IR-L Digest, Vol.XVII, No.4, Issue 488

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

IRLIST Digest                                       ISSN 1064-6965
January 24, 2000
Volume XVII, Number 4
Issue 488
******************************************************************

  I. QUERIES
        1. Information Retrieval Agents
 II. JOBS
        1. Dalhousie U.: CS: Tenure-Track Faculty Positions
        2. City University, London: Research Assistants, CS
        3. Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland: Research Assistant, CS
III. NOTICES
     A. Publications
        1. Electronic Markets: CFPapers 
     B. Meetings
        1. 7th International Symposium on Social Communication
        2. ACL-2000: CFPapers
        3. ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop on Syntactic and Semantic Complexity
           in Natural Language Processing Systems: CFPapers 
        4. CIA-2000: Final Reminder: CFPapers
        5. ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop on Automatic Summarization:
           2nd CFPapers
        6. SIGIR 2000: CFPanel & Demonstration Proposals
        7. HICSS Minitrack: Digital Documents - Understanding &
           Communication
 IV. PROJECTS
     C. Awards, Fellowships, Grants, & Scholarships
        1. NSF SMETE Digital Library Solicitation

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

I. QUERIES

I.1.
Fr: Giovanni Azúa García <Giovanni@bc.gov.cu> 
Re: Information Retrieval Agents 
 
Hi all,

I'm working in making a MAS approach for creating an "Intelligent Search
Engine" to index primarily relational databases and later URLs and files. I
think it would be a very valuable tool and would increase the flexibility of
having Relational Database advantages together with documental facilities like
fast retrieval of relevant information. I'm planning to add intelligence to it
using AI approaches by means of a Inference Machine maybe or some other way of
reasoning and learning: Statistical approaches, ANN, Text Mining, Inductive
Logic etc. Thus create more than just grammatical or syntactical relations
like
could be synonyms or family words, formally called word classes in the IR
field. For example, if I search for "red dogs", it won't match something that
talks about "Crimson Dobermans", but that might have been exactly what I was
looking for - it requires the search engine to "understand" something of the
"meaning" of the search terms, rather than just applying a brute-force
index to
them. The "understanding" is given by smart approaches to establish semantic
relations between words or even maybe expressions.

I'm planning also to customize searches based on user preferences having
initially an effective weighting function for word-class and documents as
result of automatic text analysis that could be improved based on users
selections, formally called feedback.

In the first place I wonder if anyone of you know about standards for Data
Structures and the famous Inverted File structure for IR. For example, I think
it could be a good approach for fast retrieval of words to have as a Data
Structure a Red-Black tree (I would like to hear comments about this) and have
each word pointing to a map establishing word-word syntactic and semantic
relations creating a class of words (again formally called thesauri) then
improving the user queries. I want to find out also the best way for
serializing all this information for fast loading and have the best backing
time. I have seen MICROISIS has six files for its inverted file.

I would greatly appreciate if you point me to some resources on Internet
like a
Java/C/C++ library of classes freely available, for example, to have in little
development time an Z39.50 or WAIS standard client running. At least to have
the framework with the very basic features of a search engine. This help would
be greatly appreciated. I'm also interested in finding any kind of open source
project related to this or anyone interested in exchanging code and ideas with
me in the subject please e-mail me privately. 

Thanks in advance, 
Giovanni
BCs. Giovanni Azúa García 
Bachelor in Computer Science 
Banking and Economic Information Center 
Central Bank of Cuba 
ICQ# 20725388 
e-mail: Giovanni@bc.gov.cu

BCs. Giovanni Azúa García 
Bachelor in Computer Science 
Banking and Economic Information Center 
Central Bank of Cuba 
ICQ# 20725388 
e-mail: Giovanni@bc.gov.cu

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

II. JOBS

II.1.
Fr: Mike Shepherd <shepherd@cs.dal.ca> 
Re: Dalhousie U.: CS: Tenure-Track Faculty Positions

Dalhousie University 
Faculty Positions in Computer Science 

Dalhousie University invites applications for tenure track positions at all
levels within the new Faculty of Computer Science. The Faculty has a combined
complement of 23 faculty positions and approximately 600 undergraduate majors
and 135 master's and doctoral students. The expansion and development of the
Faculty is a priority for the University. The Faculty will continue to
experience considerable growth over the next few years in all aspects; faculty
complement, student enrollment, funding levels and facilities. The Faculty
recently moved to a new building and has secured significant infrastructure
funding for 2000 and 2001. New research laboratories are planned, and
initiatives involving multidisciplinary research projects with university and
industrial partners are under development. As an example a new Master of
electronic Commerce degree is now offered in collaboration with the Faculties
of Law and Business.

Applicants should have a Ph.D in Computer Science or related area and show a
strong commitment to and aptitude for teaching and research. Rank and salary
will be commensurate with qualifications. The major research foci of the
Faculty are Network Centric Computing and Software Engineering. Individuals
with expertise in these and related areas, such as, networking, HCI,
distributed applications, etc., are especially encouraged to apply. Successful
candidates will be required to teach in both the undergraduate and graduate
programs, to establish research programs, to contribute to the administration
of the Faculty and will also be encouraged to establish significant industrial
connections.

Dalhousie University is located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is the largest
city in Atlantic Canada and affords its residents outstanding quality of
life. 
Applications should include a curriculum vitae and the names and complete
addresses of three references. They should be addressed to: 

The Chair, Appointments Committee 
Faculty of Computer Science 
Dalhousie University 
6050 University Avenue 
Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada B3H 1W5
E-mail: appointments@cs.dal.ca
URL: { HYPERLINK "http://www.cs.dal.ca" }www.cs.dal.ca

Applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until all available
positions
are filled. In accordance with Canadian immigration requirements, priority
will
be given to Canadian citizens and permanent residents of Canada. Dalhousie
University is an Employment Equity and Affirmative Action employer. The
University encourages applications from qualified Aboriginal peoples, persons
with a disability, racially visible peoples, and women. 

**********

II.2.
Fr: Andy MacFarlane <andym@soi.city.ac.uk> 
Re: City University, London: Research Assistants, CS 

Research Assistants 
£18,420 to £21,049 per annum 
Fixed term for 12 months (extendable)

Applications are invited for two Research Assistant posts to work on an EC
Fifth Framework funded project, which is concerned with the development of
advanced Web-based information retrieval and management tools.

Post 1 - The successful candidate is expected to have demonstrated ability in
server-side Web applications development, including database connectivity.
Technical skills needed include C/Perl, UNIX development, and working
knowledge
of server API development. Some knowledge of information retrieval principles,
or previous experience of implementing 

Internet search tools, is required. 
Ref: INFS/3/I

Post 2: - The successful candidate is expected to have demonstrated ability in
software design using C and UNIX. Candidates with a PhD or research experience
in Information Retrieval or a related area will be given priority. 

Ref: INFS/7/I

More information about the posts can be found on:
http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/jobs.html 

Informal enquires may be made to Dr. Murat Karamuftuoglu: Tel: 020 7477 8382, 
Email: hmk@soi.city.ac.uk. 

For further particulars and an application form, send a postcard to Emily
Crofts, Personnel Department, City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V
0HB or send an email to: E.L.Crofts@city.ac.uk, detailing your name, address
and the relevant post reference number. Deaf people can reach us through the
minicom on 0171 4778931. Closing date: 9 February 2000.

**********

II.3.
Fr: Fionn Murtagh <fmdist@hotmail.com> 
Re: Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland: Research Assistant, CS

A Research Assistant position will be available soon in Computer Science, The
Queen's University of Belfast, in the area of visualization of user
behavior in
information spaces. Please let Fionn Murtagh (address below) know of your
interest in this position. A short description of the work to be undertaken
follows.

The European (5th Framework) project "IRAIA - Getting Orientation in Complex
Information Spaces as an Emergent Behavior of Autonomous Information Agents",
which will last for two years, will be starting in March 2000.

"Information retrieval systems of the future will be huge information
repositories, distributed all over the world. Even the users will
contribute to
these repositories by communicating their experiences to other users who
follow
their footsteps. IRAIA's design metaphor focuses on the ants' system for
communicating information. Navigating the web should allow people to leave
pointers for those who might also navigate along the same paths."

QUB work in this project will include the development of an architecture of
different layers of abstraction that support the construction of a coordinate
system based on ontologies and investigation of user behavior. Such user
profiling will be based on information visualizations such as Kohonen
self-organizing feature maps or similar active maps based on linkage graphs.
These will be interfaced to the agent (CORBA, EJB) environment used. In more
open research, the fact that map visualizations are used means that we will
also seek to relate and exploit intriguing technologies used in digital image
transmission - thinwire transmission technologies, and foveation-based
strategies, based on multiscale transforms.

Prof. F. Murtagh, School of Computer Science, The Queen's 
University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland 
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/~F.Murtagh f.murtagh@qub.ac.uk 
Centre for Image and Vision Systems http://www.qub.ac.uk/ivs 

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

III. NOTICES

III.A.1.
Fr: Brigette.Buchet@unisg.ch 
Re: Electronic Markets: CFPapers 

EM: Electronic Markets: 10:4
Editor-in-Chief: Beat F. Schmid
Guest Editors: 
Ulrike Lechner 
Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva 
Yao-Hua Tan

Dear Colleagues:

EM -- Electronic Markets: The International Journal of Electronic Commerce &
Business Media is a key forum for advancing the understanding and practice of
electronic markets and commerce. The objective in this issue is to explore
community building and community development, i.e., community management as a
key success factor in the digital economy. It differentiates business
models in
the digital economy from traditional ones. These communities may be
constituted
as Internet shops, portal sites, groupware systems, electronic auctions or
billboards. Product-centered communities as well as communities of interest
are
relevant for electronic marketing, as for example the reader communities at
Amazon.com, The Well, or Dreamworks. Another example are communities that form
value chains, such as single product manufacturing consortia or flexible
consumer-driven organization of global supply chains. Further examples are
topic and technology oriented communities such as Open EDI trading
communities,
Open Trading on the Internet (OTP), or EDI/XML, in addition to the
community-oriented programming of Linux. As the mentioned examples show,
online
communities differ in their orientation. The features, that all types of
communities share are common interests, practices, languages and ontologies
with common semantics as well as normative issues. The new type of online
community is driven by platforms that make use of the new digital media.
Moreover, there is a close connection between platform design, community
management, and business models. The successful business model is the one that
recognizes and structures the goals and values of the community and the
successful platform is the one that supports these with services. For example,
in the setting of supply chain management, services and quality of these
services are essential values, whereas in the case of online selling
communities, rating systems or recommendation systems are pivotal.
 
We are calling for papers that address communities, their platforms and
community-related business models as critical success factors in the digital
economy. In particular strategies, frameworks, platforms and visions that
support the management of communities are of interest. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
1. Community-related business models 
2. Design principles for community platforms 
3. Case studies and topologies of online communities 
4. Best practices and lessons learned

Some of the papers will be culled from two minitracks of HICSS 2000
"Communities in Electronic Commerce: Concepts, Models and Formal Aspects" and
"Community Supporting Platforms". EM accepts short papers up to 2500 words, or
long papers up to 5000 words. Please refer to the Contributors' section for
more information at http://www.electronicmarkets.org/

The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2000.

Regarding Electronic Markets in general or other topics, please contact
Brigette Buchet, Executive Editor at em.editors@netacademy.org. For more
information or to submit a paper, please contact any one of the Guest Editors
listed below:

Ulrike.Lechner@unisg.ch 
Katarina Stanoevska@unisg.ch 
Yao-Hua.Tan@fac.fbk.eur.nl
 
EM - Electronic Markets 
Editorial Office:                  Editor-in-Chief: 
mcm institute for Media and        Professor Beat F. Schmid 
Communications Management          Executive Editor: 
University of St.Gallen            Brigette Buchet 
Mueller-Friedberg-Strasse 8        Assistant Editors: 
CH-9000 St.Gallen | J              ohannes Haus 

Phone 0041/71/224 27 74            eMail: em.editors@netacademy.org 
Fax 0041/71/224 27 71              http://www.electronicmarkets.org/ 

**********

III.B.1.
Fr: leonel@lingapli.ciges.inf.cu 
Re: 7th International Symposium on Social Communication 

SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
ON SOCIAL COMMUNICATION
CENTER OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS
On its 30th Anniversary
SANTIAGO DE CUBA
JANUARY 23-26, 2001

The Center of Applied Linguistics of the Santiago de Cuba's branch of the
Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment, is pleased to announce on
the occasion of its 30 Anniversary, the Seventh International Symposium on
Social Communication. The event will be held in Santiago de Cuba January 23rd
through the 26th, 2001. This interdisciplinary event will focus on social
communication processes from the points of view of Applied Linguistics,
Computational Linguistics, Medicine, Voice Processing, Mass Media, and
Ethnology and Folklore.

The Symposium will be also sponsored by:
.. University of Oriente, Cuba
.. Higher Institute for Medical Sciences, Santiago de Cuba
.. Pedagogical University 'Frank Pais', Santiago de Cuba
.. Information for Development Agency, Cuba
.. University of Twente, The Netherlands
.. National Council of Scientific Research, Italy
.. University of Leon, Spain
.. University of Malaga, Spain
.. University of Granada, Spain
.. Humboldt University, Germany

Authors will be allowed to present only one paper pertaining to the following
disciplines:
1. Applied Linguistics: 
- Spanish and foreign language teaching
- Spanish as a second language
- Phonetics and Phonology
- Lexicology and Lexicography
- Morphology and Syntax
- Sociolinguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Textual Linguistics and Pragmalinguistics
- Terminology
- Translations
2. Computational Linguistics:
- Software related to linguistic research
- Automated grammatical tagging of texts
- Automated dictionaries
- Software related to the teaching of mother tongues and foreign
  languages
- Related issues
3. Voice Processing:
- Research related to Cry Analysis
- Applications of analysis, synthesis and voice-recognition
- Artificial intelligence and voice processing
4. Medical specialties related to speech and voice and with Social 
   Communication in general:
- Logopedy and Phoniatry
- Neurology
- Otorhinolaringology
- Stomatology
- Child Psychiatry
- Pediatrics
- Cronobiology
5. Mass Media:
- Linguistic research related to the speech of journalists, actors and
  radio and television announcers.
- Textual Analysis of radio and television programs, and of print and 
  electronic media articles
6. Ethnology and Folklore:
- Research related to Social Communication Activities that will take
  place within the event are:
- Pre-Symposium seminars
- Discussion of papers in commissions
- Master conferences
- Workshops
- Posters

PRE-SYMPOSIUM SEMINARS
The Symposium will be preceded by two seminars that will be taught by
prestigious specialists to be announced. The seminars will take place Monday,
January 22nd of 2001 and will focus on the following subjects:
- Spanish as a second language
- Latest trends in Computational Linguistics

Participants should say in advance what pre-symposium seminars they want to
take part in.

WORKSHOP
A workshop entitled 'Applied Linguistics in the Spanish-speaking World'
will be
held on the occasion of the 30th Anniversary of the Center of Applied
Linguistics.

MASTER LECTURES 
During the symposium four master lectures will be delivered by:
- Prof. Dr. Anton Nijholt, Professor and Researcher, Twente University, 
  Enschede, Holland.
- Dr. Hiroto Ueda, Professor and 
  Researcher, Department of Spanish, Tokyo University, Japan.
- Dr. Mercedes Cathcart Roca, Professor and Researcher, Faculty of
  Humanities, University of Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.
- Dr. Manuel Vilares Ferro, Professor and Researcher, Vigo University,
  Spain.

ABSTRACTS
The deadline of submission of paper abstracts is July 1st, 2000. They should
not exceed 250 words. Notification of acceptance of a paper by the Symposium's
Scientific Committee will be sent before July 30th, 2000.

PAPERS
To enable the Organizing Committee to include the Proceedings as part of the
Symposium's documentation, accepted papers must be sent before September 1st,
2000, with the following requirements:
1. The paper will not exceed 5 pages including graphics, footnotes and
bibliography.
2. It should be written using Word 6.0 or Word 7.0 for Windows and sent to the
Symposium's Executive Secretary either via e-mail (attachment) or by mailing a
3½-inch diskette.
3. Each page must be written in an A4 (mail type) format with left, right,
top,
and bottom margin of 2.5 cm. 
4. The paper must be written in one of the event's official languages:
Spanish,
English or French.

Instructions for paper submission:
1. Write down the authors' names, one under the other, at the left top of the
first page, all in Arial bold capital letters, 10 points (Word 6.0 or 7.0).
Under the authors' names should appear in bold (only initials capital letters)
the institution, city, country and e-mail address if available.
2. In a separate line, at the center, the title of the paper must be
written in
Arial bold, Italics, 11 points size letters.
3. The text will follow -not in bold- with the same Arial letter, 10 points
size and leaving one space between lines.
4. Paragraphs will have no indentation. Spaces between paragraphs will be of 3
points.
5. Section titles will be written in Arial bold, and sub-sections titles will
be written in Arial Italic.
6. Footnotes will appear at the end of each page in Arial 9 points size
letters.

Presentation time will be 15 minutes and 5 minutes for discussion.

Authors must advise in advance if they will need a tape recorder, video set,
computer or other kind of equipment for presentation.

POSTERS
Posters should be 1 meter wide and 1.2 meter high. Authors will be responsible
of displaying them in the morning of the presentation. Abstract submission
should include the word POSTERS. For proceedings, follow instructions above.
Notice: unlike full papers, posters will not exceed 3 pages.

All mail or inquiries should be addressed to:
Dr. Eloina Miyares Bermudez 
Secretaria Ejecutiva 
Comite Organizador 
VII Simposio Internacional 
de Comunicacion Social 
Centro de Linguistica Aplicada 
Apartado Postal 4067, Vista Alegre 
Santiago de Cuba 4, Cuba 90400 
Telephones: (53-226) 42760 or 
(53-226) 41081 
Fax: (53-226) 41579 
E-mail: leonel@lingapli.ciges.inf.cu 
http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/Cuba/index.html

OFFICIAL LANGUAGES: 
Spanish, English and French

IMPORTANT REMINDERS
- Abstract Submission deadline:                        July 1st, 2000
- Notification on paper's approval by Scientific 
  Committee:                                           July 30, 2000
- Delivery of papers either by e-mail or by mail
  using 3½-inch diskette:                              Sept. 1, 2000
- Pre-Symposium seminars:                              Jan. 22, 2001
- 7th International Symposium on Social Communication: Jan. 23-26, 2001

**********

III.B.2.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu> 
Re: ACL-2000: CFPapers 

ACL 2000 Call For Papers
38th Annual Meeting of
the Association for Computational Linguistics
3--6 October, 2000
Hong Kong

The Association for Computational Linguistics invites the submission of papers
for its 38th Annual Meeting. As was the case with last year's ACL conference,
the technical sessions of the conference will be of two kinds. There will be
General Sessions as well as a number of special Thematic Sessions organized
around themes proposed by members of the computational linguistics community.
For the General Sessions, papers are invited on substantial, original, and
unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including,
but not limited to: pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon;
phonetics, phonology and morphology; interpreting and generating spoken and
written language; linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of
language; language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction;
corpus-based language modeling; multi-lingual processing, machine translation
and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems;
approaches to coordinating the linguistic with other modalities in multi-media
systems; message and narrative understanding systems; tools and resources; and
evaluation of systems.

Papers submitted to the Thematic Sessions are more narrowly targeted at
specific topics. The list of Thematic Sessions is as follows:
T1: NLP and Open-Domain Question Answering from Text 
T2: Machine Learning and Statistical NLP for Dialogue 
T3: Text Summarization 
T4: Theoretical and Technical Approaches for Asian Language Processing --
Similarities and Differences among Languages

Further information on the individual themes and topics appropriate to each
can
be obtained from the ACL-2000 conference website 
(http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/).

Requirements
Requirements are the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to
the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions; a separate Call for Student
Workshop papers will provide the information on requirements for the Student
Workshop submissions. Papers should describe original work; they should
emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate
clearly
the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate,
concrete
evaluation results should be included. A paper accepted for presentation at
the
ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting
with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted
to other conferences must indicate this on the title page. (See Submission
Format below.) 

Reviewing
The reviewing of the papers submitted to the General Sessions and the Thematic
Sessions will be blind. Reviewing of papers submitted to the General Sessions
will be managed by an international Conference Program Committee consisting of
Area Chairs, each of whom will have the assistance of a team of reviewers.
Reviewing of papers for the Thematic Sessions will be managed by the chairs of
the Thematic Sessions, with the assistance of teams of reviewers. Final
decisions on the technical program (both General Sessions and Thematic
Sessions) will be made by the Conference Program Committee. Each submission
will be reviewed by at least three reviewers. 

Submission Procedure
The format of submissions is the same regardless of whether you are submitting
a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions. Papers may not
exceed
3200 words (exclusive of title page and references). Papers outside the
specified length are subject to be rejected without review. We strongly
recommend the use of ACL latex style files or Microsoft Word Style files
tailored for this year's conference. These will be available from the ACL-2000
Conference Website (http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/). These style files
include a
place for the paper ID code (see below) and word count and allow for a
graceful
transition to the style required for publication. A description of the format
will also be available in case you are unable to use these style files
directly. If you are unable to access this webpage, please send email to
acl2k@cis.udel.edu.

The reviewing of papers submitted to the General Session or the Thematic
Sessions will be blind. Hence the title page and paper should not include the
authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity (e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...") should be
avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991)
...". You must first register your submission. This can be done by filling out
an electronic form that will be accessible from the conference webpage 
http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000/ after February 15, 2000. The form requires a
specification of the title and authors of the paper, as well as a preliminary
abstract and list of keywords. Submitting the form will return to you via
email
a paper ID code which must appear on your submission. Also, please use the
paper ID code in all correspondences with the program committee co-chairs. If
you have any difficulty using the electronic registration form, please send
email to acl2k@cis.udel.edu with all of the title page information (see below)
plus the authors' names and affiliations. 

As reviewing will be blind, a separate title page and identification page will
be required. The title page should include the following information:
Title: 
Paper ID Code: (generated upon paper registration) 
Topic Area: one or two general topic areas 
Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area 
Which Session: T1, T2, T3, T4, or G (you must choose one) 
Word Count, excluding title page and references: 
Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify): 
Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines)
T1, T2, T3, and T4 correspond to the four Theme Sessions and G corresponds to
the General Session. A paper can be submitted to at most one session. The
identification page should contain all of the information in the title page,
but in addition must include the authors' names, affiliations, and email
addresses. The format for the identification page should be as follows:
Title: 
Paper ID Code: (generated upon paper registration) 
Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses 
Topic Area: one or two general topic areas 
Keywords: Up to 5 keywords specifying subject area 
Which Session: T1, T2, T3, T4, or G (you must choose one) 
Word Count, excluding title page and references: 
Under Consideration for other Conferences (specify): 
Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines)

Submissions must be received by April 7th, 2000. Late submissions (those
arriving on or after April 8th) will be rejected without review. The Program
Committee is not responsible for postal delays or other mailing problems. Six
(6) paper copies (printed on both sides of the page if possible) including the
title page should be submitted to the following address:
ACL-2000 Submission 
c/o K. Vijay-Shanker 
103 Smith Hall 
Department of Computer and Information Sciences 
University of Delaware 
Newark, DE 19716 
USA

Two of the six copies must have the identification page attached. In addition,
strictly for the purposes of partially-automated routing of papers to area
chairs and reviewers, authors should send an electronic version of the paper
(without the identification page) to acl-routing@cis.udel.edu. Please include
the paper ID code in the subject line of your email. Latex, postscript, pdf,
Microsoft word and plain text are all acceptable formats for the electronic
version. The electronic version should also be received by April 7, 2000. 

Please note that as the electronic version will only be used to assist the PC
in distributing the papers to appropriate reviewers, this supplementary
electronic version in no way replaces the required hardcopy submissions. If
you
have any difficulty in submitting the electronic version, please send mail to
the pc co-chairs at acl2k@cis.udel.edu.

Acknowledgment of receipt of the hardcopy submission will be emailed soon
after
receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email) around
June 15, 2000. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final
camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice.
Authors of accepted papers will have to submit a signed copyright release
statement along with the final camera-ready papers. The dates here pertain
only
to the General Sessions and Thematic sessions. 
Paper registration deadline: March 31, 2000 
Paper submissions deadline:  April 7, 2000 
Notification of acceptance:  June 15, 2000 
ACL 2000 Conference:         October 3--6, 2000

Submission Questions
Authors unable to comply with the above submission procedure should contact
the
program committee co-chairs sufficiently ahead of the submission deadline so
that alternate arrangements can be made. All queries regarding the General
Sessions and Thematic sessions of ACL-2000 should be sent to
acl2k@cis.udel.edu; this forwards to both PC co-chairs. 

Changning Huang (PC Co-Chair)      K. Vijay-Shanker (PC Co-Chair) 
Microsoft Research, China          CIS Department 
5F, Beijing Sigma Center           University of Delaware 
No.49, Zhichun Road                Newark, DE 19716, USA 
Beijing 100080, P.R.C
cnhuang@microsoft.com              vijay@cis.udel.edu 
Tel: +86 10 6261-7711 -5760        Tel: +1 302 831 1952 
Fax: +86 10 8809-7305              Fax: +1 302 831 8458

Hitoshi Iida (General Chair)       Aravind K. Joshi (Honorary Chair)
Speech and Language Information    Department of Computer and 
Processing Lab                     Information Sciences 
SONY Computer Science Labs, Inc.   University of Pennsylvania 
Tokyo 141-0022, Japan              Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA
iida@csl.sony.co.jp                joshi@linc.cis.upenn.edu 
Tel: +81 3 5448 4380               Tel: +1 215 898 0359 
Fax: +81 3 5447 1942               Fax: +1 215 573 9247

**********

III.B.3.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu> 
Re: ANLP/NAACL2000 Workshop: CFPapers 

Syntactic and Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing Systems
Workshop to be held in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000
Sunday, April 30 2000
Seattle, Washington.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION 
The last decade has seen an explosion in the work done in the development of
robust natural language processing systems. A common methodology used in
building these systems has been to analyze a sample of the data available
(either manually, or automatically for training statistical systems), build
statistical/heuristical schemas based upon the analysis, and test the
system on
a blind sample of the data. Due to this commonly used paradigm, an important
area of research that has not been given the attention it deserves is the
estimation of syntactic and semantic complexity faced by these systems in the
tasks they perform.

At the AAAI 1999 Fall Symposium on Question Answering Systems, the problem of
semantic complexity, a topic of a 90 minutes panel, motivated a lot of
interest
and discussion. To continue the investigation of this important issue, in this
workshop, we will address the question of complexity as it pertains to the
syntax and semantics of natural language. In particular, the workshop will
seek
to address the following areas:
1) How can we model syntactic and semantic complexity for formal models of
natural language? 
2) How does complexity impact acquisition of semantic and conceptual
information? 
3) How does syntactic and semantic complexity impact document
classification in
information and text retrieval tasks? 
4) How do statistical clustering approaches compare to knowledge-based
approaches at partitioning and quantifying the semantic space in a document
set? 
5) Concerning NLP systems that are deployed in the field, how can we quantify
the information extraction task and QA task in ways similar to what is
currently done with IR tasks and algorithms? 
6) How does the estimation of syntactic and semantic complexity impact the
evaluation of such systems? 
7) Can syntactic and semantic complexity coupled with a history of the past
performance of a system be used to predict future performance of the system on
a different data set?

The workshop invites short papers, full-length papers, proposals for panel
discussions, and position statements that deal with any aspect of syntactic
and/or semantic complexity of NLP systems. In particular, the workshop is
interested in addressing the following topics: 
- estimation of the syntactic and semantic complexity of specific NLP
  tasks 
- semantic complexity and world knowledge 
- role of syntactic and semantic complexity in system design and testing 
- syntactic and semantic complexity and its role in the evaluation of
  NLP systems 
- use of syntactic and semantic complexity as a performance predictor 
- relationship between syntactic and semantic complexity

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION
Paper submissions should consist of either a short paper (2000 words or less,
including references), a position statement (2000 words or less, including
references), or a full paper (5000 words or less, including references). Each
submission should include a separate title page providing the following
information: the title, the type of paper (short/position/full), the word
count, a short abstract, names and affiliations of all the authors, the full
address of the primary author (or alternate contact person), including phone,
fax, and email. Proposals for panels should consist of a short (upto 500
words)
description of the proposed panel along with the names of the proposed
panelists.

Papers and proposals for panel discussions may be submitted by submitting
three
hard copies or one soft copy (ASCII, or PS) to:
Amit Bagga 
General Electric CRD 
Room K1-5C38B 
1 Research Circle 
Niskayuna, NY 12309. USA 
phone: 1-518-387-7077 
email: bagga@crd.ge.com

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission deadline:             February 14 
Notification of acceptance of panels : February 21 
Notification of acceptance of papers : February 28 
Camera ready papers due:               March 13

**********

III.B.4.
Fr: Matthias Klusch <klusch@dfki.de> 
Re: CIA-2000: Final Reminder: CFPapers 

Final Reminder
CIA-2000 Workshop
EXTENDED Deadline: FEBRUARY 7, 2000

As a result of several requests, the deadline for the submission of research
papers for the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents
CIA-2000, to be held in Boston, July 7-9, 2000 has been extended to Monday,
February 7, 2000.

Further details are available in the Web at 
http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2000.html

Dr. Matthias Klusch 
DFKI GmbH 
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence 
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 
66123 Saarbruecken, Germany 
Phone: +49-681-302-5297, Fax: +49-681-302-2235 
http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/, klusch@dfki.de 

**********

III.B.5.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu> 
Re: ANLP/NAACL2000 Workshop: 2nd Call for Papers 

Second Call for Papers
Workshop on Automatic Summarization
(pre-conference workshop in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000)
website: http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/was-anlp2000
sponsored by
ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics)
MITRE Corporation
Sunday, April 30, 2000
Seattle, Washington, USA

I. OVERVIEW 
The problem of automatic summarization poses a variety of tough challenges in
both NL understanding and generation. A spate of recent papers and
tutorials on
this subject at conferences such as ACL/EACL, AAAI, ECAI, IJCAI, and SIGIR
point to a growing interest in research in this field. Several commercial
summarization products have also appeared. There have been several
workshops in
the past on this subject: Dagstuhl in 94, ACL/EACL in 97, and the AAAI Spring
Symposium in 98. All of these were extremely successful, and the field is now
enjoying a period of revival and is advancing at a much quicker pace than
before. ANLP/NAACL'2000 is an ideal occasion to host another workshop on this
problem.

The Workshop on Automatic Summarization program committee invites papers
addressing (but not limited to):

Summarization Methods: use of linguistic representations, statistical models,
NL generation for summarization, production of abstracts and extracts,
multi-document summarization, narrative techniques in summarization,
multilingual summarization, text compaction, multimodal summarization
(including summarization of audio), use of information extraction, studies and
modeling of human summarizers, improving summary coherence, concept fusion,
use
of thesauri and ontologies, trainable summarizers, applications of machine
learning, knowledge-rich methods.

Summarization Resources: development of corpora for training and evaluating
summarizers, annotation standards, shared summarization tools, document
segmentation, topic detection, and clustering related to summarization

Evaluation Methods: intrinsic and extrinsic measures, on-line and off-line
evaluations, standards for evaluation, task-based evaluation scenarios, user
studies, inter-judge agreement

Workshop Themes:
1. Multilingual Text Summarization 
2. Generation for Summarization 
3. Topic Identification for Summarization 
4. Multidocument Summarization 
5. Evaluation and Test/Training Corpora 
6. Integration with web and IR access

II. IMPORTANT DATES 
Paper submission deadline:             February 4, 2000 
Notification of acceptance for papers: March 1, 2000 
Camera ready papers due:               March 13, 2000 
Workshop date:                         April 30, 2000

III. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION 
Submissions must use the ACL latex style 
(http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/was-anlp2000/latex/index.html) or Microsoft Word
style
WAS-submission.doc (both available from the Automatic Summarization workshop
web page). Paper submissions should consist of a full paper (5000 words or
less, including references). Please send submission questions to cyl@isi.edu

Submission Procedure:
Electronic submission only: send the pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS Word
form of your submission to: cyl@isi.edu. The Subject line should be
"ANLP-NAACL2000 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". Because reviewing is blind, no
author information is included as part of the paper. An identification page
must be sent in a separate email with the subject line: "ANLP-NAACL2000
WORKSHOP ID PAGE" and must include title, all authors, theme area, keywords,
word count, and an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will not
be accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author
shortly after receipt.

**********

III.B.6.
Fr: James Allan <allan@cs.umass.edu> 
Re: SIGIR 2000: CFPanel & Demonstration Proposals

Call for panel and demonstration proposals for SIGIR 2000
Athens, Greece
July 24-28, 2000

Now that the paper submission deadline for SIGIR has passed, it is time to
think about other things you might do there. Start fleshing out those
interesting ideas for panel presentations/discussions, or imagining how you
can
spruce up that interesting IR system that you would love to demonstrate. We
need your proposals by February 11th.

Proposals for panel sessions should be sent by prospective moderators. Panels
should address issues of interest to the general information retrieval
community, and should be designed to stimulate lively debate between panelists
and audience. Panel proposals (2-3 pages) must include:
1. complete contact information for the moderator. 
2. the rationale for addressing this topic as a panel. 
3. the names and affiliations of the panel members. 
4. a description of how the panel will be structured, with emphasis on
   how general participation will be encouraged. 

Abstracts of panel presentations will appear in the proceedings. Past panels
have included:
* (1999) Applying user research directly to information systems design 
* (1998) Tools for searching the Web 
* (1997) "Real world" information retrieval

Demonstrations offer first-hand experience with Information Retrieval systems,
whether advanced operational systems or research prototypes. The demonstration
proposal should indicate how the demonstration illustrates new ideas, should
provide the technical specifications of the system and should include
references to other literature. The hardware, software, and network
requirements should be indicated in a separate cover letter. A one-page
abstract describing each demonstration accepted will be published in the
proceedings. SIGIR 1999 had 16 demonstration systems, and SIGIR 1998 had 10,
all covering a wide range of topics and ideas.

Panel and Demonstration proposals must be sent in ASCII or PostScript via
email
by February 11, 2000 to James Allan (allan@cs.umass.edu).

**********

III.B.7.
Fr: Mike Shepherd <shepherd@cs.dal.ca> 
Re: HICSS Minitrack: Digital Documents - Understanding & Communication

CALL FOR PAPERS
Digital Documents - Understanding and Communication
A Minitrack of the Digital Documents Track
34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Maui, Hawaii
January 3-6, 2001

The explosion of digital documents on the internet and in the workplace has
led
to an increasing need for computer systems that help us not only manage the
documents but also manage our understanding of these documents and their
relationships.

This minitrack focuses on how one gains an understanding of a digital document
and how that information is communicated. It encompasses retrieval and text
analysis methods, including summarization, categorization and genre theory and
detection. In addition, we welcome papers on visualzation methods that
increase
understanding of document content and genre. We solicit papers from workers in
computer science, text analysis and linguistics and information retrieval as
well as from researchers in psychology, HCI and sociology.

For preliminary contact, send an abstract of your proposed paper to the
co-chairs by April 3. Final papers will be due for submission on June 5, 2000,
and contributors will be notified by September 1 of their acceptance.

James W. Cooper                      Michael Shepherd 
IBM T J Watson Research Center       Dalhousie University 
jwcnmr@watson.ibm.com                shepherd@cs.dal.ca

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

IV. PROJECTS

IV.C.1.
Fr: Clifford Lynch <cliff@cni.org> 
Re: NSF SMETE Digital Library Solicitation 

The solicitation for NSF's Digital Library for Science, Mathematics,
Engineering and Technology Education (SMETE) has just come out. This is an
important initiative to develop a major educational resource as well as to
advance our understanding of how to build digital libraries. You can find
information on this at the following URL:
http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf0044

Clifford Lynch 
Director, CNI

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

IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, California
Digital Library, 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA. 94607-5200.

Send subscription requests and submissions to: nancy.gusack@ucop.edu

Editorial Staff:
 Nancy Gusack nancy.gusack@ucop.edu
 Cliff Lynch (emeritus) cliff@cni.org

The IRLIST Archives is set up for anonymous FTP. Using anonymous FTP via the
host hibiscus.ucop.edu, the files will be found in the directory
/data/ftp/pub/irl, stored in subdirectories by year (e.g.,
data/ftp/pub/irl/1993).

Search or browse archived IR-L Digest issues on the Web at:
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/idom/irlist/

These files are not to be sold or used for commercial purposes. Contact Nancy
Gusack for more information on IRLIST. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN IRLIST DO NOT
REPRESENT THOSE OF THE EDITORS OR THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. AUTHORS ASSUME
FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR MATERIAL.