The Center for Language and Speech Processing

at Johns Hopkins University invites one page research proposals for a

NSF-sponsored, Six-week Summer Research Workshop on

Machine Learning for Language Engineering

to be held in Baltimore, MD, USA,

June 21 to July 30, 2010.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Deadline: Wednesday, November 18, 2009.

(.doc, .pdf, .txt)

One-page proposals are invited for the 16^th annual JHU summer workshop.  Proposals should be suitable for a six-week team exploration, and should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various fields of Human Language Technology (HLT).  This year, proposals in related areas of Machine Intelligence, such as Computer Vision (CV), that share techniques with HLT are also strongly solicited.

Proposals are welcome on any topic of interest to HLT, CV and technically related areas.  For example, proposals may address novel topics or long-standing problems in one of the following areas.

•       SPEECH TECHNOLOGY:  Proposals are welcomed that address any aspect of information extraction from speech signal (message, speaker identity, language,...). Of particular interest are proposals for techniques whose performance would be minimally degraded by input signal variations, or which require minimal amounts of training data.

•       NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Proposals for knowledge discovery from text are encouraged, as are proposals in traditional fields such as parsing, machine translation, information extraction, sentiment analysis, summarization, and question answering.  Proposals to improve the accuracy or enrich the output of such systems, or extend their reach by improving their speed, scalability, and coverage of languages and genres are desired.

•       VISUAL SCENE INTERPRETATION: New strategies are needed to parse visual scenes or generic (novel) objects, analyzing an image as a set of spatially related components.  Such strategies may integrate global top-down knowledge of scene structure (e.g., generative models) with the kind of rich bottom-up, learned image features that have recently become popular for object detection.  They will support both learning and efficient search for the best analysis.

•       UNSUPERVISED AND SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING: Novel techniques that do not require extensive quantities of human annotated data to address any of the challenges above could potentially make large strides in machine performance as well as lead to greater robustness to changes in input conditions.  Semi-supervised and unsupervised learning techniques with applications to HLT and CV are therefore of considerable interest.

Research topics selected for investigation by teams in past workshops may serve as good examples for your proposal (http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops).

An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated no later than November 20, 2009. Authors passing this initial screening will be invited to Baltimore to present their ideas to a peer-review panel on December 4-6, 2009.  It is expected that the proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and the teams to tackle them will be selected for the 2010 workshop.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop to collaboratively pursue the selected topics for six weeks.  Authors of successful proposals typically become the team leaders.  Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and students.  The senior participants come from academia, industry and government.  Graduate student participants familiar with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a national search, are rising seniors: new to the field and showing outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2010 Summer Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed.  If your proposal passes the initial screening, we will invite you to join us for the December 4-6 meeting in Baltimore (as our guest) for further discussions aimed at consensus.  If a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the two or three to be pursued next summer, we expect you to be available for participation in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will actively pursue it.  We in turn will make a good faith effort to accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week participation possible.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to clsp@jhu.edu by 4PM EST on Wed, November 18, 2009.