CFP: AAAI Symposium on NLP for WWW

[Apologies if you received multiple copies of this announcement...]

	 1997 AAAI Spring Symposium Series Call for Participation
		      March 24-26, 1997
	        Stanford University, California

	NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB

		    Call for Participation
                 **Submission deadline** October 25, 1996
   Web site: http://crl.nmsu.edu/users/mahesh/aaai-web-nlp-symposium.html

Sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence presents the 1997
Spring Symposium Series, to be held Monday through Wednesday, March
24-26, 1997, at Stanford University.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web (WWW) is rapidly becoming a powerful medium for
human communication and dissemination of information. Most information
on the WWW is expressed in natural language texts. Yet, most software
tools built for the WWW do not apply natural language processing (NLP)
techniques for searching, retrieving, presenting, or generating texts.

The field of NLP has the potential to offer better tools that exploit
the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of natural language texts, than
current ones based mostly on keyword matching and database indexing
methods, for easing the overload of texts on the users. The WWW in
turn is an excellent domain to develop practical applications of NLP.

Additionally, NLP and machine translation (MT) can ease language
barriers on the WWW by providing multilingual solutions to both
accessing information on the WWW and aiding the generation and
translation of texts for the WWW. Potential applications of NLP
include (but are in no way limited to) automatic and interactive
summarization and machine translation of WWW documents, information
brokering (natural language interfaces for assisting users in finding
the right information on the WWW), document filtering and personalized
newspapers (collecting and presenting current articles of personal
interest to users), and automatic generation of WWW documents.

This symposium aims to bring together researchers in various
subdisciplines of NLP and from the Web community to address
applications of NLP for improving the use of the WWW.  The symposium
will include several sessions for presenting papers and on-line
demonstrations with ample time set aside for discussions,
commentaries, working groups, and a panel.

The World Wide Web will be used extensively for exchanging papers
and for discussions before and after the symposium. Additional
information about the symposium is available at
http://crl.nmsu.edu/users/mahesh/aaai-web-nlp-symposium.html and
http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/symposia.html.

Submission Information:

We invite papers describing concrete applications of NLP techniques
for the WWW as well as position papers concerning what NLP can and
cannot do for the WWW or what should NLP as a field do in order to
meet the challenges and opportunities provided by the WWW. WE STRONGLY
ENCOURAGE ON-LINE DEMONSTRATIONS OF WORKING NLP APPLICATIONS ON THE
WWW. The focus of the symposium is on NLP applications and as such, we
invite submissions that treat WWW documents as natural language texts
(i.e., with NL syntax and semantics, as opposed to just strings or
databases). Papers addressing NLP problems characteristic of the WWW,
such as hypertext, multilingual, and multimedia documents, are
especially encouraged.

Papers should be no longer than 10 pages (font size no smaller than
11pt) with a title, abstract, and names and addresses of authors.
Please also indicate if the paper is to be reviewed as a position
paper or an application paper. Electronic submission (by e-mail to
mahesh@crl.nmsu.edu or by ftp://crl.nmsu.edu/incoming/) is strongly
encouraged. Hardcopy submissions (5 copies) may be sent to: Kavi
Mahesh, Computing Research Laboratory, Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL, Room
292B, New Science Hall, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM
88003-0001, (505) 646-5861.

Timetable:

 Submissions due: October 25, 1996. 
 Notification of acceptance: November 25, 1996. 
 Final papers due: January 17, 1997.

Program Committee:
 
 Lynn Carlson, US Department of Defense, lmcarls@afterlife.ncsc.mil;
 Kavi Mahesh (Chair), New Mexico State University, mahesh@crl.nmsu.edu;
 Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico State University, sergei@crl.nmsu.edu;
 Ashwin Ram, Georgia Institute of Technology, ashwin.ram@cc.gatech.edu;
 Philip Resnik, University of Maryland, resnik@umiacs.umd.edu.

General Information:

Several other AAAI Spring Symposia are being held at the same time:

 Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management
 Computational Models for Mixed Initiative Interaction
 Cross-Language Text and Speech Retrieval
 Intelligent Integration and Use of Text, Image, Video and Audio Corpora
 Memory and Medicine: Using Past Solutions in Medical Problem Solving
 Ontological Engineering
 Qualitative Preferences in Deliberation and Practical Reasoning

Each symposium will be limited to between forty and sixty
participants. Each participant will be expected to attend a single
symposium. Working notes will be prepared and distributed to
participants in each symposium.

A general plenary session, in which the highlights of each symposium
will be presented, will be held on Tuesday, March 25, and an informal
reception will be held on Monday, March 24.

In addition to invited participants, a limited number of other
interested parties will be able to register in each symposium on a
first-come, first-served basis. Registration information will be
available by December 15, 1996. To register, contact

     AAAI
     445 Burgess Drive
     Menlo Park, CA 94025
     (415) 328-3123  (415) 321-4457 (fax)
     sss@aaai.org 
     http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/1997/sssregistration-97.html

Received on Monday, 23 September 1996 15:12:05 UTC