sites" link.  All feedback is welcomed.

The standards by which each of the parsers listed below were judged can be
located at the Ergo Linguistic Technologies website under "parser contest".
Here you will find a full explanation of what Ergo Linguistic Technologies
feels the standards for parsing technology should be.  Basically, the
analysis is broken into seven different areas, each having several
objectives that need to be met. The seven categories are as follows:
structural analysis of strings, evaluation of strings, manipulation of
strings, question/answer, statement/response repartee, recognition of the
essential identity of synonymous structures, navigation and control, and
lexicography.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY [LINK GRAMMAR]

The Link Grammar Parser is "a syntactic parser of English, based on link
grammar, an original theory of English syntax."  This parser identifies
parts of speech, parts of sentence, internal clauses and sentence type, but
does not identify tense and voice of main clause and internal clauses
(identifies tense only). It recognizes acceptable strings, gives number of
correct parses that succeeded, identifies phrases of acceptable parses, and
gives the number of unacceptable parses that were tried, but does not give
the exact time of the parses in seconds or reject unacceptable strings. It
has no manipulation of strings. It identifies whether a string is a yes/no
question, a wh-question, or a command, but does not have any other
statement/response, question/answer repartee. It demonstrates no
recognition of the essential identity of synonymous structures and
demonstrates no navigation and control functions. The lexicon has 60,000
words and the core vocabulary is suitable to a wide variety of
applications. The parser recognizes single and multi-word items and
recognizes a variety of grammatical features. It does not have tools to
facilitate the addition, modification, or deletion of lexical entries and
it can not mark and link synonyms and classes of lexical items. The output
of this parser is in the form of a tree diagram consisting of a series of
linkages. Each link is marked with Link Grammar's own proprietary labels.
This system was found to be rather hard to follow since at every link one
must refer back to a previous page to uncover the meaning of that
particular link.
http://bobo.link.cs.cmu.edu/grammar/html/intro.html

LINGSOFT, INC. [ENGCG CONSTRAINT GRAMMAR PARSER OF ENGLISH]

This parser, developed at the Department of General Linguistics at the
University of Helsinki, gives a morphological analysis of running English
text. It identifies the parts of speech and parts of the sentence, but does
not identify internal clauses, sentence type or tense and voice of the main
clause or internal clauses. It does identify the phrases of successful
parses, but does not recognize acceptable strings, reject unacceptable
strings, give the correct number of parses that succeeded or the number of
unacceptable parses that were tried. It also does not give the exact time
of parses in seconds. This parser generates no manipulation of strings. It
is capable of identifying whether a string is a statement, yes/no question,
wh-question or a command, but demonstrates no other question/answer,
statement/response repartee. This parser also recognizes the heads of
phrases with and without associated modifiers, but it has no other
recognition of the essential identity of synonymous structures. It
distinguishes commands from questions and statements, but does not
distinguish commands for OS characters or programs, does not provide a
sufficiently detailed analysis of commands to allow proper responses, and
it does not recognize synonymous commands. There is no data available on
the size of the lexicon, but it does recognize single and multi-word items,
recognizes a variety of grammatical features, and has a core vocabulary
that is suitable to a wide variety of applications.  However, it can not
mark and link synonyms and classes of lexical items, and it does not have
tools to facilitate the addition, modification, and deletion of lexical
entries. The output of this parser is in the form of a list that provides a
part of speech and part of sentence analysis.
http://www.lingsoft.fi/cgi-pub/engcg

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI [FUNCTIONAL DEPENDENCY GRAMMAR PARSER FOR ENGLISH]

This parser gives a surface-syntactic analysis of a running text. This
parser identifies parts of speech and parts of the sentence, but does not
identify internal clauses, sentence type or tense and voice of the main
clause or internal clauses. It does identify the phrases of successful
parses, but does not recognize acceptable strings, reject unacceptable
strings, give the correct number of parses that succeeded or the number of
unacceptable parses that were tried. It also does not give the exact time
of parses in seconds. This parser generates no manipulation of strings, and
has no question/answer, statement/response repartee. Furthermore, it does
not recognize the essential identity of synonymous structures and
demonstrates no navigation and control functions. No information was
available on the size of the lexicon, but it does recognize single and
multi-word items, a variety of grammatical features, and seems to have a
core vocabulary that is suitable to a wide variety of applications.
However, it does not have any tools to facilitate the addition,
modification, or deletion of lexical entries and it is unable to mark and
link synonyms and classes of lexical items. The output of this parser
provides a part of speech and some part of sentence analysis in the form of
a list.
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~tapanain/dg/eng/demo.html

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY [NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING PARSER MODULARITY
DEMONSTRATION]

This parser identifies parts of speech and parts of the sentence, but does
not identify internal clauses, sentence type or tense and voice of the main
clause or internal clauses. It does recognize acceptable strings and reject
unacceptable strings, gives the number of correct parses that succeeded,
but not the number of unacceptable parses that were tried. It also
identifies the phrases of acceptable parses and gives the exact time of
parses in seconds. This parser demonstrates no manipulation of strings or
question/answer, statement/response repartee. It also can not recognize the
essential identity of synonymous structures and demonstrates no navigation
and control functions. The lexicon does not contain a minimum of 50,000
words, but rather has only 23,000 entries. However, it does recognize
single and multi-word items as well as a variety of grammatical features.
It also has tools that facilitate the addition, modification, and deletion
of lexical items. However, its core vocabulary is not suitable to a wide
variety of applications and it is unable to mark and link synonyms and
classes of lexical items. The output of this parser provides a part of
speech analysis for each word in the sentence in the form of a list.
http://www.georgetown.edu/cgi-bin/compling/slctscr.pl

STANFORD UNIVERSITY [LINGO]

Linguistic Grammars Online or LinGo is a "multi-purpose broad-coverage
grammar of English". This parser identifies parts of speech and tense and
voice of the main clause, but the output from the parse is not very clear.
It does not identify parts of the sentence, internal clauses, the tense and
voice of internal clauses, or sentence type. It recognizes acceptable
strings, unacceptable strings, gives the number of correct parses that
succeeded, and identifies the phrases of successful parses. However, it
does not give the number of unacceptable parses that were tried or the
exact time of parses in seconds. This parser is able to identify tense and
voice in sentences with and without internal clauses, but demonstrates no
other manipulation of strings. It identifies tense in questions, but does
not identify the appropriate tense for responses. It shows no other
question/answer, statement/response repartee. It also shows no recognition
of the essential identity of synonymous structures and demonstrates no
navigation or control functions. There was no information available on the
size of the lexicon, however many words were found in the dictionary. It
recognizes single and multi-word items and recognizes a variety of
grammatical functions. However, it does not have tools to facilitate the
addition, modification, and deletion of lexical entries and it is not able
to mark and link synonyms and classes of lexical items. The output of this
parser provides a part of speech analysis, however it is somewhat hard to
follow and no explanation of the labels were given. Upon corresponding with
Rob Malouf via email about this, I was referred to another web address
containing a document that explains the labels more thoroughly. This
explanation can be found at
ftp://ftp-csli.stanford.edu/linguistics/sag/mrs.ps.gz
http://hpsg.stanford.edu.8000/lingo/parser.html

PROSPERO SOFTWARE [PARSER VERSION 1.0 FOR DOS]

This parser is able to identify parts of speech, but it is not able to
identify parts of a sentence, internal clauses, sentence type, or tense and
voice of the main clause or internal clauses. This parser shows no
evaluation of strings or manipulation of strings. It does identify tense in
questions, but does not identify the appropriate tense for responses. It
demonstrates no other question/answer, statement/response repartee and
demonstrates no recognition of the essential identity of synonymous
structures or navigation and control functions. This parser has a large
dictionary with several hundred thousand entries, well above the suggested
50,000. It recognizes single and multi-word units as well as a variety of
grammatical features. The core vocabulary is suitable to a wide variety of
applications however, the parser does not have tools to facilitate the
addition, modification or deletion of lexical entries and it is unable to
mark and link synonyms and classes       of lexical items. This parser's output
provides a part of speech analysis in the form of a list.
http://www.prosperosoftware.com/np1id2.html

PROXIMITY TECHNOLOGY, INC [FRANKLIN PARSER]

This parser can be found in Ken Litkowski's Dictionary Maintenance
Programs also referred to as DIMAP. This parser identifies parts of speech,
parts of a sentence, and internal clauses, but it is not able to identify
sentence type, tense and voice of main and internal clauses. The Franklin
parser does not recognize acceptable strings or reject unacceptable
strings.  It also does not give the number of correct parses that succeeded
or the number of unacceptable parses that were tried.  It also does not
give the exact time of parses in seconds.  However, it does identify the
phrases of successful parses.  It does not show any manipulation of
strings, question/answer, statement/response repartee, recognition of the
essential identity of synonymous structures, or navigation and control
functions. The dictionary includes more than 120,000 headwords and the core
vocabulary is suitable to a wide variety of applications. The parser
recognizes single and multi-word items as well as a variety of grammatical
features , but it is not able to mark and link synonyms and classes of
lexical items.  This parser's output provides a part of speech and part of
sentence analysis in the form of a chart.
http://proximity.franklin.com/parse.htm

UNIVERSITY OF FINLAND'S NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING DEPT. [NATURAL
LANGUAGE PARSER]

This parser has not been thoroughly examined as of the present. Preliminary
assessments show that the parser identifies parts of speech and parts of
sentence, but does not identify internal clauses, sentence type, tense and
voice of main and internal clauses. It also recognizes acceptable strings
and rejects unacceptable strings. This parser is case sensitive. It gives
the correct number of parses that succeeded, but does not give the number
of unacceptable parses that were tried or the exact time of parses in
seconds. It shows no manipulation of strings, question/answer,
statement/response repartee or recognition of the essential identity of
synonymous structures. The lexicon uses a collection of dictionaries such
as CUOVALD, Word Net, and Link Grammar, so the core vocabulary is suitable
for a wide variety of applications and it recognizes a variety of
grammatical features and single and multi-word items. A more complete
analysis of this parser will be completed in the near future. The output of
this parser provides a part of speech and some part of sentence analysis in
the form of a tree diagram.
http://pointti.vip.fi/nlpd.html

XEROX PARC [LFG PARSER]

This parser is currently undergoing evaluation and a complete analysis will
be posted to our website when it is available.  We are in the process of
contacting Xerox PARC for more information about this product.
ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/lfg/

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY [APPLE PIE PARSER]

This parser is currently undergoing analysis. When analysis is available,
it will be posted to our website.
http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/projects/proteus/app/index.html

UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA [MINIPAR]

This parser was downloaded, but the demo was unable to be opened.  Our
programmer is currently working on the problem.  When an analysis is
available, it will be posted to the website.
http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~lindek/minipar/htm

and of course our own parser at ...

ERGO LINGUISTICTECHNOLOGIES
http://www.ergo-ling.com/

For those of you who would like to look at and compare parsers but are
unfamiliar with parsing, you can go to the Ergo web site "Parsing Contest"
page to find good test sentences and a discussion of standards for
comparing parsers.  It should take just a few hours to actually go through,
look at and try all these parsers.

Karen Smith
Linguist
Ergo Linguistic Technologies
2800 Woodlawn Dr., Ste. 175
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel   (808) 539-3920
Fax (808) 539 -3924
smithkar@htdc.org
http://www.ergo-ling.com/

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

II. JOBS

II.1.
Fr: Amanda Spink <Spink@lis.admin.unt.edu>
Re: Penn State U.: School of Information Sciences and Technology:
    Faculty Members

Penn State's School of Information Sciences and Technology
(IST)[http://www.ist.psu.edu] invites applications for full-time
tenure-track positions, with rank to be determined on the basis of
qualifications and experience. Senior ranks will be considered for
applicants with recognized national and international stature. Faculty
members will have an opportunity to participate actively and contribute
significantly to the formative stages of this exciting new School and
program.

PSU-IST is an initiative by Penn State President Graham Spanier. The School
is an academic unit that has the stature of a College within the
University. PSU-IST will offer a baccalaureate program for the first time
in the Fall Semester 1999 and it is anticipated that a graduate program
will be introduced in the Fall Semester 2000. IST is an interdisciplinary
program intended to offer students an integrated curriculum covering a wide
range of knowledge and skills in Information Sciences and Technology.
Students will learn the general principles that govern the creation,
organization, application, and structure of information, as well as the
implications of information science and technology to law, ethics, and
social policy. Subjects will include, but not be limited to, such diverse
topics as computer applications in non-technical and technical areas, basic
hardware and software concepts, information/data management and retrieval,
telecommunications, user behavior and evaluation, information policy,
multimedia applications and electronic commerce. A non-exclusive list of
application domains includes engineering, the social sciences,
environmental sciences, agriculture, libraries, geography, health, law and
business. Close interaction and collaboration with traditional and existing
Penn State programs will be encouraged and strong partnerships with
industry and government are already developed and expected to increase
significantly.

Candidates should hold a doctorate degree. The discipline of the
candidate's education is not as important as having strong interest and
experience in computer applications within that discipline. Qualifications
include a strong interest in and commitment to teaching at both
undergraduate and graduate level. Candidates should also have strong
research potential or experience in areas consistent with the information
orientation of the School and have the potential or experience to obtain
and direct funded research projects. Screening of candidates has begun and
applications will be accepted until the positions are filled. A full
curriculum vita, a one-page statement of professional interest, and the
names, addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses of three
references should be submitted to:

Chair, Faculty Search Committee
School of Information Sciences & Technology
504 Rider Building I, Box W
120 South Burrowes Street
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802

Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the
diversity of workforce.

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

III. NOTICES

III.A.1.
Fr: Gerry Mckiernan <GMCKIERN@gwgate.lib.iastate.edu>
Re: "News from the Field" / Journal of Internet
    Cataloging: RFSubmissions

For my next "News from the Field" column for the _Journal of Internet
Cataloging: The International Quarterly of Digital Organization,
Classification, and Access_ (JIC), I would appreciate any and all news
items about current or planned efforts for organizing or providing enhanced
access to Internet or Web resources

The homepage for JIC is

http://www.haworthpressinc.com/jic/

I am interested in relevant conferences, workshops, discussions,
institutes, presentations, and/or other programs. I am also interested in
current or completed digital/digitization projects, as well as noteworthy
articles, reports, journals, newsletters or other print or electronic
publications.

The full-text of my latest column is available at:

http://www.haworthpressinc.com/jic/jic2nr2news.html

I would most appreciate receiving any submissions for my next column no
later than August 15th.

Thanks!
Regards,
/Gerry McKiernan
Curator, CyberStacks(sm)
and
Theoretical Librarian
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011
gerrymck@iastate.edu

**********

III.B.1.
Fr: Mounia Lalmas <mounia@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>
Re: Searching for Information: AI and IR Approaches

SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND INFORMATION
RETRIEVAL APPROACHES

Advanced call for participation and posters

A Colloquium organised by the Professional Group IEE A4 (Artificial
Intelligence) Co-sponsored by the BCS IRSG group.

11-12 November, 1999
The IEE Teacher's Building, Glasgow

AIMS AND SCOPE
The amount of available information is currently growing at an incredible
rate; a particular example of this is the Internet. To use this
information, whether for business or leisure purpose, we need techniques
and tools to allow for fast, effective and efficient access to large
amounts of stored information.

The field of information retrieval (IR), and more recently, the field of
artificial intelligence (AI) have been looking at this problem. The IR
field has developed successful methods to deal effectively with huge
amounts of information, whereas the AI field has developed methods to learn
the user's information needs, extract information from text, and represent
the semantics of information.

However, both fields have suffered from the fact that each community is
often unaware of the work of the other.

This event brings together the two fields of AI and IR, to allow for the
sharing and combination of techniques, with the aim to improve the search
process.

The event is composed of presentations given by leading researchers in
AI and IR that are looking at developing efficient and effective access to
large amount of stored information. The event will present both theoretical
and applicative results on the use of IR and AI techniques to seek
information. This event is a first contribution to bridge the gap between
the two research communities.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
The event will be of direct relevance to academics and post-graduate
students working in the field, industrial-commercial researchers, and
end-users of search systems. Participants will benefit from hearing about
current theoretical and practical developments across a wide range of
activities.

INVITED SPEAKERS
The organising committee is pleased to announce the participation of the
following invited speakers:
       Theo Huibers, DOXiS, The Netherlands
       Keith van Rijsbergen, University of Glasgow, Scotland
       Stephen Robertson, Microsoft Research Ltd, England
       Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, England
       Susan Craw, Robert Gordon University, Scotland
       Dieter Fensel, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
       Carole Goble, University of Manchester, England
       Marc Moens, Language Technology Group, Scotland
       John P Eakins, University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England
       Yves Chiaramella, Laboratoire CLIPS-IMAG, France
       Gianni Amati, Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Italy
       Karen Sparck-Jones, Computer Laboratory, England

CONTRIBUTIONS
To offer better interaction with participants, the event will contain
poster sessions. These enable participants to present late-breaking
results, work in progress, or work that is best presented interactively or
graphically. If you are interested in presenting your work as a poster at
this event, a description of 1,000 words or less of the work that will be
covered in your poster should be submitted. Poster submissions should be
sent to arrive by 1 September, 1999, to:
         Alison Cawsey
         Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering
         Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS
         Email: alison@cee.hw.ac.uk

REGISTRATION
For a registration form (when available) please contact: IEE
Events Office, Savoy Place, London  WC2R 0BL, Tel: +44 (0)20 7344
5732/5733, Fax: +44 (0)20 7497 3633, Email: events@iee.org.uk. Delegates
must arrange their own accommodation.

ORGANISOR
Mounia Lalmas, Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of
   London, England
Alison Cawsey, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland
Keith van Rijsbergen, University of Glasgow, Scotland

VENUE
The IEE building in Glasgow is centrally located with excellent facilities.
See http://www.iee.org.uk/SEC/building.htm.

WEB SITE
Tba

CORRESPONDENCE:
Direct correspondence, inquiries related to this event should be addressed to:
       Mounia Lalmas
       Department of Computer Science
       Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London
       London E1 4NS, UK.
       Email: mounia.lalmas@dcs.qmw.ac.uk

       Alison Cawsey
       Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering
       Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS
       Email: alison@cee.hw.ac.uk

PROGRAMME (provisional)

Thursday 11
10.00 Registration and Coffee
10.45 Opening and introduction
11.00 Yorick Wilks
The issues of representations in AI, IR and NLP
11.45 Dieter Fensel
Applying AI to the web
12.30 Lunch and poster session
14.00 John P Eakins
How smart are current image retrieval techniques?
14.45 Carole Goble
A picture representing triumph or similar: classification based navigation
and retrieval for picture archives
3.30 Coffee
4:00 Theo Huibers
Intelligent information retrieval agents
4.45 Marc Moens
Personalised information objects

Friday 12
9.15 Opening and introduction
9.30 Karen Sparck-Jones
IR lessons for AI
10.15 Coffee
10.45 Susan Craw
Reinforcement Learning for Information Seeking
11.30 Gianni Amati
Learning by examples as relevance feedback, and relevance feedback as
learning by examples
12.15 Lunch and poster session
13.30 Keith van Rijsbergen
Quantum Logic: A new paradigm for IR
14.15 Stephen Robertson
Probabilistic retrieval: Thresholding for automatic filtering
15.00 Coffee
15.30 Yves Chiaramella
tba
16:15: Discussion
17.30 Closing

**********

III.B.2.
Fr: Toshihiko Nozue <nozue@rd.nacsis.ac.jp>
Re: NTCIR/IREX Joint Workshop: CFPapers

Call For Participation
NTCIR/IREX Joint Workshop
- Information Retrieval and Information Extraction -
http://www.rd.nacsis.ac.jp/~ntcadm/workshop/joint/

Co-organized by NTCIR/NACSIS and IREX
In cooperation with IPSJ, SIG-FI/IPSJ

September 1, 1999
KKR Hotel Tokyo
Tokyo, JAPAN

The joint workshop of NTCIR (NACSIS Test Collection for IR) and IREX
(Information Retrieval and EXtraction) will be held. Your participation is
most welcome.

o Date:
    9:00 - 17:00  September 1, 1999  (18:00 - 18:30  Banquet)

o Venue:
    KKR Hotel Tokyo
      1-4-1 Ohtemachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-0004 JAPAN
      Phone: +81-3-3287-2921; Fax: +81-3-3287-2913
      Just in front of the Takebashi Station of the Tozai Line Subway
     (0 minute to walk!!).  Situated in 5-minite drive from Tokyo
      Station and across the street from the Imperial Palace.  From
      the Narita International Airport to the Tokyo Station, there
      are frequent services of Shuttle trains and Limousine buses.

o Fee:
    Admission is free
    Banquet: 8,500 Yen per person

o Application for Participation:
      Send e-mail to ntcadm@rd.nacsis.ac.jp with (1) your name, (2)
      affiliation, (3) postal address, phone/fax number, e-mail
      address, (4) participation in reception or not.  Participation
      will be first-come-first-served base.

o Program (preliminary):
     9:30 -  9:45   Opening Remarks
     9:45 - 11:00   Keynote Speech(1) "TREC": Donna Harman (NIST, USA)
    11:15 - 12:00   NTCIR Workshop Overview:  Noriko Kando (NACSIS,
                    Japan)
    13:30 - 14:45   Keynote Speech(2) "TBA":  Ralph Grishman (NYU, USA)
    15:00 - 15:45   IREX Workshop Overview:   Satoshi Sekine (NYU, USA)
    15:45 - 16:45   Panel Discussion
    16:45 - 17:00   Closing Remarks
      -   -   -   -   -   -
    18:00 - 19:30   Reception

o Contact Information:
    NTCIR/IREX Joint Workshop Project (Attn: Toshihiko NOZUE)
    E-mail: ntcadm@rd.nacsis.ac.jp; Fax: +81-3-5395-7064

 * Officail Language is English.
 * NTCIR Workshop is supported by JSPS "Research for the Future
   Program:
   Studies on Ubiquitous Information Systems for Utilization of Highly
   Distributed Information Resources."

**********

III.C.1.
Fr: Amanda Spink <Spink@lis.admin.unt.edu>
Re: Amanda Spink Joins New Penn State School of Information
    Sciences and Technology

Amanda Spink, formally at the University of North Texas, has been appointed
Associate Professor at the new Penn State School of Information Sciences
and Technology (PSU-IST) [http://www.ist.psu.edu]. PSU-IST is a major
initiative by Penn State President Graham Spanier to develop an
interdisciplinary and leading edge program in information sciences and
technology. Amanda is one of the first five faculty at PSU-IST and one of
the first three senior faculty. She has an outstanding record of teaching
and research in information science and retrieval. Twenty-five additional
faculty will be sought over the next 3-4 years. Faculty positions at all
levels are currently open for PSU-IST (see the PSU-IST web site for
details). Interested faculty can also contact Amanda Spink at the ACM SIGIR
conference or spink@ist.psu.edu after August 9.

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

IV. PROJECTS

IV.C.1.
Fr: Maria Zemankova <mzemanko@nsf.gov>
Re: NSF Alan T. Waterman Award: Nominations Due 10/31/99

Alan T. Waterman Award: 1999 Award Nominations Information (nsf99134)
Program Announcements & Information is now available from the NSF Online
Document System

http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf99134
(MS Word fill-in forms and PDF files included)

Nominations and references must be postmarked by October 31, 1999.

Excerpt:
The Award is presented annually by the National Science Foundation and
National Science Board to an outstanding young researcher in any field of
science or engineering funded by the National Science Foundation. It
consists of a citation, a bronze medal, and a nonrestrictive grant of
$500,000 over a 3-year period for scientific research or advanced study in
the biological, mathematical, medical, engineering, physical, social or
other sciences at the institution of the recipient's choice.

Questions concerning the procedures, requests for additional information,
or nomination or reference forms should be directed to the Committee's
Executive Secretary, Mrs. Susan Fannoney, by <mailto:sfannone@nsf.gov> or
by telephone (703-306-1096).

**********

IV.C.2.
Fr: Stuart Peters <s.peters@soc.surrey.ac.uk>
Re: Funded Studentship in Electronic Information/Publishing

ESRC CASE STUDENTSHIP -- DEADLINE AUGUST 14

NEW TECHNOLOGIES, ELECTRONIC CONSUMPTION AND STUDENT PARTICIPATION
IN THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

A full time ESRC CASE research studentship beginning in September 1999 is
available in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey.

The studentship is in collaboration with Sage Publications Ltd. The student
would be jointly supervised by Dr. Nina Wakeford and Professor
Nigel Fielding.

The student should ideally possess skills in qualitative research and
internet use. The standard ESRC research student conditions apply, but the
studentship is enhanced by an additional allowance of 1625 pounds pa.

Further particulars may be found on the Department of Sociology web site
<http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/CASEnw.htm> or contact Agnes McGill  at
<mailto:A.McGill@soc.surrey.ac.uk>
Fax: +44 (0) 1483 259551
Phone: +44 (0) 1483 259450.

The closing date for this CASE application is **14 AUGUST 1999**. Please
complete the University Application Form, obtainable from Agnes McGill.

Candidates must meet standard eligibility criteria for ESRC studentships
<http://www.esrc.ac.uk/>.

Stuart Peters
Dept of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford GU2 5XH
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1483 259292
Fax: +44 (0)1483 259551

Electronic Publishing Resource Service -- EPRESS http://www.epress.ac.uk/

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

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