From: [log in to unmask] (Cecile Paris)


  Call For Papers: ESSLLI97 PhD Workshop on Natural Language Generation

                    A workshop held as part of the
9th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI97)
             August 11-22, 1997, Aix-en-Provence, France

ORGANISERS:   Cecile Paris (CSIRO, Sydney) and Robert Dale (MRI, Sydney)

Web Page: http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/conf/esslli-nlg/

WORKSHOP THEME:   Natural Language Generation

BACKGROUND:

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is coming of age: historically,
natural language analysis has received substantially more attention
from computational linguists and those working in natural language
processing, but recent years have seen the development of a robust NLG
community, with an international NLG workshop being organised every
two years, and a European workshop in the alternate years; and many
new research projects in NLP and CL include work on natural language
generation.  As a consequence, there are now a significant number of
researchers working in the field, both in Europe and internationally.

One effect of this growing interest is that there is considerable
competition for limited space in the fora available for students
undertaking their PhDs to report on their progress and results, and
discuss their work with colleagues and more senior researchers.  The
purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for students
undertaking PhD research in NLG to present their results.

WORKSHOP AIMS:

This workshops aims to:

    * provide a setting for PhD Students to present and discuss
      their work, in a small, friendly and constructive environment;
    * provide guidance for future research directions;
    * develop spirit of collaborative research.

CALL FOR PAPERS: We invite PhD students to submit a description of
their thesis topic, approach and results.  Papers should be 5--8 pages
long.  Authors are also welcome to submit a list of topics they would
like to see discussed.  This will be used by the organisers to
identify issues for discussions and debates.  Finally, PhD students
are invited to provide additional information about their background
and relevant experience.

DEADLINE:  Papers for submission shold be received by April 30th
1997.  They should be sent to

        Dr Cecile Paris

        CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences
        Locked Bag 17, North Ryde, NSW 2113
        Australia

Use the above address for paper submission. Electronic submission is
also acceptable:  send your submission, in PostScript form, to

       [log in to unmask]

If you are submitting electronically, please do this by April 28th, so
that we can ensure that your su8bmission is printable before the
deadline.

PUBLICATION:

Authors of papers presented at the workshop will be invited to submit,
after the workshop, written versions for a 'virtual special issue' of
WEB-SLS, the European Student Journal of Language and Speech, a
journal supported jointly by the European Speech Communication
Association (ESCA), the European Chapter of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (EACL) and the Europan Network in Language
and Speech (ELSNET).  The papers will be reviewed and the best will be
published on the web as part of the journal.

WORKSHOP FORMAT: The workshop will consist of five sessions of 90 minutes
each, over 5 days.  There will be two research presentations per
day and extensive time for discussions and debates.  We will select
specific themes that are currently of particular interest depending on
the submissions.  We intend to select up to ten students currently
working in the area.