Call for Papers: InCGI-98

[Vasant Honavar]

Dear Colleague:

A preliminary call for papers for ICGI-98 follows. This is being
mailed to multiple mailing lists. My apologies if you receive multiple
copies of this message as a result. 

Vasant Honavar
honavar at cs.iastate.edu

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                        Preliminary Call for Papers

		http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~honavar/icgi98.html

     Fourth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI-98)

 Program Co-Chairs: Vasant Honavar and Giora Slutzki Iowa State University

                              July 12-14, 1998
                           Iowa State University
                              Ames, Iowa, USA.
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                            In cooperation with
                 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society
          ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning
                     (and possibly other organizations)
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Index

   * Introduction
   * Conference Format
   * Topics of Interest
   * Program Committee
   * Local Arrangements Committee
   * Submission of Papers
   * Submission of Tutorial Proposals

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Introduction

Grammatical Inference, variously refered to as automata induction, grammar
induction, and automatic language acquisition, refers to the process of
learning of grammars and languages from data. Machine learning of grammars
finds a variety of applications in syntactic pattern recognition, adaptive
intelligent agents, diagnosis, computational biology, systems modelling,
prediction, natural language acquisition, data mining and knowledge
discovery.

Traditionally, grammatical inference has been studied by researchers in
several research communities including: Information Theory, Formal
Languages, Automata Theory, Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics,
Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Computational Learning Theory, Neural
Networks, etc.

Perhaps one of the first attempts to bring together researchers working on
grammatical inference for an interdisciplinary exchange of research results
took place under the aegis of the First Colloquium on Grammatical Inference
held at the University of Essex in United Kingdom in April 1993. This was
followed by the (second) International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference,
held at Alicante in Spain, the proceedings of which were published by
Springer-Verlag as volume 862 of the Lectures Notes in Artificial
Intelligence, and the Third International Colloquium on Grammatical
Inference, held at Montpellier in France, the proceedings of which were
published by Springer-Verlag as volume 1147 of the Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence. Following the success of these events and the
Workshop on Automata Induction, Grammatical Inference, and Language
Acquisition, held in conjunction with the International Conference on
Machine Learning at Nashville in United States in July 1997, the Fourth
International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference will be held from July 12
through July 14, 1998, at Iowa State University in United States.

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Topics of Interest

The conference seeks to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of
original research papers on all aspects of grammatical inference including,
but not limited to:

   * Different models of grammar induction: e.g., learning from examples,
     learning using examples and queries, incremental versus non-incremental
     learning, distribution-free models of learning, learning under various
     distributional assumptions (e.g., simple distributions), impossibility
     results, complexity results, characterizations of representational and
     search biases of grammar induction algorithms.
   * Algorithms for induction of different classes of languages and
     automata: e.g., regular, context-free, and context-sensitive languages,
     interesting subsets of the above under additional syntactic
     constraints, tree and graph grammars, picture grammars,
     multi-dimensional grammars, attributed grammars, parameterized models,
     etc.
   * Theoretical and experimental analysis of different approaches to
     grammar induction including artificial neural networks, statistical
     methods, symbolic methods, information-theoretic approaches, minimum
     description length, and complexity-theoretic approaches, heuristic
     methods, etc.
   * Broader perspectives on grammar induction -- e.g., acquisition of
     grammar in conjunction with language semantics, semantic constraints on
     grammars, language acquisition by situated agents and robots,
     acquisition of language constructs that describe objects and events in
     space and time, developmental and evolutionary constraints on language
     acquisition, etc.
   * Demonstrated or potential applications of grammar induction in natural
     language acquisition, computational biology, structural pattern
     recognition, information retrieval, text processing, adaptive
     intelligent agents, systems modelling and control, and other domains.

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Program Committee (Tentative)

The following people have agreed to serve on the program committee. Several
other individuals are yet to confirm their participation.

R. Berwick, MIT, USA
M. Brent, Johns Hopkins University, USA
C. Cardie, Cornell University, USA
W. Daelemans, Tilburg University, Netherlands
D. Dowe, Monash University, Australia
D. Estival, University of Melbourne, Australia
J. Feldman, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA
L. Giles, NEC Research Institute, Princeton, USA
J. Gregor, University of Tennessee, USA
C. de la Higuera, LIRMM, France
T. Knuutila, University of Turku, Finland
E. Makinen, University of Tampere, Finland
L. Miclet, ENSSAT, Lannion, France.
G. Nagaraja, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
H. Ney, University of Technology, Aachen, Germany
J. Nicolas, IRISA, France
R. Parekh, Iowa State University, USA
L. Pitt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
D. Powers, Flinders University, Australia
L. Reeker, National Science Foundation, USA
C. Samuelsson, Lucent Technologies, USA
A. Sharma, University of New South Wales, Australia.
E. Vidal, U. Politecnica de Valencia, Spain

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Local Arrangements Committee

Dale Grosvenor, Iowa State University, USA.
K. Balakrishnan, Iowa State University, USA.
R. Parekh, Iowa State University, USA
J. Yang, Iowa State University, USA.

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Conference Format and Proceedings

The conference will include oral and possibly poster presentations of
accepted papers, a small number of tutorials and invited talks. All accepted
papers will appear in the conference proceedings to be published by a major
publisher. (Negotiations are underway with Springer-Verlag regarding the
publication of ICGI-98 proceedings as a volume in their Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence a subseries of the Lecture Notes in Computer
Science).

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Submission of Papers

Postscript versions of the papers no more than 12 pages long, (including
figures, tables, and references), prepared according to the formatting
guidelines should be submitted electronically to
icgi98-submissions at cs.iastate.edu. The formatting guidelines (including
commonly used word-processor macros and templates) will be placed online
shortly.

In those rare instances where authors might be unable to submit postscript
versions of their papers electronically, we will try to accomodate them.

Each paper will be rigorously refereed by at least 2 reviewers for technical
soundness, originality, and clarity of presentation.

Deadlines

The relevant schedule for paper submissions is as follows:

   * March 1, 1998. Deadline for receipt of manuscripts
   * April 21, 1998. Notification of acceptance
   * May 15, 1998. Camera ready copies due

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Submission of Proposals for Tutorials

The conference will include a small number of short (2-hour) tutorials on
selected topics in grammatical inference. Some examples of possible tutorial
topics are: Hidden Markov Models, Grammatical Inference Applications in
Computational Biology and PAC learnability of Grammars. This list is meant
only to be suggestive and not exhaustive. Those interested in presenting a a
tutorial should submit a proposal (in plain text format) to
icgi-submissions at cs.iastate.edu by electronic mail:

   * A brief abstract (300 words or less) describing the topics to be
     covered
   * A brief description of the target audience and their expected
     background
   * A brief curriculum vitae including the proposer's relevant
     qualifications and publications

The relevant schedule for tutorials is as follows:

   * March 1, 1998. Deadline for receipt of tutorial proposals
   * April 1, 1998. Notification of acceptance
   * May 15, 1998. Tutorial notes due

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