### to whom it may concern. //fw.

CALL FOR PAPERS (new submission deadline: Dec. 31 2005)

"Reasoning in Natural Language Information Processing"

Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP)

GUEST EDITORS:

Dawei Song (d.song@open.ac.uk), Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, United Kingdom Jian-Yun Nie (nie@iro.umontreal.ca), Department of IRO, University of Montreal, Canada

WEBSITE:

http://www.kmi.open.ac.uk/people/dawei/talip http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~nie/talip/CFP.html

BACKGROUND:

For any applications related to Natural Language Processing (NLP), reasoning has been recognized as a necessary underlying aspect: when we try to retrieve relevant documents in Information Retrieval (IR), to determine the correct answer in a Question-Answering (QA) system, or to determine an appropriate sentence in Machine Translation (MT), some forms of reasoning are often underlying. Most of the existing work in NLP deals with specific NLP problems in a highly heuristic manner, yet not from an explicit reasoning perspective. Recently, there have been developments on models that allow reasoning in NLP, such as language modelling, logical models, models based on Bayesian networks, and so on.

Then the question is: how can the theoretical approaches for reasoning be coupled with the practical approaches in NLP?

We believe that the basic techniques necessary for these NLP-related applications are mature enough to think about the problem from a broader point of view. Publishing a special issue on this topic would contribute in anchoring the idea of reasoning in different NLP applications.

THEME:

In this special issue, we seek particularly for high-quality contributions that integrate reasoning involved in different areas of natural language processing, both at theoretical and/or practical levels.

TOPICS:

Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

- Models and methods with capability of integrating reasoning in NLP, including statistical and symbolic reasoning:

o Logical models o Bayesian networks o Fuzzy logic o Statistical reasoning using co-occurrences or language modelling

- Applications of reasoning process to different problems, including (not limited to):

o Disambiguation (e.g., word sense, stemming, segmentation, etc.) o Machine translation o Information retrieval o Question-answering o Speech recognition or speech input methods for Asian languages o Temporal/Spatial information extraction and reasoning

- Development of resources to facilitate reasoning in NLP

o Text data mining and machine learning techniques allowing to construct

large scale linguistic resources and knowledge base for reasoning in NLP

While this special issue will consider applications to non-Asian languages, we particularly encourage submissions describing applications

in Asian languages.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

Papers should be formatted following the style guidelines for the ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (http://www.acm.org/pubs/talip/authors.html#STYLE_GUIDELINES).

Submission should be sent electronically in PDF or postscript format to either of the guest editors by email with subject: "TALIP Special Issue Submission". Please list title and authors of your submission in the body of the email.

IMPORTANT DATES:

- Paper submission: Dec. 31, 2005 - Notification of acceptance: Feb. 31, 2005 - Final version: Apr. 31, 2006 - Expected publication date: Fall 2006