In conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ICEIS 2012

Bernadette Sharp Staffordshire University United Kingdom e-mail

Michael Zock université de la Méditerranée (Aix-Marseille II) France e-mail

Amy Neustein

Biography of Amy Neustein

Amy Neustein, Ph.D. is CEO and founder of Linguistic, Technology Systems, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Speech Technology (Springer Verlag), series editor of SpringerBriefs Series in Speech Processing Technology, and commentator on machine intelligence and speech processing for Womensenews.
She co-founded the New York City Speech Processing Consortium - a group of NY-based companies, publishing houses, and researchers dedicated to advancing speech research and development.
She's published scholarly articles, chapters and books on her specialty, (Conversation Analysis) and related topics, including editing Advances in Speech Recognition: Mobile Environments, Call Centers and Clinics (Springer 2010) and Forensic Speaker Recognition: Law Enforcement and Counter-Terrorism (2011).
She has received numerous awards, including the Information Technology Next Generation Medical Informatics Award. She is currently co-editing, with Dr. Judith Markowitz, Machine Talk: The Next Generation of Natural Language Processing and Speech Technology (Springer, forthcoming).

Abstract

No one would challenge the fact that the demands of our rapidly expanding global world require sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) technology for machine translation and information retrieval as well as for the design of intelligent natural language dialog systems, which have become indispensable to the semi/fully automated call center today.
Even the meteoric launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S with Siri shows that consumers crave natural language capabilities in their everyday use of mobile voice assistants.
Yet against such demands for advanced uses and applications of NLP in our everyday life, there exists poor integration of the various disciplines – linguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic philosophy, artificial intelligence, conversation analysis, and computer science/engineering – that are essential in helping machines to better understand human (natural) language.
In this talk, I will address how cognitive science as an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with how information is represented, processed and transformed, such as in the performance of essential computer tasks of translating text from one language to another, extracting information from news broadcasts in foreign languages, mining texts for important data, performing text-to-speech synthesis, or answering voice search queries on mobile devices, has become sine qua non for meeting the demands of natural language technology in its rapidly expanding role in both industrial and consumer venues.
As an instantiation of the ubiquitous value of integrating cognitive science in the study of natural language processing, I will use part of my talk to discuss some exciting and new findings of cognitive scientists on the benefits of using a lexically sensitive model of word sense disambiguation (WSD) to resolve many of those persistent ambiguities that are often found when translating text from one language to another, or in the performance of cross-lingual text mining in which material that is subject to machine translation is extracted from a specific portion of the text.
Such cognitive paradigms that serve to complement computational (statistical) models can be especially useful today where natural language technology has been found to reach so deeply into those regions of the world where there are under-resourced languages, such as Basque, which present added challenges to natural language programs.
In such instances, and in many others, machine translation and information retrieval (and the other functions of natural language processing) cry out for a wholly integrated approach so that they can derive benefit from the corpora of knowledge and research methods provided by these other disciplines.
This indeed is the contribution of cognitive science to the field of NLP today.

The aim of this workshop is to foster interactions among researchers and practitioners in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by taking a Cognitive Science perspective.

What characterizes this kind of approach is the fact that NLP is considered from various viewpoints (linguistics, psychology, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence), and that a deliberate effort is made to reconcile or integrate these viewpoints into a coherent whole.

We believe that this is necessary, as the modeling of the process is simply too complex to be addressed by a single discipline. No matter whether we deal with a natural system (people), an artificial system (computers) or a combination of both (interactive NLP), systems rely on many types of very different knowledge sources. Hence, strategies vary considerably depending on the person (novice, expert), on the available knowledge (internal and external), and on the nature of the information processor : man, machine or both (man-machine communication, interactive NLP).

This being so, any of the following aspects are welcomed : structure, representation and processing of information by different agents (natural, artificial or both) and in different communication modes.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Ontologies
• Text mining
• Conceptualisation
• Meaning construction
• Electronic Dictionaries
• Evolutionary NLP
• Discourse processing
• Social cognition of language
• Multi-Lingual Processing
• Speech Processing
• Pragmatics and NLP
• Tools and Resources in NLP
• Evaluation of NLP Systems
• Embodied and situated NLP
• Computational Models of NLP
• Emotion and language processing
• Translation and Machine Translation
• Multimodality in speech / text processing
• Cognitive and Psychological Models of NLP
• Text Summarization and Information Extraction
• Natural Language Interfaces and Dialogue Systems

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in any of the topics listed above.

Instructions for preparing the manuscript (in Word and Latex formats) are available at: Paper Templates Please also check the Submission Guidelines.

Papers should be original and their submission should be done electronically via the following link: http://www.insticc.org/Primoris

All accepted papers (full, short and posters) will be published in a special section of the conference proceedings book - under an ISBN reference and on CD-ROM support - and submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index (ISI), INSPEC, DBLP and EI (Elsevier Index).

All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SciTePress Digital Library (http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/). SciTePress is member of CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/).

ICEIS Workshops - NLPCS 2012
e-mail: iceis.workshops.secretariat@insticc.org

Previous best papers were published in two special issues of the International Journal of Speech Technology:

	Rethinking Natural Language Processing for Speech Technology, vol. 11, 1-4, 2008
	Expositions of Romanian scientists on the design of text-to-speech synthesis and natural language understanding and generation systems, vol. 12, 2-3, 2009