The 1999 AAAI Fall Symposium Series

Using Layout for the Generation, Understanding or Retrieval of Documents

November 5-7, 1999
Sea Crest Conference Center on Cape Cod
North Falmouth, Massachusetts

The report (html format) to the symposium is now available.

The full program (ps format) and the venue of the AAAI Fall Symposium are now available.

Layout clearly plays a role in text comprehension and, concomitantly, in the way in which text ought to be generated. It also contributes to the identification of classes of documents (e.g., business letters versus journal articles versus user manuals), parts of documents (e.g., the sports pages versus the classified advertisements of a newspaper) and types of information contained in a document (e.g., subsidiary information in footnotes versus primary information in titles; paragraph breaks as topic breaks). Nevertheless, the issue of layout has been largely ignored in computational linguistics and information retrieval: few, if any, natural language generation systems produce (except in the most rudimentary way) laid-out text; probably no natural language understanding system includes layout as an input feature; possibly no information retrieval or information extraction system makes more than cursory use of layout. Furthermore, of the growing corpora of on-line texts, none to our knowledge makes more than a passing stab at including the layout of their source documents.

The rapidly expanding use of SGML and HTML in source documents is, however, now making layout a much more accessible feature for study and for computational treatment than it has been previously, and therefore increasingly available for use in natural language processing and information retrieval.

The symposium will provide a discussion forum for emerging work on the following issues:

• the parameters of layout
• the interactions between layout and
  • information structure
  • discourse structure
  • document structure
  • genre
  • grammaticality
  • punctuation
  • referring expressions
  • linguistic style
• the influence of layout on text comprehension
• corpus annotation schemes for document layout
• integrating text and graphics in documents
• implementation issues (e.g., treatment of local vs global layout features; relation between layout realisation and syntactic realisation).

Submissions

We invite applications for participation in one of two formats: An extended abstract of up to 5 pages describing completed work or work-in-progress; or a statement of 1 page describing your interest in this area and including, where possible, any relevant publications. Submissions should be made electronically in one of the following forms: ASCII, PostScript, self-contained LaTeX, HTML, or RTF. They are to be sent to layout-symposium@ itri.bton.ac.uk

Symposia will be limited to between forty and sixty participants. Each participant will be expected to attend a single symposium. Working notes will be prepared and distributed to participants in each symposium. In addition to invited participants, a limited number of interested parties will be able to register in each symposium on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration information will be available in early July at http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/symposia.html

Submission Dates

• Submissions for the symposia are due March 31, 1999
• Notification of acceptance will be given by May 7, 1999
• Material to be included in the working notes of the symposium must be received by August 27, 1999.

Organizing Committee

John Carroll, University of Sussex
Robert Dale, Microsoft Research Institute
Winfried Graf, Kienbaum Management Consultants GmbH
Matthew Hurst, University of Edinburgh
Geoff Nunberg, Xerox PARC
Richard Power, University of Brighton (cochair)
Donia Scott, University of Brighton (cochair)
Karen Sparck Jones, Cambridge University