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From: bernie@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Bernie Jones)
Subject: CFP: SIGPARSE96 - PUNCTUATION WORKSHOP
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 CALL FOR PAPERS  CALL FOR PAPERS CALL  FOR PAPERS  CALL FOR PAPERS 
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 		  	  SIGPARSE 96


International Workshop on PUNCTUATION IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

	             Friday, June 28, 1996

      	  in conjunction with the 34th Annual Meeting of the 
              Association for Computational Linguistics
                 University of California, Santa Cruz
		      Santa Cruz, California, USA


FOCUS OF THE WORKSHOP 

Surprisingly, most research in Computational Linguistics over the
years has almost completely ignored the (ortho)graphical facet of
language, punctuation. This has mainly been due to the overall
complexity of that field, but also due to the lack of a good
theoretical description of the problem.

However, interest in punctuation in the fields of `straight' and
computational linguistics has greatly increased in the last five
years. This is partially due to the publication, in 1990, of Geoffrey
Nunberg's book "The Linguistics of Punctuation", but also due to the
fact that it has been recognised that true understanding and
processing of written language will be almost impossible if
punctuation is not taken into account.

Almost any structure-giving, or graphical, device in text could be
described as punctuation - this means that punctuation falls into
roughly three categories:

    Within word: marks like hyphens and apostrophes 

    Between word: what we conventionally think of as punctuation, 
                  e.g. commas, full-stops, colons.  

    Higher-level graphical punctuation: paragraphing, indentation, 
                                        underlining, font changes etc...

Although most research on punctuation seems to have focussed on the
narrow, second definition, and its role in parsing and syntax,
punctuation has a far wider nature and application, and there is
interest in fields as diverse as semantics, discourse, automatic
editing, conversation analysis, intonation and psycholinguistics.

The time is therefore ripe for a workshop in the general field of
punctuation, to bring together all those researchers who have been
working on various aspects of the problem, or who have an interest in
it, to share ideas and maybe establish some standard approach to what
is a novel and highly interesting area.

WORKSHOP ORGANISATION 

The workshop will be a full-day event consisting of about 12 half-hour
papers, including some time for discussion. There will be an invited
talk given by the `Father of Modern Punctuation Research', Geoff
Nunberg of Xerox PARC.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions are invited that address the issue of punctuation in all
areas of CL, including, but not limited to, the following:

Parsing                Syntax                 Generation 
Discourse processing   Semantics              Machine translation
Phonetics              Phonology              Corpus-based work
Psycholinguistics      Message understanding  Editorial assistants
Information retrieval  Statistical methods    Automated tagging

Papers should not exceed 3,200 words and should include an abstract of
not more than 15 lines. The title page should include title, authors,
addresses, email, telephone numbers and the abstract. Electronic
submissions are strongly prefered and encouraged, and should be in
postscript, self-contained LaTeX or (if nothing else is available) in
ASCII.

Submissions and any questions should be sent to:

Bernie Jones                     Centre for Cognitive Science,
                                 2 Buccleuch Place,
bernie@cogsci.ed.ac.uk           Edinburgh EH8 9LW, United Kingdom

DEADLINES

Submissions should reach Bernie Jones by Friday 12th April 1996.

