ROMAND 2002 2nd Workshop on RObust Methods in Analysis of Natural language Data (URL: http://scie02.info.uniroma2.it/ROMAND02.htm) jointly held with SCIE 2002 - International Summer Convention on Information Extraction on July 17 2002 at ESA-Esrin (European Space Agency), Frascati, Rome (Italy) Motivations and Goals ===================== The ability of dealing with odd (i.e. ill-formed or simply partial) sentences is largely exhibited by humans. This allows to rather easily manage unknown words (e.g. proper nouns never encountered before), to tackle odd grammatical constructions, to force the interpretation of illegal syntactic structures (e.g. gaps in the information streams as in remote/telephonic dialogue) as well as the ability of resorting always to partial information during the interpretation of uncomplete (or erroneous) input. All of the above phenomena are interesting aspects of what has been recently called robustness in NLP processing (Menzel,1997). The modeling of such phenomena within computational devices is thus more than a relevant research area either for linguistic research as well as for the design of real NLP systems. Robustness has been traditionally stressed as a general desirable property of any computational model and system. NLP engineering methods and NLP systems are crucially faced by problems caused by the noise found in the "real" target texts. However, the nature of these problems and their interactions with the different levels of the language analysis process exhibits specific properties that are hardly approached by exisisting software engineering criteria and practice. Moreover, the above research area is also central from a linguistic point of view. Effective models of robusteness, tha are able to fill gaps or to recover from deficiencies against wrong or poor input streams, pose challanges to the expresiveness of any underlying explanatory language theory. Cognitive aspects of robustness are here also playing the role of experimental evidence as well as definitory knowledge. The interdisciplinary nature of these research theme is even more critical as without a systematic validation within "real" NLP systems no linguistic or psycholinguistic definition of robustness is possible, that is objectively captured and assessed. The success of a recent Special Issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Cambridge University Press) is a further evidence of the relevance of these problems within the current research trends. ROMAND 2002 is the second of a series of workshop that aims at bringing together researchers working on robust methods in natural language processing. The term natural language is here intended as all possible modalities of human communication and it is not restricted to written or spoken language. The main goal of the workshop will be to bring together researchers working in fields like artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, language engineering, human-computer interaction, cognitive science who are facing with the problem of feasible and reliable systems implementation. Theoretical aspects of robustness in NLP are welcome as well as engineering and industrial experiences. The workshop will be jointly held with the SCIE 2002 Summer Convention on Information Extraction which will be held in Frascati, Rome (Italy) from July 16th to 18th. The ROMAND workshop will be held during the SCIE 2002 week on the 19th. Topics ====== Abstracts are invited on all topics related to robustness in natural language processing, including, but not limited to: * Robust Text Analysis * Information Extraction * Robust Parsing * Natural Language Architectures * Hybrid methods in computational linguistics and language engineering * Text Mining * Robust Semantics * Underspecification * Spoken Dialogue systems * Multimodal human-computer interfaces * NLP and Soft Computing * Multimedia document analysis Submissions =========== Papers from the first two ROMAND workshops will be considered for publication on a book on Robust Methods in Analysis of Natural language Data for an International Editor. Among the submitted papers relevant results on robustness or significant position papers will be considered for inclusion on the above book. Authors should submit the final version of the paper of at most 12 pages following the ACL/Coling formatting instructions. Authors are encouraged to submit papers electronically (both printable versions (postscript or pdf format) or sources, i.e. Word97-2000, will be accepted) to: Roberto Basili (basili@info.uniroma2.it). Also hardcopy submission will be accepted at: Roberto Basili e-mail: basili@info.uniroma2.it Dept. of Computer Science, Systems and Management University of Roma Tor Vergata Via di Tor Vergata 00133 Roma (ITALY) tel: +39 06 72597391 fax: +39 06 72597460 Workshop Committee ================== Program chairs: * Roberto Basili basili@info.uniroma2.it * Vincenzo Pallotta Vincenzo.Pallotta@epfl.ch Program Committee * Afzal Ballim (EPFL and Japan Tobacco International) * Philippe Blache (University of Aix-en-provence) * Rens Bod (University of Amsterdam) * Jean-Pierre Chanod (XEROX Grenoble) * Dan Cristea (University of Iasi) * Rodolfo Delmonte (University of Venice) * Wolfgang Menzel (University of Hamburg) * Martin Rajman (EPFL-LIA) * Giorgio Satta (University of Padova) * Srinivas Bangalore (University of Pennsylvania) * Atro Voutilainen (University of Helsinki) * Patrick Ruch (University of Geneva and EPFL) Organization ============ This year's workshop is jointly held with the "SCIE 2002 - International Summer Convention on Information Extraction " ( SCIE 2002 ). The workshop will take place at the ESA (European Space Agency) premises at Frascati (Rome, Italy). The workshop is endorsed by: * AI*IA (Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Artificiale). Registration ============ Details about the registration procedure and the on-line registration form could be found at: http://scie02.info.uniroma2.it/Registration.htm The registration fee will be: Normal registration: 100 Euros For SCIE2002 attendee: 40 Euros Travel information and Accomodation =================================== Details about the travel information to Frascati, local accomodation and the access to the workshop site could be found at http://scie02.info.uniroma2.it/ConVen.htm Further Information =================== For any information related to the organization, please contact: Roberto Basili e-mail: basili@info.uniroma2.it