Job Vacancy, June 2002

ISSCO has an immediate opening for a junior researcher in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

The candidate will carry out research in the fields of machine learning, discourse parsing and dialogue management, as part of the IM2 project (http://www.im2.ch).
The position also offers the possibility to prepare a doctoral thesis (PhD) at the University of Geneva, on a subject related to the IM2 project.

The main research themes related to this position are:
Parsing and semantic/discourse tagging
General statistical NLP tools
Machine learning
Dialogue management
Human-computer interaction

The qualified candidate will carry out research and collaborate in the development of software and language resources in one or more of the above areas. Furthermore, the qualified candidate is encouraged to register as a student at the PhD level, at the School of Translation and Interpretation of the University of Geneva. For more information about the degrees, please follow this link:
http://www.unige.ch/eti/index.cgi?http://www.unige.ch/eti/enseignement/contenu.html.

Requirements:
University degree in computational linguistics, computer science or other relevant discipline
Interest in theoretical and applied research in machine learning and/or natural language processing
Fluency in either French or English (with knowledge of the other language)

Additional qualities:
Good analytical skills
Knowledge of German
Programming skills in Perl, C/C++ and/or Java
Experience in developing software for NLP applications

ISSCO offers excellent working conditions in a well-established research group at the University of Geneva. The position provides opportunities to work on a variety of international projects. The salary is calculated according to qualifications, based on the University of Geneva scales.

The University of Geneva is an equal opportunity employer.

Duration: initial contract for one year with good prospects of renewal

We invite interested candidates to send us a letter of interest along with a detailed CV and the names of three referees to:
ISSCO/TIM/ETI, University of Geneva
Attn: Professor Susan Armstrong
University of Geneva
40, bvd. du Pont d'Arve
CH-1211 Geneva 4
Switzerland

Email: Susan.Armstrong@issco.unige.ch
Tel: (+41 22) 705 87 64
Fax: (+41 22) 705 86 89

Submission by email is preferred and should be also addressed in CC to:
Alexander Clark (Alex.Clark@issco.unige.ch).
Alexander Clark
asc@aclark.demon.co.uk
http://www.issco.unige.ch/staff/clark/index.html
ISSCO/ETI, University of Geneva

Lecturing Posts -IR Interests

2 Lecturers in Computing
School of Information & Communication Technologies
Faculty of Communications, Engineering & Science
University of Paisley

Recruitment packs may be obtained from the Department of Human Resources,
University of Paisley,
PAISLEY, PA1 2BE
Tel: 0141 848 3692
Answering service out with normal working hours
Closing date: 5 July 2002.
Informal enquiries to:
Professor Mark Girolami on:
Tel: 0141 848 3317
E-mail:
mark.girolami@paisley.ac.uk
mark.girolami@paisley.ac.uk.

2 Professorial Chairs

Sheffield University
Information Studies Department

The Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield is pleased to announce that it is seeking appointments for two new Chairs in Information Retrieval and in Librarianship and Information Management.

The Department of Information Studies has received the highest possible grades in all Research Assessment Exercises to date (5*A in 2001), a feat not achieved by any other comparable department in the UK, and was graded as 'Excellent' in the Teaching Quality Assessment.

Chair in Information Retrieval
Applications are invited for a Chair in Information Retrieval. The appointee will have an international research standing in information retrieval and/or a related area such as digital libraries, information extraction and multimedia. The appointee will be expected to contribute to a portfolio of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Information Systems, Information Management and Librarianship, and to participate at a strategic level in the development of the research and teaching activities of this dynamic and successful interdisciplinary Department.

Informal enquiries about this post may be directed to:
Professor Micheline Beaulieu.
Tel. +44 (0) 114 2222640
Email: m.beaulieu@sheffield.ac.uk

Chair in Librarianship and Information Management
Applications are invited for a Chair in Librarianship and Information Management. The appointee will contribute to the
Department's undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programmes and to the work of the Library and Information
Management Research Group, and will also be expected to play a major part in the continued development of the Department's Centre for the Public Library and Information in Society.
Research interests are welcome in any aspect of library and information management, but preference may be given to applicants who can contribute to the Department's work in some or all of the following areas: Academic, public, and workplace library and information services; Libraries, information and society; Value and impact of library and information services; Management of library and information services. The appointee will have extensive academic or operational experience that, coupled with an international standing in the library and information world, will enable him/her to enhance links both within and beyond the University, particularly with practitioners, professional and other relevant organizations.

Informal enquiries about this post may be directed to:
Professor Bob Usherwood.
Tel. +44 (0) 114 2222635
Email: r.usherwood@sheffield.ac.uk

Closing Date for both posts: 6th September 2002
Salary: to be negotiated

For details about how to apply for these posts please contact:
Personnel Services,
Firth Court, Western Bank,
Sheffield
S10 2TN,
UK.
Tel: +44 (0) 114 2221631
Fax: +44 (0) 114 2221624.
More information can also be obtained from the University of Sheffield Personnel Services website at: http://www.shef.ac.uk/jobs/adc

Further details about both these posts are available from the Department's website:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/news/jobs/jobs.html

III Notices

III.1 Publications

The ICE East Africa corpus (ICE-EA) is now available

ICE-EA is a lexical corpus, containing one million words of spoken & written English from Kenya & Tanzania. This release includes a version for use with Wordsmith, and full documentation.

The corpus is available FREE (postage & packing only) under Licence.
For more information, go to:
http://www.hku.hk/english/research/ice/avail.htm

Dr Gerald Nelson,
Research Assistant Professor,
Department of English,
The University of Hong Kong,
Pokfulam Road,
Hong Kong SAR.

Email: ganelson@hkucc.hku.hk
Phone: (852) 2241-5141
Fax: (852) 2559-7139
http://www.hku.hk/english/staff/ganelson.htm

Coordinator, The International Corpus of English (ICE)
http://www.hku.hk/english/research/ice/index.htm

Measure of Semantic Distance in WordNet

We are happy to announce the availability of a free, open-source Perl package that implements a variety of semantic distance measures that can be used in conjunction with WordNet.

Distance-0.1 implements the semantic distance measures described by Leacock & Chodorow (1998), Jiang & Conrath (1997), Resnik (1995), Lin (1998) and Hirst & St. Onge (1998). These five measures were the subject of a study by Budanitsky & Hirst (2001) that provided the inspiration for undertaking this project. (Complete references are in the README.)

The package has an easy to use command-line interface. A user specifies a distance measure and two words. It will output the measure of semantic distance between those two words according to that measure.

You can download this package (or view the README) at:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/tools.html
You will need to have WordNet and QueryData (a Perl Module) available.
QueryData : http://www.ai.mit.edu/~jrennie/WordNet/
WordNet : http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/
The Budanitsky and Hirst paper provides a good introduction to all of these measures, and can be found at:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/compling/Publications/Abstracts/Papers/Budanitsky+Hirst-2001-abs.html

Enjoy! Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Ted Pedersen
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
Department of Computer Science
Email: tpederse@d.umn.edu
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth, MN 55812
(218) 726-8770

Web Intelligence And Agent Systems

Web Intelligence And Agent Systems: An International Journal
Publisher: IOS Press
ISSN 1570-1263
Home Page: http://wi-consortium.org/

Version 0.5 of the Bigram Statistics Package is now available

BSP is now NSP!
Version 0.5 of the Bigram Statistics Package is now available, and has been renamed the N-gram Statistics Package (NSP v0.5).

NSP is an easy-to-use suite of Perl tools for counting and analysing word n-grams in text. It provides a number of standard tests of association that can be used to identify word n-grams in large corpora, and also allows users to easily implement other tests without knowing very much about Perl at all.

Earlier versions of this package were known as the Bigram Statistics Package (BSP v0.1, v0.3, v0.4) and dealt exclusively with word bigrams (two word sequences). NSP v0.5 is backwards compatible with these earlier versions, and adds supports for word n-grams.

Also new to v0.5 is support for user defined tokenization using regular expressions, stop lists, and an extensive collection of test/sample scripts.

This is free software. Download it (or view the README) at:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/nsp.html

Ted
Ted Pedersen
Tel: (218) 726-8770
E-mail: tpederse@d.umn.edu
Department of Computer Science
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth,
MN 55812
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse

III.2 Meetings

COLING-2002

The 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics COLING-2002
Taipei
24 August -1 September 2002
Organized by Academia Sinica, ACLCLP, and National Tsing Hua University

First Call for Participation

Important Dates:
Early Registration Deadline: 15, June.
Tutorials: 24 (Sat) - 25 (Sun) August 2002 (Academia Sinica)
Conference: 26 (Mon) - 30 (Fri) August 2002 (Howard International House)
Post-Conference Workshops: 31 (Sat) - 1 September 2002 (Academia Sinica)

Official URL:http://www.coling2002.sinica.edu.tw/

Roadmap Workshop at COLONG 2002

A Roadmap for Computational Linguistics
Saturday, August 31 2002, 09:00-17:30
Workshop in conjunction with COLING 2002
August 24 - September 1, 2002,
Taipei, Taiwan
Organized by ELSNET

Call For Participation

Registration And Other Information:
Registration details and other information can be found on the main conference website:
http://www.coling2002.sinica.edu.tw/
The URL for this workshop is
http://www.elsnet.org/roadmap-coling2002.html

IEEE ITCC2003

Special Track: Web and Information Retrieval Technologies IEEE ITCC2003:
4th International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing
March 31 -April 2, 2003.
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
ITCC2003 "
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~srimani/itcc2003/cfp.html
Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society

Call for Paper
You are invited to submit a draft paper of no more than 8 pages for the special session on any aspects of the following topics:
Web Retrieval
Information Retrieval
Multimedia Web/Information Retrieval
Algorithms & Techniques
Interfaces
User Studies

Papers will be reviewed by two referees for originality and quality. The conference proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society

Important Dates
Papers due: October 1, 2002
Notification of Acceptance: November 13, 2002
Camera-Ready Paper Due: December 15, 2002

Send papers to the Track Chair:
Dr. Amanda Spink
School of Information Sciences and Technology
The Pennsylvania State University
004C Thomas Building
University Park, PA 16801 USA
Tel: (814) 865-4454 Fax: (814) 865-5604
E-mail: HYPERLINK "
mailto:spink@ist.psu.edu
spink@ist.psu.edu

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)

Special Issue on Mining and Searching the Web

Call for Paper
Submission Guidelines
Prospective authors are requested to submit PDF or PS versions of their papers to:
Bing Liu, liub@comp.nus.edu.sg
Manuscripts should be no longer than 35 double-spaced pages and should conform to the guidelines for the authors printed inside the back cover of the issues of IEEE TKDE.

Important Dates:
The deadlines for the special issue are as follows:
Paper submission deadline: Sept 1, 2002
Acceptance notification: Jan. 5, 2003
Final versions of papers: Apr. 1, 2003
Publication: Jan-Feb. 2004
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~liub/tkdeWeb.html

ICDM '02: The 2002 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining

Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society
Maebashi TERRSA,
Maebashi City, Japan
December, 9 - 12, 2002

Suggested Timeline for Workshop Chairs:
July 26, 2002: Workshop call for papers has been sent out.
September 13, 2002: Workshop paper submissions due.
October 11, 2002: Workshop paper acceptance notices.
October 25, 2002: Camera-ready version of workshop papers due.
December 9, 2002: Workshop takes place.

Web Page: http://kis.maebashi-it.ac.jp/icdm02/
Mirror Page: http://www.wi-lab.com/icdm02/

JCDL 2002

The 2nd Joint Conference on Digital Libraries - JCDL 2002
July 14-18, 2002
Portland, Oregon, USA

2nd Announcement
http://www.jcdl2002.org/

CLIN 2002

Thirteenth CLIN Meeting (Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands)
Friday, 29 November 2002
University of Groningen

First Call for Papers and First Announcement
Important Dates
Deadline for submission: 27 September 2002.
Notification of acceptance: 11 October 2002.
http://www.let.rug.nl/clin2002/.

CIVR 2002 International Conference On Image And Video Retrieval

July 18th-19th 2002
Brunei Gallery, Bloomsbury, London, UK.
Further Information on The Programme is Available at
http://www.civr2002.org

Special Track on: Information Access And Retrieval Systems

18th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2003)
March 9-12, 2003,
Melbourne, Florida, USA

Important dates:
September 6, 2002 Paper Submission
October 18, 2002 Author Notification
November 8, 2002 Camera-Ready Copy
March 9-12, 2003 SAC 2003 takes place

http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/SAC2003/

JCDL 02 The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

The 2nd Joint Conference on Digital Libraries - JCDL 2002
July 14-18, 2002
Portland, Oregon, USA
http://www.jcdl2002.org/

ACL02 Workshop On Computational Approaches To Semitic Languages

University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, 11 July 2002
Invited Speaker: Sergei Nirenburg, CRL, New Mexico

Themes
Which areas are suitable for common research and for the pooling of resources?
What are the limitations of established techniques and tools when applied to Semitic languages?
What are the themes of interest to a Special Interest Group for Semitic Languages?

Further Details: http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/~mros/WSL
Or contact
mike.rosner@um.edu.mt
Or
shuly@cs.haifa.ac.il

Registration: http://www.acl02.org

The 2002 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining: ICDM '02

ICDM '02: The 2002 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society
Maebashi TERRSA, Maebashi City, Japan
December, 9 - 12, 2002

Suggested Timeline for Workshop Chairs
July 26, 2002: Workshop call for papers has been sent out.
September 13, 2002: Workshop paper submissions due.
October 11, 2002: Workshop paper acceptance notices.
October 25, 2002: Camera-ready version of workshop papers due.
December 9, 2002: Workshop takes place.

Web Page: http://kis.maebashi-it.ac.jp/icdm02/
Mirror Page: http://www.wi-lab.com/icdm02/

AMTA-2002

Tiburon, California
October 8-12, 2002

Online registration is now available. Register before July 31.
For more details, visit the AMTA Web site at:
http://www.amtaweb.org

5th AUSTRALASIAN Natural Language Processing Workshop ANLP2002

Call for Papers
Workshop: 2nd or 3rd December 2002
Exact date to be confirmed
Submissions due: 31st July 2002
Canberra, Australia
http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/Conferences/anlp2002

Fifth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2002)

TSD 2002 - Call For Demonstrations And Participation
Fifth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2002)
Brno, Czech Republic,
9-12 September 2002

Important Dates
Submission of demonstration papers: July 31, 2002
Conference date: September 9-12, 2002

The official TSD 2002 homepage is:
http://www.fi.muni.cz/tsd2002/

DAARC 2002

The 4th International Conference on Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution
September 18 - 20, 2002
Hosted by the University of Lisbon,
Faculty of Sciences

Detailed information on the programme, venue, accommodation and registration can be found at:
http://daarc2002.di.fc.ul.pt

SIGIR -Practical Guidelines for Multimedia Information Retrieval Tutorial

The 25^th ACM SIGIR 2002 Conference
11 –15 August 2002
Tampere, Finland

Call for Participation

Description:
This introductory tutorial is targeted at a beginner audience interested in a broad overview of techniques used in multimedia information retrieval (MMIR). It describes the fundamental challenges in digital audio/video retrieval and provides an overview of methods used in all phases of MMIR spanning the lifecycle of digital audio/video content:

a) Representation,

b) Indexing,

c) Query formulation,

d) Retrieval,

e) Browsing,

f) Distribution/streaming, and

g) Evaluation.

The overview of methods will be illustrated and supported by several multimedia information systems in practice. The attendees will walk away with an understanding of MMIR challenges and an overview of techniques used to address them. The tutorial handouts will include slides, a bibliography by topic with books and key papers, URLs pointing to web demos, a collection of screenshots of multimedia systems, and a CD with the MPEG-7 XM Framework code base.

http://www.sigir2002.org/html/tutorial8.htm.

Document Recognition and Retrieval X

The conference is part of:

The IS&T/SPIE's International Symposium on Electronic Imaging

2003, 20-24 January 2003,

Santa Clara Convention

Centre and Westin Hotel, Santa Clara,

California USA

The fields of document recognition and retrieval have grown rapidly in recent years. This development has been fuelled by rising accuracy rates for omnifont and handprint optical character recognition (OCR), decreasing costs for the computational power needed to run such sophisticated algorithms, and the emergence of new application areas such as the World Wide Web (WWW), digital libraries, and video- and camera-based OCR. The use of OCR is spreading from high-volume, niche domains to more general tasks, including the processing of noisy "real-world" documents, photocopies, and faxes.

Beyond OCR, document recognition includes the recovery of a document's logical structure and format. This encompasses decomposing a document into its various fundamental components (sentences, paragraphs, figures, tables, etc.), tagging these units, and then determining a higher-level structure for the document as a whole. The analysis of these entities may include attempting to understand the structure of tables and equations, or the conversion of line drawings from raster to vector format. Syntactic representation of logical structure (e.g. using grammars) and syntax-directed recognition is another important area where research contributions are solicited.

One primary reason for digitising existing paper materials is, of course, to simplify retrieval of information. Therefore we are particularly interested in papers which address any of the following retrieval issues: (1) retrieval in the face of corrupted readings of the terms in a document; (2) retrieval based on sketches, images, tables, diagrams or other non-linguistic objects that appear in the document;(3) retrieval based on text appearing with non-standard alignment, in images or graphics; (4) recognition and tagging of mathematical arrays and equations which serve as indicators of subject content or methodology used in the document. Papers addressing retrieval-specific issues are encouraged to use a standard methodology from either statistics (such as the ROC representation) or IR (such as precision versus recall) to assess the effectiveness of proposed techniques against the endpoint goal of correct recognition and retrieval of the entire document, or a section thereof.

Call for Papers and Announcement

Note: submissions to Document Recognition and Retrieval X should be extended abstracts (6 pages / 2,500 words maximum). The abstract should be informative and address the following questions:

i) What is the paper about?

ii) What is the original contribution?

iii) What is the most closely related work by others and how does this work differ?

iv) How can others make use of this work?

v) What are the main experimental/theoretical results?

Important dates

Abstract Due Date: 10 July 2002

Manuscript Due Date: 28 October 2002

Final Summary Due Date: 18 November 2002

Note: The due date for this conference has been extended to 10 July and has some elasticity beyond that.

For more information and submission instructions, please see:

http://electronicimaging.org/call/03/conferences/index.cfm?fuseaction=EI11

IV Projects

MSc in Lexical Computing and Lexicography

MSc in Lexical Computing and Lexicography
ITRI
University of Brighton
UK
http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/courses/MScLex/

A groundbreaking new MSc programme
The field The MSc links two fast-growing areas in research and commerce. Modern dictionaries are compiled through increasing use of language technology, while language technology applications demand lexical resources of ever-increasing quality to improve their performance

Skills:
Analysis of language data
Write entries for dictionaries and computer lexicons
Plan and manage lexical resource projects
Automatic processing of language corpora

Who?
Graduates in languages, linguistics or computer science wishing to specialize
Experienced professionals wishing to consolidate their expertise
Full time or part time
Individual modules may be taken as stand-alone courses

Prospects Graduates of the MSc will be well placed to take up posts in:
Dictionary publishing, as lexicographers or computer specialists
Software companies involved in language technology
PhD study and research

Where?
The course is run by the Information Technology Research Institute, a research institute specialising in language and computation, and takes place in Brighton, a vibrant and cosmopolitan seaside city one hour from London

Contact:
msclex-admin@itri.brighton.ac.uk

MSc Lexical Computing and Lexicography
ITRI
University of Brighton
Lewes Road
Brighton BN2 4GJ
UK

Tel: +44 1273 642900
Fax: +44 1273 642908
http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/courses/MScLex/