21.400, Calls: Computational Ling/Natural Language Engineering (Jrnl)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-400. Mon Jan 25 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.400, Calls: Computational Ling/Natural Language Engineering (Jrnl)

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1)
Date: 23-Jan-2010
From: Anssi Yli-Jyra < anssi.yli-jyra at helsinki.fi >
Subject: Natural Language Engineering
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:24:23
From: Anssi Yli-Jyra [anssi.yli-jyra at helsinki.fi]
Subject: Natural Language Engineering

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Full Title: Natural Language Engineering 


Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics;Morphology;Phonology;Syntax 

Call Deadline: 23-May-2010 

Special issue call for papers for
Finite State Methods and Models in Natural Language Processing

Unabridged call available: http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/projects/jnle/

                 
The languages described by regular expressions are exactly those recognized
by finite state automata (Kleene 1956).  This fundamental result has been
extended to string transductions, sets of trees, formal power series,
grammars, semigroups, and finite models.  The further study of formal
properties and restrictions of recognizable languages was pioneered by
Schützenberger, McNaughton, Papert and Kamp.

Kleene's theorem, its extensions and its restrictions have tremendous
methodological relevance to NLP.  Finite state methods in NLP continue to
be an area of further research and growing area.

The current special issue has two goals.  The first is to summarize the
state of the art.  The second is to increase awareness about open issues
and new perspectives.

The call is open to everyone.


Topics:

1.  New or updated work on the traditional topics of FSMNLP workshops
2. Study of new questions raised by fundamental results in finite state
phonology and morphology

One can construct finite state transducers aka lexical transducers from
phonological and morphological grammars (Beesley and Karttunen 2003).  This
fundamental result paves the way for further study:

- less rigid formalisms and descriptive approaches used in field linguistics
- correlation between computational morphology and language development
- approaches to language clusters
- dynamically changing linguistic descriptions
- model-checking and automatic verification of grammars
- language variation and diachronic description
- portability and long-term archiving
- constructing from updated extended regular expressions
- tonal languages
- learning and training from small samples
- grammar designs
- optimality-theoretic and multi-tiered phonology
- finite state re-implementation of competitively efficient ad hoc methods
(see NLE 14(4) 2007).

3. Study of new methods with connections between languages, trees and
finite state automata

The theory of classical string automata has a natural extension to tree
automata, which found applications in NLP.  In 1982, Joshi and Levy pointed
out in Computational Linguistics 8(1) that phrase structure grammars
actually generalize to tree automata that bring more descriptive power.  

Furthermore, Chomsky and Schützenberger (1963) gave a morphic
representation for the context-free languages i.e. the yields of local tree
automata. The representation gives rise to methods between tree automata
and string automata.

Please refer to the unabridged call for more information.

4. Study of advantages of restrictions defined in algebraic theories of
automata and languages or in finite model theory

In NLP, there remain situations where straightforward and general finite
state methods fail to be applicable or efficient. These situations motivate
interest in special families of regular relations, automata, semirings, and
formal power series.  

In addition, the topics of interest include tools that support related
experiments.


Important Dates:

Deadline for submissions: 23 May 2010


Guest Editors:

- Anssi Yli-Jyrä (University of Helsinki)
firstname (dot) last-name (at) helsinki (dot) fi

- András Kornai (Budapest Institute of Technology and MetaCarta, USA)

- Jacques Sakarovitch (CNRS and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des
Télécommunications, France)




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