Greetings all, I realized that I have not posted a report from my trip to CICLING in Mexico City. It was great. How's that? :) Mexico City remains one of my favorite places, and I should point out that this was the 7th time I have attended CICLING in Mexico City, and it has taken place 7 times in Mexico City, so I have a perfect attendance record thus far. If you are interested the conference web site is http://www.cicling.org
CICLING remains an interesting and useful event. The invited speakers were quite good this year (as they usually are) Ray Mooney, Greg Greffenstat, and Kathy McKeown. Ray is an old friend but this was my first chance to meet Greg and Kathy and they were both really great, very accomplished of course, and quite approachable and friendly as well. The presentations were of questionable quality overall however, since my presentation of Anagha and my paper won the best presentation award. That is surely a sign of a low overall standard. :) That is a joke of course, I actually think the presentation was pretty good because the underlying work was good, and that is mostly due to Anagha's efforts. This paper was about the name discrimination task we have worked on, and relied very heavily on Anagha's manually annotated name data from the web, and also her work on cluster stopping. You can find the paper here if you are interested : http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/Pubs/cicling2007.pdf and Anagha's web name data is available here: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/namedata.html I am not going to travel this summer. I have decided to pass on NAACL, ACL, and SIGIR this year, just because I feel like I'm a little saturated with travel. The last year featured quite a few trips.... CICLING Mexico City Feb 2006 EACL Trento, Italy April 2006 NAACL New York City June 2006 AAAI Boston July 2006 AMIA Washington DC Nov 2006 IJCAI Hyderabad Jan 2007 CICLING Mexico City Feb 2007 So, I think my next conference trip (pending the outcome of a paper submission with Bridget) will be to AMIA in Chicago in November 2007. I am working a lot more on journal articles now, as I feel like we have quite a lot of work that it is in need of "bigger picture" writing, so that's my main activity now. I hope to have articles relating to SenseRelate and SenseClusters written sometime over the next few months... I am also participating in a few Senseval tasks, English lexical sample (#17) and sense discrimination (#2). There are many other very interesting tasks, but unfortunately there just isn't time to enter them all! That will occupy the next few weeks as results are due around April 1. That's a brief update at least. There are more specific points that came up at CICLING and probably even back at IJCAI, and I will get to those as they come up or as I wade through the backlog of notes, etc. that I have. I hope all is well wherever you are, and feel free to send an update to the list of just to me. I am always interested in what people are doing. Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
