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Executive summary
Microsoft Research Asia organized a regional theme of “Web-Scale NLP”
workshop in Feb 21-22, 2008 in the Asia-Pacific region to discuss the
development of natural language processing (NLP) technology to meet requirements
of large-scale applications, such as search engines for general domains and
various vertical domains, advertising platforms, and e-commerce. In addition,
over the past two years, MSRA has funded more than 20 projects in the Asia-Pacific
region on the areas of machine translation, opinion analysis, next generation search
engines, keyword extraction, ontology construction for specific domains, and knowledge
acquisition of dialogue systems.
On the basis of the above work, in 2008 we are continuing to seek proposals
on the focus of web-scale NLP and its application to various important web
applications. In particular, this year we are interested in proposals on using
practical NLP technology for the development of a search engine and Chatbot.
The Topics of Proposals
In your proposal, you can cover one or multiple topics in the following four areas:
- Information extraction - Information
extraction from web data such as blogs, news articles
and web pages. The interested information includes a
broad scope, but most important to our research are
named entity and relation extraction.
- Information gisting of search results - For instance,
automatic summarization of search results, opinion extraction/sentiment
analysis/trend analysis for the applications of search engines.
- Machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval
- Monolingual and multilingual online conversational agent or Chatbot
Awards
- Microsoft Research Asia anticipates giving a number of awards to innovative proposals.
The number and value of the awards will be determined by a “Proposal Review Board” comprising Research
Managers and senior researchers from Microsoft Research Asia. It is expected that awards in the vicinity of
US$10K - $25K per project will be made for winning submissions based on the review result. All awards will
be given to the institution to support the proposed research project.
- Payments of awards will only be made to academic institutions. Personal or business accounts for
award payments will not be accepted under any circumstances.
- The award winners will be invited to attend the Natural language Processing theme workshop in 2009
(detailed arrangements will be updated by the Microsoft Research Asia University Relations manager who sends
out this invitation).
- Awards under this program are for one year only, but may be renewable at the sole discretion of Microsoft Research Asia.
- The award should be used solely to support the project in the area described in your proposal.
- The award will not be used to cover any overhead costs but dedicated solely to direct project expenditure.
Eligibility
Conditions of eligibility listed below must be strictly adhered to. Proposals not meeting all the criteria will not be considered.
- Proposals are only accepted through the invitation by Microsoft Research Asia University Relations.
- Finance requests and budget must be in US dollars.
- Proposals that are incomplete, inaccurate or not responsive to the terms and conditions of this program will be excluded from consideration.
IP Related Issues
Once the award is granted, you need sign an agreement with Microsoft to agree to certain terms relating to the intellectual property (“IP”) derived
from your proposed project. If you do not sign the agreement, you will be deemed to reject the award. Following are some key terms:
- The results of your project/research, such as the research platform, tools, technical reports, papers
and source code, once generated, shall go into the public domain. If you wish to assert any intellectual
property rights over the results, Microsoft shall be automatically granted a perpetually, assignable,
sub-licensable and royalty-free license to use such results for any purpose.
- You should provide Microsoft Research Asia suitable progress reports twice yearly. The results
of the projects will be collected through the reports and will be shared in the public domain through the
theme web site maintained by Microsoft, regional theme workshop, and other types of academic community building
activities. The grant will be acknowledged in all publications, press releases and other publicity connected with
the awarded project.
Selection Criteria
All proposals received will be reviewed by the proposal Review Board. Evaluations will be conducted anonymously. Based on evaluations by
the review board, Microsoft Research Asia can select the most worthy proposals for funding. Due to the volume of
submissions, Microsoft Research Asia cannot provide individual feedback on proposals that are not funded.
All proposals will be evaluated based upon the following criteria:
- Demonstrates need, identifies and explains the importance of research.
- Originality of research approach in the proposal.
- Proposals that are incomplete, inaccurate or not responsive to the terms and conditions of this program will be excluded from consideration.
- Potential for wide dissemination and use of intellectual property created, including specific plans for publications, conference presentations, distance learning, as well as
plans to distribute content in multiple formats and/or under non-restrictive (e.g. BSD-like) licensing terms.
- Demonstration of ability to complete the project, including the adequacy of available resources, timelines, qualifications and number of identified contributors.
- Qualifications of principal investigator, including previous history of work in the topic area, publications, and papers delivered at conferences, successful completion of previously funded
projects, teaching awards, books published, and so on.
Submission Process
- Proposals will be accepted in electronic form through email. Please send them to msranlp@microsoft.com no later than April 30, 2008.
- Proposals submitted to Microsoft will not be returned. Microsoft cannot assume responsibility for the confidentiality of information in submitted proposals. Therefore, proposals should
not contain information that is confidential, restricted or sensitive.
- Microsoft will not review drafts of proposals prior to their submission, nor provide feedback on the reasons why a particular proposal was not selected.
- Proposals are limited to five pages maximum, 10pt. font or larger, in either Microsoft Word or PDF format.
Program Timeline
- April 30, 2008. Deadline of proposal submission
- May 23, 2008. Announcement of awards
- Nov 20, 2008. Project mid-term summary and review
- May 20, 2009. Project year-end summary and review
- Feb, 2009. The Natural language Processing theme workshop in 2009
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