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. 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 ------- Kavi Mahesh, Ph.D. | Office : (505) 646-5861 Computing Research Laboratory | Fax : (505) 646-6218 New Mexico State Univ, Box 30001 Dept. 3CRL | mahesh@crl.nmsu.edu Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001, USA | http://crl.nmsu.edu/users/mahesh/