(Apologies for multiple postings)

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Call for Papers

ACL-08: HLT Workshop on

Mobile Language Processing
mobileNLPworkshop.org  <http://www.mobileNLPworskshop.org> 

Columbus, Ohio, United States
June 19th or June 20th, 2008

** Paper submission deadline: March 7, 2007 ** 


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Mobile Language Processing

Mobile devices, such as ultra-mobile PCs, personal digital assistants,
and smart phones have many unique characteristics that make them both
highly desirable as well as difficult to use. On the positive side, they
are small, convenient, personalizable, and provide an anytime-anywhere
communication capability. Conversely, they have limited input and output
capabilities, limited bandwidth, limited memory, and restricted
processing power.  

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussing the
challenges in natural and spoken language processing and systems
research that are unique to this domain. We argue that mobile devices
not only provide an ideal opportunity for language processing
applications but also offer new challenges for NLP and spoken language
understanding research.

For instance, mobile devices are beginning to integrate sensors (most
commonly for location detection through GPS, Global Positioning Systems)
that can be exploited by context/location aware NLP systems; another
interesting research direction is the use of information from multiple
devices for "distributed" language modeling and inference. To give some
concrete examples, knowing the type of web queries made from nearby
devices or from a specific location or a specific 'context' can be
combined for various applications and could potentially improve
information retrieval results. Learned language models could be
transferred from device to device, propagating and updating the language
models continuously and in a decentralized manner. 

Processing and memory limitations incurred by executing NLP and speech
recognition on small devices need to be addressed. Some applications and
practical considerations may require a client/server or distributed
architecture: what are the implications for language processing systems
in using such architectures?

The limitation of the input and output channels necessitates typing on
increasingly smaller keyboards which is quite difficult, and similarly
reading on small displays is challenging. Speech interfaces for
dictation or for understanding navigation commands and/or language
models for typing suggestions would enhance the input channel, while NLP
systems for text classification, summarization and information
extraction would be helpful for the output channel.  Speech interfaces,
language generation and dialog systems would provide a natural way to
interact with mobile devices. 

Furthermore, the growing market of cell phones in developing regions can
be used for delivering applications in the areas of health, education
and economic growth to rural communities.  Some of the challenges in
this area are the limited literacy, the many languages and dialects
spoken and the networking infrastructure.

We solicit papers on topics including, but not limited to the following:

*       Special challenges of NLP for mobile devices 
*       Applications of NLP for mobile devices
*       NLP enhanced by sensor data
*       Distributed NLP 
*       Speech and multimodal interfaces 
*       Machine translation
*       Language model sharing
*       Applications for the developing regions

The goal of this one day workshop is to provide a forum to allow both
industrial and academic researchers to share their experiences and
visions, to present results, compare systems, exchange ideas and
formulate common goals. 

"Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lisa Stifelman, Principal User Experience Manager
at Tellme/Microsoft. The title of her talk is soon to be announced."

We accept position papers (2 pages), short research or demo papers (4
pages), and regular papers (8 content pages with 1 extra page for
references). Papers must be submitted through the submission system at 
https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS07/submit.html

Please use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available at
http://ling.osu.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html.

Important dates:
- Paper submission deadline: March 7, 2008
- Notification of acceptance: April 8, 2008
- Camera-ready Copy: April 18, 2008


Organizing committee:
Rosario, Barbara        Intel Research     
Paek, Tim               Microsoft Research     


Program committee:
Acero, Alex,            Microsoft Research     
Black, Alan             CMU 
Hakkani Tur, Dilek      ICSI
Hearst, Marti iSchool, UC Berkeley
Johnston, Michael       AT&T     
Kamvar, Maryam  Google & Columbia University
Knight, Kevin           USC/Information Sciences Institute 
Kupiec, Julian  Google
Lin, Dekang             University of Alberta, Canada
Mahdaviani, Maryam University of British Columbia, Canada
Minker, Wolfgang        University of Ulm, Germany
Smith, Noah             CMU 
Thiesson, Bo            Microsoft Research
Tur, Gokhan             SRI
Weng, Fuliang           Bosch 
Zheng, Thomas   Tsinghua University
Zweig, Geoffrey         Microsoft Research


Contact
For questions about the workshop, please contact Barbara Rosario
([EMAIL PROTECTED]).


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