The FINITE STRING Newsletter Announcements

Announcements (Carnegie-Mellon University), Howard Morgan (University of Pennsylvania), Emmanuel Schegloff (UCLA), and John C. Thomas (IBM Research). New ACL Officers Elected at 1979 Meeting The Annual Banquet will be held on Friday eve- The following people were elected to office at the ning, amongst the Egyptian mummies in the Rotunda 1979 Annual Business Meeting of the ACL, which was of the University Museum. held on August 11 in La Jolla, California: Local arrangements for the meeting are being han- President: dled by Kathleen McKeown of the University of Penn- Bonnie Webber, University of Pennsylvania sylvania. Vice President: Norm Sondheimer, Sperry Univac Secretary-Treasurer: Cognitive Science Conference at Yale Don Walker, SRI International The Cognitive Science Society will hold its second Executive Committee (1980-1982): annual conference at Yale University in New Haven, Wendy Lehnert, Yale University Connecticut, on June 16-19, 1980. There will be Nominating Committee (1980-1982): three major addresses, three panel discussions, and Ron Kaplan, Xerox PARC sessions of short papers sponsored by members of the These names had been placed into nomination by Society. (A Call for Abstracts has already gone out to the 1979 Nominating Committee, which consisted of members, with a deadline of March 1.) There will also Stan Petrick, Paul Chapin, and Jon Allen. be computer demonstrations and a banquet. Dormito- ry space at the University is being reserved, and a room plan and meal plan will be available for atten- 1980 ACL Meeting Date Changed dees. The 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Arrangements will be made to minimize the impact Computational Linguistics will be held June 19-22, of the one-day overlap with the schedule of the ACL 1980, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania meeting (see previous item). in Philadelphia. This is a change from the previously For further information, contact announced date of June 18-21, and was brought about by a desire to minimize the overlap in time with the Professor Wendy G. Lehnert Cognitive Science Society meeting, which will be held Department of Computer Science in New Haven earlier the same week (see next item). Box 2158 Yale Station Yale University The ACL meeting will be divided into two parts. New Haven, Connecticut 06520 During the first two days (Thursday and Friday), re- fereed, contributed papers will be presented, and the Annual Business Meeting will be held. Gary Hendrix COLING 80 to be Held in Tokyo of SRI International is the Chairman of the Program The 1980 International Conference on Computa- Committee, and a Call for Papers (with a February 15 tional Linguistics (COLING 80) will be held in Tokyo, deadline) went out to all ACL members in December. September 29 - October 4. Both artificial intelligence The other members of the Program Committee are and theoretical linguistics provide the underpinnings Charles Fillmore, University of California, Jane Robin- for studies to be reported at COLING 80, and applica- son, SRI International, Ivan Sag, Stanford University, tions including office automation will be presented Henry Thompson, Xerox PARC, and Rober Wilensky, together with pure scientific results. Voice recognition University of California. and the problem of Chinese character input-output are During the second two days of the meeting likely to have a large place in the final program, ac- (Saturday and Sunday), a parasession on "Topics in cording to David G. Hays, program chairman. Interactive Discourse" with invited papers and panels Computational linguistics is the study of interac- will be held. This part of the meeting is being organ- tions between human language and the computer. On ized by Bonnie Webber of the University of Pennsyl- the linguistic side, papers on discourse structure, se- vania, and will consist of three panels, Front-end De- mantics, syntax, and phonology are usually included in sign: Demands of Service Application, chaired by Bar- conferences; papers on the history of language, lexi- bara Grosz of SRI International, Front-end Design: cography, literary studies, and dialect variation are Demands of Convention and Channel, chaired by Jerry frequently offered. In artificial intelligence, natural- Hobbs of SRI International, and Natural Language language input for programming, data-base access, and Interactive Systems: Looking to the Future, chaired by data input are topics of high current interest. Readers Bonnie Webber. Among the panelists will be John for the blind and other voice input-output applications Carey (Alternate Media Center, NYU), Phil Hayes have appeared.

American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 1, January*March 1980 51 The FINITE STRING Newsletter Announcements

Office automation, including word processing, is a Social events are being planned, as well, including a rapidly growing application area that can use the re- cocktail party, a farewell banquet, an opera perform- sults of 20 years' work in computational linguistics, ance, local excursions, and post-conference trips. Hays says, and machine translation is coming to the Further information can be obtained from the fore again. Workshop Secretariat: The first conference in the COLING series was Miss Ludmila R6zafiska held in New York in 1965. Since then conferences Institute of Informatics have been held in Canada, France, Hungary, Italy, Warsaw University Norway, and Sweden. The Tokyo conference will be PKiN pok. 850 held during the week preceding the IFIP conference on 00-950 Warsaw, POLAND computing. COLING meetings are sponsored by the International Committee on Computational Linguistics, Sixth International ALLC Symposium of which Bernard Vauquois, professor at Grenoble, to be Held in Cambridge France, is chairman. Professor Hiroshi Wada is honor- The Sixth International ALLC Symposium on Com- ary president of COLING 80. Professor Makoto Na- puters in Literary and Linguistic Research will be held gao is local arrangements chairman. at the University of Cambridge, England, from March Information about COLING 80 can be obtained 28 to April 3, 1980, co-sponsored by the Association from: for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Associ- David G. Hays ation for Computers and the Humanities. Papers are Program Chairman anticipated in the following categories: authorship 5048 Lake Shore Road studies, concordances, data bases, education, input- Hamburg, New York 14075 output, language-oriented studies, lexicography, liter- ary statistics, metrics, quantitative linguistics, software, A dollar bill makes the inquirer a member of the U. S. stylistic analysis, and textual criticism. The program Committee for COLING 80. will include sight-seeing, an Elizabethan Feast: and Sra. Nicoletta Calzolari, C.N.U.C.E., 36 via Santa demonstrations of text processing. Maria, 56100 Pisa, Italy, is European secretary. Pro- For further information contact: fessor Nagao's address is Department of Electrical Dr. J.L. Dawson Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. Secretary, 1980 Symposium Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre First International Workshop on Natural Sidgwick Site Communication with Computers to be Cambridge CB3 9DA, ENGLAND Held in Warsaw The Institute of Informatics of Warsaw University Introduction to Computing in the Humanities is organizing the First International Workshop on Nat- The next ALLC Summer School, in the series or- ural Communication with Computers, to take place ganized by Mrs. Susan Hockey, has been scheduled to September 9-12, 1980, in Warsaw, Poland. The aim take place at the University College of Wales, Abery- of the Workshop is to present recent advances in stwyth, April 14-19, 1980. The subject of the Summer man/computer natural communication, with three main School will be "Introduction to Computing in the Hu- topic areas: Man/computer Communication Systems in manities." The major element in the course is pro- Natural Written Text (question answering systems, gramming in SNOBOL4, together with the use of con- natural language data base access, etc.), Speech Com- cordance and information retrieval packages. Informa- munication with Computers (speech understanding tion may be obtained from: systems, digital synthesis of speech, speaker recogni- Mr. G.V. Appleton tion, etc.), and Digital Image Processing Systems. Computer Unit There will be invited papers suitable for 60-minute Llandinam Building presentation, regular papers suitable for 35-minute University College of Wales presentation (with acceptance based on a 3-page, de- Aberystwyth, Dyfed SY23 2AX, Wales, UK tailed summary due February 15), and short communi- cations suitable for 10-15 minute presentation (with Third National Conference of Canadian Society acceptance based on a 1 or 2-page summary, possible for Computational Studies of Intelligence in the course of the Workshop). All accepted papers The Third National Conference of the Canadian will be published in the Proceedings. The official lan- Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence will guage of the Workshop is English.

52 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 1, January-March 1980 The FINITE STRING Newsletter Announcements be held in Victoria, British Columbia, on May 14-16, Sten-Ake T~rnlund 1980, in cooperation with the Canadian Man- Department of Computer Science Computer Communications Society, the Canadian University of Stockholm Image Processing and Recognition Society, the Canadi- 106 91 Stockholm, SWEDEN an Information Processing Society, and the University before April 1, 1980. Accepted authors will be noti- of Victoria. fied by May 1. Full papers will also be separately Topics of interest include natural language under- considered for inclusion in a book on logic program- standing, heuristic problem solving and game-playing, ming based on the conference. automatic programming and debugging, computer per- The program committee consists of Keith Clark ception, computer vision, psychological aspects of AI, (Imperial College, London), Alain Colmerauer automatic theorem proving, representation of knowl- (University of Marseille), Maarten van Emden edge, applications of AI, and social consequences of (University of Waterloo), Robert Kowalski (Imperial AI. Proceedings will be distributed at the conference, College, London), Sharon Sickel (University of Cali- and will be subsequently available for purchase from fornia, Santa Cruz), Peter Szeredi (SZKI, Institute for CIPS. Coordination of Computer Techniques, Budapest), The address for correspondence is: Sten-Ake Tarnlund (University of Stockholm), and David Warren (University of Edinburgh). CSCSI Conference Dept. of Computing Science University of Alberta New American AI Society Formed Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2H1, CANADA The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is a new scientific society whose purpose is to AISB-80 Conference to be Held in Amsterdam further the dissemination of information on artificial intelligence in the United States. Its primary activities AISB-80, the fourth conference to be organized by will be to hold an annual conference (see next item), the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and except in those years when IJCAI is held in North Simulation of Behaviour, will be held in Amsterdam, America, and to issue a quarterly publication. The July 2-5, 1980. The topics and the Programme Com- AAAI will focus on new work in AI in the United mittee members include Natural Language Understand- States, and hopes to work in cooperation with other ing, Karen Sparck-Jones (Cambridge), Automatic De- related groups. duction, Joerg Seikman (Karlsruhe), AI Methods and Problem Solving, Bob Wielinga (Amsterdam), Auto- The Initial Organizing Committee has elected Allen matic Programming and Languages for AI, Steven Newell of Carnegie-Mellon University as the first Hardy (Sussex), Vision and Image Understanding, President, Ed Feigenbaum of Stanford University as Mike Brady (Essex), and Psychological Models, Rich- President-elect, and Don Walker of SRI International ard Young (Cambridge). Both long and short papers as the first Secretary-Treasurer. A general election, in will be presented, and a conference proceedings will be which all members may vote, will be held this winter. published. The AAAI is open to all active researchers in AI Questions about the conference should be ad- interested in developing the science of Artificial Intelli- dressed to: gence. To obtain a membership application, contact: Dr. Bob Wielinga B.G. Buchanan Psychology Laboratory Computer Science Department Weerperplein 8, Stanford University Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS Stanford, California 94305

Logic Programming Workshop in Budapest First Annual National Artificial Intelligence A workshop on Logic Programming and closely Conference to be Held at Stanford related topics will be held July 14-16 in Budapest, The First Annual National Artificial Intelligence sponsored by the von Neumann computer science soci- Conference, sponsored by the newly-formed American ety. Although the primary interest will be the theory, Association for Artificial Intelligence (see above item), implementation and applications of logic programming, will be held at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Cali- similar papers on other applicative programming lan- fornia, on August 19-21, 1980. Topics will include guages, on data base inference, and on program verifi- knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, cation and synthesis are welcome. Extended abstracts, problem solving and search, natural language, program of at most five single-spaced pages, or complete papers synthesis and understanding, AI languages and soft- should be sent to: ware, mathematical and theoretical foundations, psy-

American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 1, January-March 1980 53 The FINITE STRING Newsletter Abstracts of Current Literature chological aspects, vision, robotics, theorem proving, The 1980 LISP Conference, sponsored by Stanford applications, specialized systems, and game playing. University, will be held at Stanford University in Palo The deadline for submitting papers is May 1, 1980. Alto, California, August 24-27, 1980. For further Additional information can be obtained from: information, contact Robert Balzer John R. Allen Artificial Intelligence Laboratory AAAI Program Chairman Stanford University USC/Information Sciences Institute Stanford, California 94305 4676 Admiralty Way Manna del Rey, California 90291 IFIP Congress "80, sponsored by IFIP, will be held in Kyoto, Japan, and Melbourne, Australia, October 6-17, 1980. For further information, contact Workshops on Semantics And Representation IFIP Congress '80 of Knowledge Being Held in New York G.P.O. Box 880G Semantics of natural language and methods for Melbourne, Victoria representing knowledge are the topics of a series of AUSTRALIA 3001 informal workshops held at the IBM Systems Research ACM 80, this year's annual conference of the As- Institute in New York City. The workshops are open sociation for Computing Machinery, will be held in to anyone who is actively doing research on these top- Nashville, Tennessee, October 27-29, 1980. For fur- ics in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psy- ther information, contact chology, computational linguistics, data base design, Mr. Louis J. Fiora linguistics, philosophy, psycholinguistics, and symbolic ACM logic. The purpose of the workshops is to provide a 1133 Avenue of the Americas forum for people who are working on these and related New York, New York 10036 topics at universities and research institutions in New York and surrounding areas. Visitors from other loca- tions are welcome to come, but we would like to es- Abstracts of Current* Literature tablish a nucleus of participants who can attend regu- larly. On the Difference Between Natural Language The format for the workshops is a meeting about and High Level Query Languages once a month, normally on Friday mornings. The first meeting is scheduled for February 1, 1980 with a lec- S. Jerrold Kaplan ture, "Inferring Conceptual Meaning Structures," by Department of Computer and Information Science Moore School of Electrical Engineering Professor Sharon Salveter from SUNY at Stony Brook. University of Pennsylvania The IBM Systems Research Institute is providing a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 classroom and maintaining a computerized mailing list ACM78, Proc. 1978 Annual Conf., Dec. 1978, 27-38. for the workshops. Anyone who is interested in at- Natural Language questions differ from most exist- tending and/or speaking at the workshops should send ing formal query languages in that they tend to admit a name, address, and a description of research interests wider range of responses than their formal counter- to parts, and provide cues for selecting among the variety John F. Sowa of appropriate responses. These differences reflect the IBM Systems Research Institute fact that in Natural Language conversation, a respon- 205 East 42nd Street dent is expected to take an active role in the process New York, New York 10017 of selecting and organizing responses, in contrast to (212) 983-7231 formal query systems, where control of the interaction typically resides with the user or applications program- mer. This paper explores some specific ways in which Other Conferences Natural Language questions are particularly well suited The National Computer Conference, sponsored by for their environment, and discusses the potential role AFIPS, will be held in Anaheim, California, May 19- of similar capabilities in formal query systems, particu- 22, 1980. For further information, contact larly with respect to Natural Language Data Base query systems. Mr. Gerard Chiffriller AFIPS * Editor's note: The abstracts in this first issue are not as 1815 North Lynn St., Suite 800 "current" as I would like, but, because we did not publish the Arlington, Virginia 22209 Journal in 1979, there is a lot of material to get caught up on.

54 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 1, January-March 1980