21.420, Calls: Computational Ling, Morphology/USA

Tue Jan 26 17:46:21 UTC 2010

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-420. Tue Jan 26 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.420, Calls: Computational Ling, Morphology/USA

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            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

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Eric Raimy, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
       <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

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1)
Date: 25-Jan-2010
From: Ines Rehbein < rehbein at coli.uni-sb.de >
Subject: NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:42:55
From: Ines Rehbein [rehbein at coli.uni-sb.de]
Subject: NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages

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Full Title: NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically
Rich Languages 
Short Title: SPMRL 2010 

Date: 05-Jun-2010 - 06-Jun-2010
Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA 
Contact Person: Djame Seddah
Meeting Email: djame.seddah at paris-sorbonne.fr
Web Site: http://sites.google.com/site/spmrl2010 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Morphology 

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2010 

Meeting Description:

NAACL-HLT 2010 First Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich
Languages (SPMRL 2010)
June 5 or 6, 2010, Los Angeles, CA
http://sites.google.com/site/spmrl2010/
Sponsored by SIGPARSE

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in parsing
languages with richer morphological structures than in English, and to provide a
forum for discussing the challenges associated with parsing such languages and
sharing strategies towards their solutions. We are interested in presentations
relating to actively studied areas of research including the adaptation of
existing parsing techniques to new languages, the design of new models that take
morphological information into account, the implementation of models that allow
robust statistics to be obtained in the face of high word-form variation, and so
on. 

First Call for Papers

Important Dates
Submission deadline: March 1, 2010
Notification to authors: March 30, 2010
Camera ready copy: April 12, 2010
Workshop: June 5 or 6, 2010

Presentation
The availability of large syntactically annotated corpora led to an explosion of
interest in statistical parsing methods, and to the development of successful
models for parsing English using the Wall Street Journal Penn Treebank (PTB,
Marcus et al, 1993). In recent years, parsing performance on the PTB has reached
a performance ceiling of 90-92% f-score using the Parseval evaluation metrics
(Black et al, 1991). When adapted to other language/treebank pairs (such as
German, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian or French), these models have been shown to be
considerably less successful.

Among the arguments that have been proposed to explain this performance gap are
the impact of small training data size, differences in treebank annotation
schemes, inadequacy of evaluation metrics, as well as linguistic factors such as
the degree of word order freedom and the use of morphological information in the
parser. None of these arguments in isolation can account for the systematic
performance deterioration, but observed from a wider, cross-linguistic
perspective, a picture begins to emerge -- the morphologically rich nature of
some of the languages makes them inherently more susceptible to such performance
degradation.

Morphologically rich languages (MRLs) are particularly challenging for the
application of algorithms primarily designed to parse English. These algorithms
focus on learning word order but they often do not take morphological
information into account. Another typical problem associated with parsing MRLs
is increased lexical data sparseness due to high morphological variation in
surface forms. In a more general setup, this problem is akin to handling
out-of-vocabulary or rare words for robust statistical parsing and techniques
for domain adaptation via lexicon enhancement (also explored for English and
less morphologically rich languages).

As well as technical and linguistic difficulties, lack of communication between
researchers working on different MRLs can lead to a reinventing the wheel
syndrome; the prominence of English parsing in the literature reduces the
visibility of research aiming to solve the problems particular to MRLs. By
offering a platform to this growing community of interests we hope to overcome
this potential cultural obstacle.

We solicit papers describing parsing experiments with models and architectures
for languages with morphological structure richer than English, or studies that
address the lexical sparseness challenges (for any language). The workshop's
areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following list of topics:

-  Parsing models and architectures that explicitly integrate morphological
analysis and parsing
-  Parsing models and architectures that focus on lexical coverage and the
handling of OOV words either by incorporating linguistic knowledge or through
the use of unsupervised/semi-supervised learning techniques
-  Cross-language and cross-model comparison of models' strength and weaknesses
in the face of particular linguistic phenomena (e.g. morphosyntactic
characteristics, degree of word-order freedom ...)
-  Comprehensive analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of various
parsing models on particular linguistic (e.g. morphosyntactic) phenomena with
respect to  variation in tagsets, annotation schemes and additional data
transformations.

Submission
Authors are invited to submit long papers (up to 8 pages + 1 extra page for
references) and short papers (up to 4 pages + 1 extra page for references). 
Long papers should describe unpublished, substantial and completed research. 
Short papers should be position papers, papers describing work in progress or
short, focused contributions.

Papers will be accepted until March 1, 2010  in PDF format via the START system.
Please watch the workshop page for additional last-minute details:
http://sites.google.com/site/spmrl2010/

Submitted papers must follow the styles and the formatting guidelines used for
the NAACL conference, see the details at:
http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/authors.html

As the reviewing will be blind, the paper must not include the authors' names
and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's
identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be avoided.
Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..."
Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without
review. In addition, please do not post your submissions on the web until after
the review process is complete.

Program Committee
Djame Seddah, Jennifer Foster, Sandra Kuebler, Reut Tsarfaty,
Lamia Toumsi, Yannick Versley, Marie Candito, Ines Rehbein,
Yoav Goldberg

Review Committee
Mohamed Attia (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Adriane Boyd (Ohio State University, USA)
Aoife Cahill (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Marie Candito (University of Paris 7,  France)
Grzegorz Chrupala  (Saarland University, Germany)
Benoit Crabbé (University of Paris 7, France)
Michael Elhadad (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
Jennifer Foster (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Josef van Genabith (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Yoav Goldberg (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois, USA)
Deirdre Hogan (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Sandra Kübler (Indiana University, USA)
Alberto Lavelli (FBK-irst, Italy)
Joseph Le Roux (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Wolfgang Maier (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Takuya Matsuzaki (University of Toyko, Japan)
Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Yusuke Miyao (University of Toyko, Japan)
Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Ines Rehbein (Saarland University, Germany)
Kenji Sagae (University of Southern California, USA)
Djamé Seddah (University of Paris Sorbonne, France)
Khalil Sima'an (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Nicolas Stroppa (Yahoo! Research Paris, USA)
Lamia Toumsi (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Reut Tsarfaty (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Yannick Versley (University of Tübingen, Germany)

Organizers and Contacts
Sandra Kuebler, Indiana University
Djame Seddah, Universite Paris-Sorbonne
(Contact: djame.seddah at paris-sorbonne.fr)
Reut Tsarfaty, University of Amsterdam
to contact the organizers : spmrl2010org at googlemail.com

Sponsors
This worksop is sponsored by SIGPARSE and  by the INRIA's Alpage project.

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