Second International Workshop on Scalable Natural
                      Language Understanding

                      ScaNaLU 2004

                      May 6, 2004, following HLT/NAACL, Boston, MA

                      ScaNaLU 2004 NEWS

                      - Travel Grants for accepted Papers and Speakers available (for application see below)
                      - New Submission Deadline: February the 5th 2004

                      Final Call for Workshop Papers

                      There is a growing need for systems that can understand and generate natural language in applications that require substantial
                      amounts of knowledge as well as reasoning capabilities. Most current implemented systems for natural language understanding
                      (NLU) are decoupled from any reasoning processes, which makes them narrow and brittle. Furthermore, they do not appear to be
                      scalable in the sense that the techniques used in such systems do not appear to generalize to more complex applications. While
                      significant work has been done in developing theoretical underpinnings of systems that use knowledge and reasoning (e.g.,
                      development of models of linguistic interpretation using abductive reasoning, intention recognition, formal models of dialogue, formal
                      models of lexical and utterance meaning, and utterance planning), it has often proved difficult to utilize such theories in robust
                      working systems. Another major barrier has been the vast amount of linguistic and world knowledge needed. But there is now
                      significant progress in compiling the required knowledge, using manual, statistical and hybrid techniques. But even as these resources
                      become available, we still lack some key conceptual and computational frameworks that will form the foundation for effective
                      scalable natural language systems.

                      There are many applications that would be enabled or benefit greatly from scalable language systems, including, the design of smart
                      user interfaces that act more as a personal assistant than a computer, intelligent tutoring systems that can fully engage the student in
                      responsive interaction, machine translation systems, text and message understanding, and natural language interfaces to knowledge
                      management systems that move beyond data based queries to enable planning, situational analysis, and other ?cognitive? capabilities

                      FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION:

                      The format and length requirements will be the same as for full papers of NAACL/HLT 2004, except that submission will not be
                      blind. See http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~pablo/hlt-naacl04/callpapers.html for details.

                      SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

                      Papers should be sent to scanalu2004@eml-d.villa-bosch.de. The paper should be an attachment in PDF format and the heading on
                      the email should read "PAPER SUBMISSION". Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to the originating email address.

                      LANGUAGE: all papers must be written and presented in English

                      IMPORTANT DATES:

                      Papers due: February 05, 2004
                      Acceptance/rejection notification: February 21, 2004
                      Final version due: March 8, 2004
                      Conference: May 6, 2004

                      ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

                      James Allen, Rochester
                      Jerry Feldman, Berkeley
                      Rainer Malaka, Heidelberg
                      Johanna Moore, Edinburgh
                      Robert Porzel, Heidelberg

                      PROGRAM COMMITTEE (TENTATIVE)

                      Carolyn Rose, Carnegie Mellon University
                      Dan Gildea, University of Rochester
                      Jaime Carbonell, Carnegie Mellon University
                      Jan Alexandersson, DFKI
                      Martha Palmer, University of Pennsylvania
                      Massimo Poesio, University of Essex
                      Mathew Stone, Ruttgers
                      Sanda Harabagiu, Southern Methodist University
                      Stanley Peters, Stanford University

                      SCOPE/AUDIENCE

                      The workshop aims at bringing together researchers involved using knowledge representations and reasoning systems to support
                      language understanding and generation, The goal is to find common ground and exchange ideas in the fields of ontology, semantics,
                      representation, reasoning, and pragmatics, etc. in order to strengthen individual approaches and combine modelling efforts.

                      In the ScaNaLU 2004 workshop we intend to bring together researchers working in various sub-fields of natural language
                      understanding with an interest in building scalable systems. The scope of interest includes but is not limited to:

                      - Integrating hybrid approaches combining knowledge-based and statistical approaches
                      - Multi-modal interfaces including language understanding in knowledge-rich domains
                      - Natural Language Generation: From sentences to extended discourse
                      - Utilization of world knowledge into NLU systems
                      - Semantic formalisms for scalable NLU
                      - Knowledge-driven discourse models of NLU (e.g., speech act interpretation, implicature, intention recognition, reference
                      resolution)
                      - Representation standards
                      - Integration of extra-linguistic and pragmatic contexts
                      - (Semi-)automatic acquisition of linguistic and world knowledge
                      - Theories of semantic and pragmatic phenomena (e.g., metonymy, metaphor, degree expressions, ?)
                      - Applications requiring deep semantic analysis and reasoning

                      WORKSHOP FORMAT AND SCHEDULE:

                      The workshop will interleave technical presentations with extensive time for discussion of the presented work. Before the workshop
                      we will assign a commentator for each accepted presentation from the attendees, in order to kick off a lively discussion. Altogether
                      the format will consist of four elements:

                      - Paper presentations with commentators and discussion
                      - Invited talk(s)
                      - Application and device demonstrations with discussion
                      - Panel discussion

                      We will accept paper submissions for both technical presentations and demonstrations. We plan to be reasonably selective in order
                      to have a high quality workshop. The papers will be published in workshop proceedings and we will try to forward the best ones to
                      some high quality journal.

                      APPLICATION FORM for Travel Grants:

                      Please send an email to scanalu2004@eml-d.villa-bosch.de to receive an application form, before the 29th of February 2004.