27.1599, Calls: Comp Ling/Germany

Wed Apr 6 14:33:29 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1599. Wed Apr 06 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1599, Calls: Comp Ling/Germany

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Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2016 10:33:20
From: Kay-Michael Würzner [wuerzner at bbaw.de]
Subject: ACL Workshop on statistical NLP and weighted automata

Full Title: ACL Workshop on statistical NLP and weighted automata 
Short Title: StatFSM 2016 

Date: 12-Aug-2016 - 12-Aug-2016
Location: Berlin, Germany 
Contact Person: Kay-Michael Würzner
Meeting Email: statfsm2016 at bbaw.de
Web Site: http://zwei.dwds.de/statfsm/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 08-May-2016 

Meeting Description:

ACL SIGFSM is organizing a workshop on statistical NLP and weighted automata
with special theme ''automata-based techniques in optical character
recognition'' co-located with ACL 2016 in Berlin.

Workshop Description:

The past 20 years have seen a fundamental paradigm shift in the field of
automated natural language processing: though long dominated by rule-based
techniques, the vast majority of contemporary approaches are now based on
underlying statistical models. Many classes of statistical models such as
Hidden Markov Models have direct connections to graph- rsp. automata-theory.
Open research questions remain however regarding the formal relation between
automata and other popular statistical models such as Conditional Random
Fields or Support Vector Machines.

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in
statistical natural language processing, automata theory and application.
While the interests and methods of these different communities overlap
considerably, there has been little institutional recognition of shared
problems and techniques.

Special Theme: Automata-Based Techniques in Optical Character Recognition 

Increasing efforts by libraries and publishing houses to digitize sources not
originating in electronic form and the resulting vast quantity of digitally
available books has led in recent years to a commensurate demand for
high-quality, flexible, and cost-efficient text transcription techniques,
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) being of great interest in this regard.
Paralleling the increased use of OCR techniques on the part of text providers,
interest in computational linguistic research on the topic has grown as well,
since many typical OCR-related tasks touch on the discipline's core issues.
Our proposed special theme is aimed to reflect the growing interest in
OCR-related topics from the fields of computational linguistics and digital
humanities on the one hand, and to raise awareness of the associated
challenges among the automata research community on the other.

Keynote Speaker:

We are happy to announce that Professor Jason Eisner (Johns Hopkins
University) has agreed to give a keynote at the workshop.

Programme Committee:

Borja Balle (Lancaster University, UK)
Francisco Casacuberta (Instituto Tecnológico de Informática, Spain)
Simon Clematide (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Gregory Crane (University of Leipzig, Germany)
Frank Drewes (Umeå University, Sweden)
Jason Eisner (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
Colin de la Higuera (Nantes University, France)
Mans Hulden (University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA)
Krister Lindén (University of Helsinki, Finnland)
Kevin Knight (University of Southern California, CA, USA)
Marcus Eichenberger-Liwicki (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Stoyan Mihov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria)
Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St Andrews, UK)
Michael Riley (Google Inc., USA)
Martin Reynaert (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)
Brian Roark (Google Inc., USA)
Richard Sproat (Google Inc., USA)
Heiko Vogler (Dresden University of Technology, Germany)
Bruce Watson (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)

Organisers:

Bryan Jurish (Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities)
Andreas Maletti (Stuttgart University)
Uwe Springmann (HU Berlin, LMU Munich)
Kay-Michael Würzner (Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities)

Call for Papers:

We invite researchers to submit papers containing substantial, original, and
unpublished research, potentially including strong work in progress.
Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

- Weighted automata, their theory and applications,
- Statistical NLP; in particular approaches using finite-state techniques,
- Rresults concerning the relation of statistical models and weighted
automata,
- Automata-based formalizations or implementations of statistical methods,
- Machine learning approaches relating to the other topics,
- Machine learning of finite-state models of natural language,
- Systems and frameworks for OCR/OLR with a connection to automata-based
methods,
- Statistical approaches to automated page segmentation and document analysis,
- Supervised or unsupervised extraction of lexica, language- or error-models
for OCR post-correction, and
- Systems and frameworks for post-correction or -segmentation of OCR output
texts, especially those making use of weighted automata.

Submissions:

All submissions should follow the ACL 2016 style guidelines and must be in PDF
format. Style files are available for download from the ACL 2016 website at
http://acl2016.org/files/acl2016.zip.

Long papers which describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished
work may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus references. Short
papers which report focused contributions, ongoing research, negative results
or system descriptions may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus
references.

Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be
included in the papers; self-reference should be avoided as well. Papers that
do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. Accepted
papers will appear in the workshop proceedings.

Papers should be submitted electronically using the Softconf START conference
management system via:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2016/StatFSM/

Please choose the appropriate submission type from the submission page.

Submissions must be uploaded by the submission deadline 8 May, 2016 (11:59pm
GMT -12 hours).

Schedule:

8 May 2016: Long and Short Paper submission deadline
5 June 2016: Notification of acceptance
22 June 2016: Camera-ready deadline
12 August 2016: Workshop

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