13.0502 calls for contributions: open content encyclopedia, CL special issue

From: Humanist Discussion Group (willard@lists.village.virginia.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 23 2000 - 08:28:03 CUT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 502.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                  <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

       [1] From: "Ross Scaife" <scaife@pop.uky.edu> (52)
             Subject: Open content encyclopedia

       [2] From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@english.uga.edu> (113)
             Subject: Reminder: Computational Linguistics Special Issue

    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 08:09:50 +0000
             From: "Ross Scaife" <scaife@pop.uky.edu>
             Subject: Open content encyclopedia

    Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 15:15:38 -0800
    From: Larry Sanger <lsanger@nupedia.com>

    Larry Sanger
    Editor-in-Chief, Nupedia

    =====

    Open content encyclopedia calls for submissions about classics

    A major new encyclopedia project, Nupedia.com, requests expert
    help in constructing an "open content" encyclopedia, planned to
    become the largest general encyclopedia in history. The project
    has significant financial support, and its leaders and owners
    are committed to a years-long, intensive effort -- to founding
    an open, public institution.

    If you are an expert in any subject, your participation in the
    project will be welcome. We are in need of well-qualified
    writers, editors, and peer reviewers, and will be doing searches
    for subject area editors. Moreover, if you are a good writer
    and researcher, you may be interested in contributing short
    biographies, descriptions of cities, and other brief entries.

    What does it mean to say the encyclopedia is "open content"?
    This means that anyone can use content taken from Nupedia
    articles for almost any purpose, both for-profit or non-profit,
    so long as Nupedia is credited as the source and so long as the
    distributor of the information does not attempt to restrict
    others from distributing the same information. Nupedia will be
    "open content" in the same way that Linux and the Open Directory
    Project (dmoz.com) are "open source." As has been the case with
    those projects, we plan to attract a huge body of talented
    contributors.

    Since making our initial press release earlier this month, over 800
    people from around the world have signed up as Nupedia members,
    including some very highly-qualified people (including Ph.D.'s
    in very many relevant subject areas).

    Because Nupedia will be open content, it will be in a
    freely-distributable public resource created by an international
    public effort. It is not an exaggeration to say that your
    contributions would help to provide an international public a
    free education. We believe Nupedia is, thus, a project worthy
    of your attention.

    If you want to join us or stay apprised of the progress of
    Nupedia, please take a minute to go to the Nupedia website at
    http://www.nupedia.com/ and become a member. (Becoming a member
    is quick, easy, and free.)

    Thank you very much for your attention.

    Larry Sanger, Ph.D. expected May 2000 Philosophy, Ohio State
    Editor-in-Chief, Nupedia.com
    San Diego, California

    P.S. If you wish to help promote this project -- something we
    would greatly appreciate -- please do forward this announcement
    to any *appropriate* forums and to colleagues you think may be
    interested (including your local/departmental mailing lists and
    newsgroups). Or, if you would rather that Nupedia make the
    announcement on a forum you frequent, please just give us a
    pointer to the forum and we can take it from there.

    --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 08:10:50 +0000
             From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@english.uga.edu>
             Subject: Reminder: Computational Linguistics Special Issue

    >> From: Ruslan Mitkov <R.Mitkov@wlv.ac.uk>

                                    Call for Papers

    Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Anaphora and Ellipsis Resolution

    Guest editors: Ruslan Mitkov, Branimir Boguraev, Shalom Lappin

    Anaphora and ellipsis both account for cohesion in text and are phenomena
    of active study in formal and computational linguistics alike. The
    correct interpretation of anaphora and ellipsis, as well as the
    understanding of the relationship between them, is vital for Natural
    Language Processing.

    After considerable initial research, and after years of relative silence
    in the early eighties, these issues have attracted the attention of many
    researchers in the last 10 years and much promising work on the topic has
    been reported. Discourse-orientated theories and formalisms such as DRT
    and Centering have inspired new research on the computational treatment
    of anaphora. The drive towards corpus-based robust NLP solutions has
    further stimulated interest, for alternative and/or data-enriched
    approaches. In addition, application-driven research in areas such as
    automatic abstracting and information extraction, has independently
    identified the importance of (and boosted the research in) anaphora and
    coreference resolution. Ellipsis resolution too, being of particular
    importance to a number of Natural Language Understanding applications
    such as dialogue and discourse processing, has received increasing
    attention. The growing interest in anaphora and ellipsis resolution has
    been demonstrated clearly over the last 4--5 years through the MUC
    coreference task projects and at a number of related fora (workshops,
    conferences, etc.).

    Against this background of expanding research and growing interest, this
    special issue offers the opportunity for a high quality, and timely,
    collection of papers on anaphora and ellipsis resolution.

    Topics

    The call for papers invites submissions of papers describing recent novel
    and challenging work/results in anaphora and ellipsis resolution.
    The range of topics to be covered will include, but will not be limited
    to:

        o new anaphora and ellipsis resolution algorithms,
        o factors in anaphora resolution: salience and interaction of factors,
        o techniques in ellipsis resolution,
        o use of theories and formalisms in anaphora resolution,
        o use of theories and formalisms in ellipsis resolution,
        o applications of anaphora/coreference resolution,
        o applications of ellipsis resolution,
        o multilingual anaphora resolution,
        o evaluation issues,
        o use/production of annotated corpora for anaphora and ellipsis.

    In addition, we expect papers addressing various issues of debate related
    to the resolution of anaphora and ellipsis, such as:

        o Is it possible to propose a core set of factors used in anaphora
           resolution?
        o When dealing with real data, is it at all possible to posit
           "constraints", or should all factors be regarded as "preferences"?
        o What is the case for languages other than English?
        o What degree of preference (weight) should be given to "preferential"
           factors? How should weights best be determined? What empirical
           data can be brought to bear on this?
        o What would be an optimal order for the application of multiple
           factors? Would this affect the scoring strategies used in selecting
           the antecedent?
        o Is it realistic to expect high precision over unrestricted texts?
        o Is it realistic to determine anaphoric links in corpora
           automatically?
        o Are all CL applications 'equal' with respect to their requirements
           from an anaphora resolution module? What kind(s) of compromises
           might be possible, depending on the NLP task, and how would
           awareness of these affect the tuning of a resolution algorithm for
           particular type(s) of input text?
        o Should ellipsis resolution be handled by syntactic or semantic
           reconstruction?
        o Is it necessary to retrieve both syntactic and semantic properties of
           the antecedent in the reconstructed representation of the elided
           structure?

    Finally, we invite discussion on various open questions from both
    theoretical and computational point of view such as whether we should
    construe ellipsis as entirely distinct from anaphora.

    Submissions and Reviewing

    The submission deadline is 1 April 2000. Authors can submit either
    electronically or send 6 hard copies of their paper (for format and style
    details, see http://www.aclweb.org/cl) to:

        Ruslan Mitkov (R.Mitkov@wlv.ac.uk)
        School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences
        University of Wolverhampton
        Stafford St.
        Wolverhampton WV1 1SB
        United Kingdom

    Please note that in addition to the submission, a 100-word abstract and
    details of the author (following the format given at
    http://www.aclweb.org/cl/submit.txt) should be emailed to R.Mitkov.

    Each submission will be reviewed both by experts appointed by the editor
    of the journal and by members of the guest editorial board of the special
    issue. In addition to the guest editors,

        Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton),
        Branimir Boguraev (IBM Research, Yorktown Heights) and
        Shalom Lappin (University of London),

    the guest editorial board includes the following members:

        Nicholas Asher (University of Texas),
        Amit Bagga (GE CRD),
        Claire Cardie (Cornell University),
        David Carter (Speech Machines, Malvern),
        Eugene Charniak (Brown University),
        Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp),
        Mary Dalrymple (Xerox PARC),
        Dan Hardt (Villanova University),
        Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto),
        Jerry Hobbs (SRI International),
        Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania),
        Lauri Karttunen (Xerox Research Center Europe),
        Andrew Kehler (SRI International),
        Christopher Kennedy (Northwestern University),
        Massimo Poesio (University of Edinburgh),
        Monique Rolbert (University of Marseille),
        Stuart Shieber (Harvard University),
        Candy Sidner (Lotus Research),
        Marilyn Walker (AT&T).

    This call for paper is also available at
    http://www.wlv.ac.uk/sles/compling/news/text.html



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