ITR/IM+PE+SY: Summer Workshops on Human Language Technology: Integrating Research and Education

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

We propose to organize yearly, intensive six-week research workshops at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on Language Engineering, including the mutually related areas of automatic speech recognition and synthesis, natural language processing, machine translation, information extraction and summarization. Applications of language engineering techniques to other domains such as language instruction or bioinformatics will also be appropriate workshop topics. These workshops will bring together teams of leading professionals and graduate and undergraduate students in a cooperative effort to advance the state of the art. The first goal of the proposed workshop series is to establish new research directions in Language Engineering. The second goal is to attract students to the field and to offer them an intensive hands-on mentored research education. The third is to engender extensive cross-fertilization between researchers distributed across industrial, academic and government institutions, forging intensive links in the 6-week summer period and offering a shared research environment for follow-on collaborative work. To ensure that the projects address current problems in the state of the art, each year an open call for workshop project proposals will be issued to researchers in the worldwide language engineering community. The proposals received will be evaluated competitively at planning meetings held each year. The meetings will draw together project proponents, government representatives, and experts from related fields to assess the viability and promise of the proposals and to identify three candidate projects for the summer workshop. Throughout this process of soliciting proposals and recruiting the personnel to carry them out, we will make a diligent attempt to include researchers from underrepresented institutions and communities.