IR-L Digest, Vol.XVII, No.6, Issue 490

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

IRLIST Digest                                       ISSN 1064-6965
February 7, 2000
Volume XVII, Number 6
Issue 490

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 II. JOBS
        1. Ergo Linguistic Technologies: Honolulu, HI:
           1 Linguist and 2 ESL Curriculum Developers
        2. www.thirdvoice.com: IR Expert
III. NOTICES
     A. Publications
        1. JASIS ToC: 51:4
     B. Meetings
        1. ANLP/NAACL2000: CFDemos
        2. Communicating Agents: CFParticipation
        3. CoopIS'2000: 3rd CFPapers
        4. SIGIR 2000: Last CFPanel & Demonstration Proposals
        5. ANLP/NAACL2000: 2nd Workshop CFPapers
        6. AMTA-2000: CFParticipation

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

II. JOBS

II.1.
Fr: Philip A. Bralich <bralich@hawaii.edu> 
Re: Ergo Linguistic Technologies: Honolulu, HI:
    1 Linguist and 2 ESL Curriculum Developers 


Ergo Linguistic Technologies currently has job openings for one linguist
(full-time) and 2 full-time or 4 part-time (80 hours per week) ESL curriculum
developers to work on Software and Internet ITS (Interactive Tutoring Systems)
tools. To learn more about the company and the tools you will be working with
go to http://www.ergo-ling.com. The Ergo working environment is comfortable
and
a little casual but it is working with state of the art NLP tools and
software.
Located at the Manoa Innovation center in Honolulu we are convenient to the
University of Hawaii for those with on-going research interests. We also
have a
beautiful location as well as access to restaurants and shopping. We cannot
pay
a relocation allowance but the lifestyle in Hawaii is worth the effort to work
here. Job descriptions follow: 

Linguist: 
Knowledge of Syntax and a knowledge of English Grammar required. Must also be
proficient in standard software applications (Word Processors, Internet,
Spread
Sheets, etc.) Experience teaching ESL grammar classes a plus. Job will entail
working with programmers and curriculum developers to improve lexicographical,
syntactic, and standard grammar tools made from the Ergo parser. The main
project is the development of interactive tutors which use a 3-D character to
do interactive question and answer exchanges with users in the areas of ESL,
Geography, and Biology. The use of in-house tools as well as standard software
required. Temporary for now (six to twelve month project), perhaps long term. 

ESL Curriculum Developers: 
Experience teaching ESL and in Curriculum development. Must have a good eye
for
English grammar. The position entails designing and writing curriculum for
Interactive tutors. Job will entail working with programmers and linguists to
improve lexicographical, syntactic, and standard grammar tools made from the
Ergo parser. The main project is the development of interactive tutors which
use a 3-D character to do interactive question and answer exchanges with users
in the area of ESL for a stand alone software product and for the Internet. 

Contact me by email or at the following numbers. Resumes may be sent by email,
fax, or regular mail but all jobs start as soon as possible. 
Phil Bralich

Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. 
President and CEO 
Ergo Linguistic Technologies 
2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel: (808)539-3920 
Fax: (808)539-3924 
bralich@hawaii.edu 
http://www.ergo-ling.com

**********

II.2.
Fr: Scott Ratcliff <scottr@thirdvoice.com 
Re: www.thirdvoice.com: IR Expert
  
www.thirdvoice.com is looking for an expert in Information Retrieval to
join our
ranks to lead our critical IR needs. We are located in Redwood City, CA,
private, well-funded and have exciting new projects in which to participate. 

Please contact Sanjeev Singh at sanjeev@thirdvoice.com.

Thank you, 
Scott Ratcliff 
Ambassador Des Corps 
scottr@thirdvoice.com 
650-591-1200 x 2037 


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

III. NOTICES

III.A.1.
Fr: Richard Hill <rhill@asis.org> 
Re: JASIS ToC: 51:4 

Journal of the American Society for Information Science
JASIS
VOLUME 51, NUMBER 4

JASIS, Volume 51, Number 4
Special Topic Issue: Digital Libraries: Part 2 
Guest Editor: Hsinchun Chen

CONTENTS
Introduction to the Special Topic Issue, In This Issue 
Hsinchun Chen 
311 

A Spoken Access Approach for Chinese Text and Speech Information Retrieval 
Lee-Feng Chien, Hsin-Min Wang, Bo-Ren Bai, and Sun-Chein Lin 
313 

Determining the Publication Impact of a Digital Library 
Nancy R. Kaplan and Michael L Nelson 
324 

Combination and Boundary Detection Approaches on Chinese Indexing 
Christopher C. Yang, Johnny W.K. Luk, Stanley K. Yung, and Jerome Yen 
340 
 
Kristin M. Tolle and Hsinchun Chen 
352 
 
Content and Knowledge Management in a Digital Library and Museum 
Jian-Hua Yeh, Jia-Yang Chang, and Yen-Jen Oyang 
371 

Previews and Overviews in Digital Libraries: Designing Surrogates to 
Support Visual Information Seeking 
Stephan Greene, Gary Marchionini, Catherine Plaisant, and Ben Shneiderman 
380 

Digital Libraries: Situating Use in Changing Information Infrastructure 
Ann Peterson Bishop, Laura J. Neumann, Susan Leigh Star, Cecelia Merkel, 
Emily Ignacio, and Robert J. Sandusky 
394 

The ASIS home page <http://www.asis.org/Publications/JASIS/tocs.html> contains
the Table of Contents and brief abstracts as above from January 1993 (Volume
44) to date.

The John Wiley Interscience site <http://www.interscience.wiley.com> includes
issues from 1986 (Volume 37) to date. Guests have access only to tables of
contents and abstracts. Registered users of the interscience site have access
to the full text of these issues and to preprints. We are still working on
restoring access for ASIS members as "registered users."

Richard Hill 
American Society for Information Science 
8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501 
Silver Spring, MD 20910 
(301) 495-0900 
FAX: (301) 495-0810 
http://www.asis.org

**********

III.B.1.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu> 
Re: ANLP/NAACL2000: CFDemos 

Call for Proposals: Software Demonstrations Program

Demonstrations Chair:
Jeff Reynar 
Microsoft Corporation 
jreynar@microsoft.com

Call
The ANLP-NAACL2000 Program Committee invites proposals for the Demonstrations
Program for ANLP-NAACL 2000, to be held at the Westin Hotel in Seattle,
Washington, USA, May 1-3, 2000. The goals of this program are to encourage
both
the early exhibition of research prototypes and the demonstration of mature
systems (commercial sales and marketing activities are not appropriate in the
Demonstration program, and should be arranged as part of the ANLP-NAACL2000
Exhibit Program).

Areas of Interest
We would like to encourage the submission of proposals for demonstrations of
software related to all areas of computational linguistics. Areas of interest
include, but are not limited to:

Natural language processing systems, including 
Dialogue systems and interfaces 
Machine translation systems and translation aids 
Message and narrative understanding systems 
Language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction systems 
Application systems using embedded language technology components 
Reusable components (parsers, generators, speech recognizers, etc.) 
Software tools for facilitating computational linguistics research 
Software for demonstrating or evaluating computational linguistics research 
Aids for teaching computational linguistics concepts

Format for Submission
Demo Proposals consist of the following parts, which should all be sent to the
Demo Chair (electronic submissions preferred).

An abstract of the technical content to be demonstrated, not to exceed two
pages, including title, authors, full contact information, references and
acknowledgements. (This will be published in an addendum to the
proceedings, so
please submit in camera ready format.)

A detailed description of hardware and software requirements expected to be
provided by the local organizer. Demonstrators are encouraged to be
flexible in
their requirements (possibly with different demos for different logistical
situations). Please state what you can bring yourself and what you absolutely
must have provided. We will do our best to provide equipment and resources but
nothing can be guaranteed at this point beyond space and power. Please contact
the demo chair at one of the addresses below for any specific questions.

A "Script Outline" of the demo presentation, including accompanying narrative,
and either a web address for accessing the demo or visual aids (e.g.
screen-shots, snapshots, or sketches). No more than 6 pages, total.

Submissions Procedure
Proposals should be submitted as soon as possible, but before March 15th, to
the ANLP-NAACL2000 Demonstrations Chair. Please submit your proposals and any
inquiries to:

Jeff Reynar 
Microsoft Corporation 
One Microsoft Way 
Redmond, WA 98052-6399

Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance to computational
linguistics, innovation, scientific contribution, presentation, and user
friendliness, as well as potential logistical constraints.

Other Details
Further details on the timing and format for the demonstrations sessions will
be determined and provided at a later date. We anticipate charging a $40 fee
for presenting demos, to help defray costs.

Important Dates
Submission Deadline for Demo Proposal: 15 March 2000
Notification:                           1 April 2000 
Conference Dates:                      1-3 May 2000

**********

III.B.2.
Fr: Bernhard Schroeder <B.Schroeder@uni-bonn.de> 
Re: Communicating Agents: CFParticipation 

Communicating Agents
Workshop of the GLDV special interest group on
generation and parsing in morphology, syntax and semantics,
IKP, University of Bonn, Feb 15, 2000
http://www.gldv.org/Veranstaltungen/WS_Feb00/

In the focus of this workshop will be approaches to the formal description and
to the implementation of communicating agents. 

List of lectures
Anton Benz: Perspectives and derived extensions of dialogue acts 
Rodolfo Delmonte: Parsing preferences and lingustic strategies 
Roland Hausser: A new data structure for representing propositional content 
Jan-Torsten Milde: Der kommunikative Agent Lokutor 
Christof Monz: Ambiguous communication in a multi-agent system 
Bernd S. Müller: Remarks on concept formation for cognitive robotics 
Paul Piwek: Constraint-based Dialogue Modelling: Indirect Speech Acts 
Henk Zeevat: Discourse markers as speech act markers 

Please register before Feb 8, 2000, if possible. 

Organizing Comittee
Roland Hausser, University of Erlangen 
Hans-Christian Schmitz, University of Bonn 
Bernhard Schroeder, University of Bonn 

Contact
Bernhard Schroeder 
Institut für Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik 
Universität Bonn 
Poppelsdorfer Allee 47 
D-53115 Bonn 
Germany 
E-Mail 
B.Schroeder@uni-bonn.de 
Phone 
+49 228 735621 
Fax 
+49 228 735639

**********

III.B.3.
Fr: carmel@il.ibm.com 
Re: CoopIS'2000: 3rd CFPapers 

Call for Papers - CoopIS'2000
Fifth IFCIS International Conference on
Cooperative Information Systems
In Cooperation with VLDB'2000
Neptune Hotel
Eilat, Israel, September 6-8, 2000
http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/coopis2000.html


What is CoopIS ?
CoopIS is the leading conference for system cooperation. Cooperation among
systems has gained substantial importance in recent years: electronic
commerce,
virtual enterprises, and the middleware paradigm are just some examples of
this
area. Several levels of cooperation are present:
* The subject matter is the foundation and implementation of cooperation among
systems. 
* The CoopIS area is a meeting of disciplines which provide concepts and
techniques. The relevant disciplines are: collaborative work, distributed
databases, distributed computing, electronic commerce, human-computer
interaction, multi-agent systems, information retrieval, and workflow
systems. 
* The CoopIS series provides a forum for well-known researchers, that are
drawn
from the stature and the tradition of these conference series, and has a
leading role in shaping the future of the cooperative information systems
area.
Opportunities for informal meetings between the conference delegates will be
enhanced with a series of social events, including pre-conference exploration
of Eilat, in-conference tour of the surrounding desert, and post-conference
excursion that will enable easy connection for those continuing to
VLDB'2000 in
Cairo.

CoopIS'2000 is the seventh conference in the series and the fifth conference
organized by the International Foundation on Cooperative Information Systems
(IFCIS). It is sponsored by the International Foundation in Cooperative
Information Systems (IFCIS), and the IBM Research 
Laboratory in Haifa (other sponsors pending). It replaces the erstwhile
international workshops on Interoperability in Multidatabase Systems (IMS) and
the conference series on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS & ICIS).

Important dates:
Submission Intention Notice Deadline March 13,2000 
Paper Submission Deadline            March 27, 2000 
Acceptance Notification              May 29, 2000 
Final Version Due                    June 26, 2000 
Early registration deadline          July 31, 2000 
The Conference                       September 6-8, 2000

Who should submit papers ?
Papers are solicited in two categories: regular research papers and industrial
experience papers. The category should be clearly identified. Regular research
papers should contain original research concepts and results in one or more
technologies relevant to cooperative information systems. Industrial
experience
papers should describe technical or key business issues and lessons learned in
developing, applying, and deploying relevant technologies, highlighting
aspects
of cooperation and interoperation. Submitted papers should not be longer than
5000 words. 

Submissions should be unpublished and should not be under consideration by
another conference or journal. A few papers will be selected for publication,
after appropriate expansion and review, in the International Journal of
Cooperative Information Systems. One of the main themes will be information
services in the 21st century, and we particularly welcome papers related to
this theme. We also encourage the submission of all topics related to
cooperative information systems, including (but not limited to) the following:
* Agent Technology 
* Business Intelligence Frameworks 
* Business Process Modeling 
* Communication infrastructure for collaboration 
* Computer-supported Cooperative work 
* Cooperative Information System Architectures 
* Cooperative Information System foundations 
* Cooperative Transactions 
* Cooperative Transactions 
* Digital Libraries 
* Distributed Problem Solving 
* Distributed GIS 
* Distributed Multimedia Systems 
* Distributed Object Management 
* Distributed Warehousing and mining 
* Electronic Commerce 
* Enterprise Knowledge management 
* Event Based Systems 
* Engineering Distributed systems 
* Federated and Multi-database systems 
* Human-Computer Interaction for cooperation 
* Information Filtering 
* Information Resource Discovery 
* Information Retrieval 
* Information, Data and knowledge Modeling 
* Integration and Interoperability 
* Legacy Data Access and Management 
* Mediators, Wrappers 
* Middleware Technology 
* Meta-data and Repositories 
* Multi-agent Systems 
* Mobile Computing for Cooperation 
* Organizational Aspects of Cooperative 
* Semantic Interoperability Systems (including virtual organizations) 
* Web-based Information Systems 
* Web-based Services 
* Workflow Systems

Papers Submission
Papers will be submitted in an electronic fashion (Postscript or PD files) to
both program chairs. A pre-submission intention notice to both program chairs
with the paper's authors, title, and classification is requested.

The CoopIS'2000 team:
General Chairs 
Avigdor Gal 
Rutgers University, USA 
E-mail: avigal@rci.rutgers.edu

Michele Missikoff 
IASI-CNR, Italy 
E-mail: missikoff@iasi.rm.cnr.it

David Carmel 
Information Retrieval and Organization, IBM - HRL 
E-mail: carmel@il.ibm.com 
Phone: 972-4-8296223, Fax: 972-4-8296114 
Address: IBM, Haifa Research Lab, Matam, Haifa 31905, Israel 

**********

III.B.4.
Fr: James Allan <allan@cs.umass.edu> 
Re: SIGIR 2000: Last CFPanel & Demonstration Proposals

LAST CALL for panel and demonstration proposals for SIGIR 2000
Athens, Greece
July 24-28, 2000
We need your proposals by February 11th

Proposals (2-3 pages) 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.

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.

See http://sigir2000.aueb.gr/ for more information.

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.5.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu> 
Re: ANLP/NAACL2000: 2nd Workshop CFPapers 

Second Call for Papers
Workshop on Reading Comprehension Tests as Evaluation for
Computer-Based Language Understanding Systems
Thursday, May 4th, 2000, Seattle, Washington, USA
(post-conference workshop in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL2000)

Reading Comprehension tests, such as the one below, are designed to help
evaluate a reader's understanding of a text passage.

How Maple Syrup is Made
Maple syrup comes from sugar maple trees. At one time, maple syrup was used to
make sugar. This is why the tree is called a "sugar" maple tree.

Sugar maple trees make sap. Farmers collect the sap. The best time to collect
sap is in February and March. The nights must be cold and the days warm.

The farmer drills a few small holes in each tree. He puts a spout in each
hole.
Then he hangs a bucket on the end of each spout. The bucket has a cover to
keep
rain and snow out. The sap drips into the bucket. About 10 gallons of sap come
from each hole.

1. Who collects maple sap? (Farmers) 
2. What does the farmer hang from a spout? (A bucket) 
3. When is sap collected? (February and March) 
4. Where does the maple sap come from? (Sugar maple trees) 
5. Why is the bucket covered? (to keep rain and snow out)

Such tests exist in many languages, have human performance benchmarks
associated with them, and come in a variety of types (short-answer, multiple
choice) and levels of difficulty. In addition, they are generally written to
make each story and set of questions self-contained, in order to require as
little outside knowledge as possible to answer the questions.

The focus of the proposed workshop will be to explore the following questions:
- Can such exams be used to evaluate computer-based language understanding
effectively and efficiently? 
- Would they provide an impetus and test bed for interesting and useful
research? 
- Are they too hard for current technology? 
- Or are they too easy, such that simple hacks can score high, although there
is clearly no understanding involved? 

The most direct method of exploring these questions is to choose a set of
tests
and build a system that takes these tests. Some preliminary results indicate
that such tests are tractable, but not trivial and that linguistic processing
is helpful (Hirschman, et al. ACL-99). A test set, evaluation routines,
prototype system, and documentation are available upon request to
light@mitre.org.

We hope that a number of submissions will present results based on actual
reading comprehension systems. In addition, we encourage submissions that
report on other kinds of tests or similar tests in other languages, or that
address our list of questions by other means. Note that submissions are
encouraged that describe work in progress with preliminary empirical results.

Invited speaker:
Karen Kukich (Educational Testing Service)
"NLP Tools for Identifying Reading Comprehension Skills"

Format for Submission
Authors are asked to submit previously unpublished papers only; workshop
proceedings will be published. Our target submission length is 2000 words but
both shorter and longer submissions will also be considered. Electronic
submission of postscript will be accepted. Hard copy submissions should
include
4 copies of the paper. Since the papers will be reviewed anonymously,
please do
not place the author name on the paper. Instead include a separate title page
with title, abstract, author, and e-mail address. Unless requested otherwise,
notification of acceptance will be sent electronically to the first author.
Parallel submission is unproblematic; however if your paper is accepted to
this
workshop and you decide to present it here, we will ask you to withdraw it
from
any other events.

Important Dates
Deadline for submission: February 11th, 2000 
Notification of authors: March 1st, 2000 
Final versions due:      March 10th, 2000

Address for Submission and Further Information 
Marc Light 
The MITRE Corporation 
202 Burlington Rd. 
M/S K329 
Bedford, MA 01730 
USA 
Phone: 1-781-271-5579 
light@mitre.org

(The mailing list, read-comp@linus.mitre.org, has been set up to discuss
reading comprehension tests as evaluation for computer-based language
understanding systems. It is open subscription and unmoderated. To subscribe,
send email to majordomo@linus.mitre.org with 'subscribe read-comp' in the
body.)

Program Committee:
Eric Brill 
Eugene Charniak 
Mary Harper 
Marc Light (chair) 
Ellen Riloff 
Ellen Voorhees

**********

III.B.6.
Fr: Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu> 
Re: AMTA-2000: CFParticipation 

RELIMINARY CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
AMTA-2000 Conference
Cuernavaca, Mexico
October 10-14, 2000

Envisioning Machine Translation in the Information Future

The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) is happy to
announce the plans for the fourth biennial conference, planned for October
10-14 at Mision del Sol, near Cuernavaca, Mexico.

The theme of AMTA-2000 is "Envisioning MT in the Information Future." The
focus
will be on the articulation of future visions of MT: in the '00 decade, the
21st century, and even in the third millennium. Ubiquitous, instant internet
access will be available very soon from a host of appliances and apparel.
Later
on, ways of thinking about the universe of information will transcend our
current metaphors of networks, clients, servers, and communication. How will
these and other possible paths into the future affect our exponential need for
translation? Will the process of translation become transparent? How long
before we each have a true babelfish in our ear? Will the quality ceiling
finally be broken by incremental improvements, or by an as yet unimagined
breakthrough? Will translation even be necessary - will globalization lead
to a
single language, or will translation allow for the growth of local languages?

Every current topic in multilingual information processing is germane to this
discourse, especially as it points the way to the near term and long term role
of MT in the information world of the future.

As in the past, the conference will feature a lively and engaging variety of
invited speakers, panel discussions, demonstrations, workshops, tutorials, and
technical papers by researchers, developers, and users.

AMTA invites everyone interested in machine translation to participate in this
conference - developers, researchers, users, professional translators,
managers, marketing experts - anyone who has a stake in the vision of an
information world in which language issues become transparent to the
information consumer. We especially invite users to share their experiences,
developers to describe what is happening in the internet marketplace,
researchers looking to new capabilities, and visionaries to describe the
future.

Colleagues from Latin America who are involved in or interested in MT or other
human language technologies, are especially welcome to participate and submit
papers, workshops, tutorials, and demonstrations.

We also welcome and encourage participation by members of AMTA's sister
organizations, AAMT in Asia and EAMT in Europe. We also urge people working in
related areas in information processing to participate as well.

For complete information about the conference, please see the web site at: 
http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/conferences/ 
<http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/conferences/> 

David Farwell, General Chair 
John S. White, Program Chair

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

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