Informatics Research Institute (IRIS) July 2004 newsletter

This summer period has been rich in presence and dissemination related activities. Several important conferences, which have enjoyed a great international participation and success, have been organized by IRIS academics in Salford. These include NLDB04, CRIS 2004 and the LTSN workshop. Also, a substantial number of research projects have been secured from national as well as European funding sources. All these activities are contributing to reinforcing the leading position that IRIS is currently enjoying in the field of Informatics. This newsletter gives an overview of all research activities that took place during this reporting period. It is hoped that this will help trigger further collaboration with existing and future colleagues from academia, research and industry to work together towards addressing the many societal and technological challenges engendered by the information age

Interacting with Philosophy Through Natural Language Conversation

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Application of natural language to information systems (NLDB04)

The International Conference on Application of Natural Language to Information Systems is nearing its 10th birthday and has gained in maturity and in the quality of the papers submitted. In the early years, the conference was mainly concerned with the application of natural language to databases (hence the acronym NLDB), and to the development of information systems. It is very well know that the early stages of software development are very problematic as they involve many stakeholders and are mainly expressed in natural language, a source of all kind of ambiguities. However, the latest developments in the field of natural language and the emergence of new technologies has seen a shift towards storage of large semantic electronic dictionaries, their exploitation and the advent of what is now known as the semantic web. Information extraction and retrieval, document and content management, ontology development and management and natural language conversational systems are becoming regular tracks in the last NLDB conferences. NLDB04 was held at the University of Salford, United Kingdom from June 23 to 25, 1994 and has seen a 50% increase in the number of submissions and has established itself as one of the leading conferences in the area of applying natural language to information systems in its broader sense. 65 papers were submitted from 22 different countries. Twenty nine papers were accepted as regular papers, while 13 were accepted as short papers. Five of the highest rated papers were selected for publication in a special issue of the Data & Knowledge Engineering Journal