Invited Talk 1

Speaker: Prof. Key-Sun CHOI

Title: Semantic Post-IT, an adventure to integrate pieces of information in memos

Abstract:
'SemanticPostIt' is a configurable memo interface that augments the memos around us with digital information and knowledge and lets us use any memos to interact with that information near its context of Post- it memo. We have used the Post-It memo such that the sticky memo is useful to be located anywhere possibly inside of meaningful context where the owner remembers the memo. It helps people express their idea and statement freely. But it is not easy to organize the memos with the owner's behavioral and information context. If the computer and knowledge systems are to recognize their needs, clusters of relevant stories and their contexts could generate consistent stories. The stories (or documents) mean what the user wanted to intend in their mind implicitly or explicitly. Note that it is for some person somewhat difficult to write a story based on their idea on memos, and it is time-consuming for a normal person to write/express the whole story within limited time duration.

Dr Key-Sun Choi is a full professor in computer science department, KAIST. He founded and directs the Semantic Web Research Center (SWRC) and Cognitive Informatics Lab. Previously he founded and ran Korterm and Bank of Language Resources. He currently acts as the Department Head for the Computer Science Department. Prior to joining KAIST, he was a researcher in NEC C&C Lab for Machine Translation. He holds bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Seoul National University, and Master and PhD degrees in computer science in KAIST. His areas of expertise are natural language processing, ontology and knowledge engineering, semantic web, intelligent interfaces and knowledge service. Key-Sun is one of founding members of AFNLP and ISO/TC37/SC4. He serves as the President of AFNLP (2009-2010) and as the vice chair for ISO/TC37 and the secretary of SC4 for language resource management. He was an associate editor of ACM TALIP (2002-2006), and now of IJCPOL and IEICE Trans. Information and Systems. He was a PC co-chair of ISWC2007, Organizing chair of GWC2006, Conference chair of IJCNLP2005, and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. He has received several awards: KAIST Grand Research Award (1998), FIPA Contribution Award (2000), Award from Ministry of Industry for international standardization (2006), and international collaboration award of KAIST (2009). He is now a council member of AAMT, IAMT for machine translation, and a vice president of Infoterm and TermNet for international terminology association, and the President of Eafterm (East-Asia Terminology Association). Home page: http://kschoi.kaist.ac.kr/.

Invited Talk 2

Speaker: Prof. Hiroya Fujisaki

Title: Challenging Issues in Human Language Processing

Abstract:
Recent progress in the technologies for processing human language by machine is truly remarkable, but they still fall short of human capability. In order to achieve a higher level of performance, it is necessary to obtain a deeper understanding of some of the features inherent in human language that present major difficulties to machine processing, as well as of the way in which humans deal with them. As such features, this talk takes up ambiguity, vagueness, variability and openness that are inherent in human language, and presents their definitions and formulations, mainly based on the author's own studies. It then discusses human processes of language use, from which we can learn how to improve our current technologies. Finally, it presents the author's view on directions for future research.

Dr Hiroya Fujisaki is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo, where he was Prof. of Electronic Engineering at the School of Engineering, but also Professor of Speech Science at the Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, the School of Medicine, and Lecturer at the Dept. of Linguistics, the School of Letters.

His research interests are in languages, processing of language (both spoken and written) by humans and machines, as well as in human and artificial intelligence, with special emphasis on modeling. His works include a model of language use, a model of the cognitive processes in speech sound identification/discrimination (known as the dual channel model), and a model for the process of fundamental frequency control in speech (known as the command-response model, or the Fujisaki model). He also played a key role in activating the speech research community of Japan, and in defining and promoting the field of spoken language processing internationally by founding and chairing the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) in 1990. He also served as the chair for ICASSP 86 in Tokyo, which was the first ICASSP ever held in Asia.

For his academic works and technical leadership, he received a number of awards including the Distinguished Paper Awards both from the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and from the Institute of Electrical Communication Engineers of Japan (1968), the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical Communication Engineers of Japan (1973), the Meritorious Service Award from the IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society (1988), the Distinguished Service Award from the Acoustical Society of America (1988), the Third Millennium Medal from the IEEE (2000), the Medal for Scientific Achievement from the ISCA (2008), and was named Person of Merit in Science and Technology by the Mayor of Tokyo (1989).

Dr. Fujisaki is an honorary member of the Acoustical Society of Japan, a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), a life member of IEEE and the Information Processing Society of Japan, a member of the Engineering Academy of Japan, and a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

Invited Talk 3

Speaker: Dr. Haizhou Li

Title: Recent Advances in Machine Transliteration

Abstract:
Machine transliteration is the process of automatically rewriting the script of a word from one language to another, while preserving pronunciation. The last decade has seen a tremendous progress and a growth of interests from theory to practice of machine transliteration. In this talk, I will present an overview of the fundamentals, algorithms and applications. I will also report the findings in the most recent transliteration evaluation campaign - NEWS 2009 Shared Task at ACL-IJCNLP 2009.

Dr Haizhou Li is the Principal Scientist and Department Head of Human Language Technology at the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore. His research interests include statistical language modeling, machine translation and automatic speech recognition.

Dr Li taught in the University of Hong Kong and South China University of Technology (1988-1994). He was a Visiting Professor at CRIN/INRIA in France (1994-1995), and at the University of New South Wales in Australia (2008).

He was a Research Manager in Apple-ISS Research Centre (1996-1998), a Research Director in Lernout & Hauspie Asia Pacific (1999-2001), and a Vice President in InfoTalk Corp. Ltd (2001-2003), responsible for Asian language products. In 2009, he was named one the two Nokia Professors by Nokia Foundation in recognition of his contribution to spoken language processing.

Dr Li now serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing. He is an elected Board Member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA, 2009-2013), a Vice President of the Chinese and Oriental Language Information Processing Society (COLIPS, 2009-2011), an Executive Board Member of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP, 2006-2010). Dr Li was the co-chair of the 6th SIGHAN Workshop in 2008, the local chair of ACL-IJCNLP 2009.