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Call for Papers

ACL-08: HLT Workshop on

Mobile Language Processing

mobileNLPworkshop.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 â??distributedâ?? 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 â??contextâ?? 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 (barbara.rosario@intel.com).