ELSNET 2006 Summer School : CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

APPOLOGIZE FOR MULTIPLE POSTINGS

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION   / PRE-REGISTRATION

The 12th ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication

INFORMATION FUSION IN NATURAL LANGUAGE SYSTEMS

hosted by the University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
3 - 14 July 2006
http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/view/Main/ELSNET06



In order to pre-register candidates are required 
to send a statement of interest to participate in 
the summer school, a curriculum vitae and a title 
for a contribution to the "student" session as 
well as courses of interest, to:

                elsnet06@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

PRE-REGISTRATION IS OBLIGATORY FOR THE PARTICIPATION AT THE SUMMER SCHOOL

COURSES

¢ Information fusion for command and control, 
Pontus Svenson (FOI Stockholm, Sweden)
¢ Audio visual speech recognition, Rainer 
Stiefelhagen  (University Karlsruhe, Germany)
¢ XML integration of natural language processing 
components, Ulrich Schäfer, (DFKI, Germany)
¢ Hybrid Parsing, Kilian Forth and Wolfgang 
Menzel (University of Hamburg, Germany)
¢ Ontologies for information fusion, Luciano Serafini, (ITC-IRST Trento, Italy)
¢ Syntax semantics integration in HPSG, Valia Kordoni, (DFKI Germany)
¢ Hybrid approaches in machine translation, 
Stephan Oepen (University of Oslo, Norway)
¢ Ensemble based architectures, Hans van Halteren 
(University of Nijmengen, Holland)
¢ Information fusion in multi-document 
summarization, Ani Nenkova (Stanford University, 
USA)

Courses will have the duration of one week.  Some 
of them will include practical exercises

PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME

¢Pre-registration deadline 30.05.2006
¢Notification of acceptance 10.06.2006
¢Payment Deadline 30.06.2006
¢Summer school  3.07 - 14.07.2006



Rationale
Information Fusion is an everyday necessity in 
complex speech and language systems although it 
is rarely noticed as such. Systems in this area 
are always composed of individual components 
which need to co-operate towards a common goal. 
The reason for such modularisation is obvious: 
due to the many different layers and knowledge 
sources usually involved, system components need 
to be developed independently by different people 
with different areas and degrees of 
specialization. Moreover, there might be the 
option or even the necessity to train such 
components on vastly different kinds of data 
sets. Often it is the case that a range of 
solution alternatives exists for one and the same 
processing task, each of them providing a partial 
and unreliable but perhaps complementary 
contribution to the overall behaviour of the 
system. Here, the problem arises of how to 
achieve a synergy between such competitive 
approaches, even for tasks where the desired 
processing result is no longer a trivial one.

Since all available solutions for speech and 
language processing are approximations to a 
conveyed ideal, system design has to account for 
the inherent uncertainty of processing results on 
all levels. this makes system integration a 
problem of information fusion, which can be 
considered as solved in some cases but it is 
still an open research issue in others: for 
speech recognition the contributions of the 
acoustic models and the language model need to be 
adjusted properly, whereas in translation a 
target sentence has to be composed of partial 
structures produced by e.g. an example-based 
component and a deep-linguistic one. Other 
examples can be taken from more ambitious task 
like the integration of acoustic (speech and 
noise) and visual data (lip movements, hand 
gestures and facial expressions) in complex 
multimodal environments.

It is always astonishing to notice, how little 
effort humans spend to integrate the available 
information from such a diversity of sources. 
Even more, multimodal information processing in 
many cases leads to a facilitatory effect in the 
sense that using evidence from a range of sensory 
channels is faster than relying on a single one. 
This, obviously, is contrary to the behaviour of 
all the techniques we currently have at our 
disposal when designing a complex speech and 
language system. Therefore, the summer school 
will depart from a survey of phenomena and 
mechanisms for information fusion. It continues 
with studying various approaches for sensor-data 
fusion in technical systems, like robots. Finally 
it will investigate the issue of information 
fusion from the perspective of a range of speech 
and language processing tasks, namely
¢ speech recognition and spoken language systems
¢ machine translation
¢ distributed and multilingual information systems
¢ parsing
¢ multimodal speech and language systems

How different these application areas might look, 
the underlying principles of and the approaches 
towards information fusion seem to be comparable 
if not even highly similar. It is the goal of the 
summer school to highlight such similarities and 
to inspire the cross-disciplinary transfer of 
ideas and solutions




FEES
====

The registration fee will cover tuition, course 
notes, coffee and tea breaks the welcome and the 
farewell parties.

Students:                    125 ¤
Academic Staff             250 ¤
Employees of Industry   500 ¤

The registration fee does not include 
accommodation or meals. Participants from ELSNET 
sites receive a 20% reduction.

The organisers can provide accommodation in 
student campus for prices between 280 - 300 Euro/ 
2 weeks. Registration for only part of the school 
is not possible.

A small number of scholarships  (full or partial) 
will be available. Please indicate if you intend 
to apply . When applying please keep in mind that 
full-cost scholarships (including travelling and 
accommodation) will be granted only in very well 
motivated cases


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Walther v. Hahn
Wolfgang Menzel
Cristina Vertan

University of Hamburg, Dept. of Computer Science
Natural Language Systems Division
Vogt-Kölln Str. 30
D-22527, Germany

e-mail:
{vhahn, menzel, vertan}@informatik.uni-hamburg.de

Tel: +49 40 428832533
Fax: +49 40 428832515

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Elisabeth Andre, University of Augsburg, Germany
Nils Ole Bernsen, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Robert Dale, Macquarie University Sydney, Australia
Günther Görz, University of Erlangen, Germany
Björn Granström, KTH Stokholm, Sweden
Walther v. Hahn , University of Hamburg, Germany
Jan Hajic, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Steven Krauwer, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands




--
Dr. Cristina Vertan
Natural Language Systems Division
Computer Science Department
University of Hamburg
Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30
22527 Hamburg GERMANY

Tel. 040 428 83 2519
Fax  040 428 83 2515

http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~cri
--
Dr. Cristina Vertan
Natural Language Systems Division
Computer Science Department
University of Hamburg
Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30
22527 Hamburg GERMANY

Tel. 040 428 83 2519
Fax  040 428 83 2515

http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~cri