[Corpora-List] ACL-04 Workshop on Incremental Parsing: Bringing Engineering and Cognition Together

[Frank Keller]

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INCREMENTAL PARSING: BRINGING ENGINEERING AND COGNITION TOGETHER

Workshop at ACL-2004
Barcelona, Spain, July 25, 2004


WORKSHOP TOPIC

Much recent parsing research has focused on the limited task of
achieving broad coverage and high accuracy in parsing Treebank
corpora. The parsing models developed for this task typically work on
a sentence-by-sentence basis: they often only deliver a valid analysis
if the input consists of a complete sentence. They are not designed to
operate incrementally, i.e., to deliver partial analyses (perhaps with
associated probabilities) that can be updated on a word-by-word basis
as more of the input becomes available.

Incrementality is desirable for two reasons. First, incremental
processing is crucial for many NLP tasks. Language modeling, for
instance, typically requires that probabilities are assigned
incrementally as more and more of the speech stream becomes
available. Recently, a number of parsing models have been proposed
that have this property and thus can be used for language
modeling. These models have resulted in lower perplexity scores and
word error rates than the standard n-gram models. However, the parsing
accuracy of these models typically falls short of the state of the
art. The challenge for parsing research is to develop models that
achieve optimal performance for both parsing and language modeling.

The second argument for incrementality comes from cognitive
modeling. There is substantial evidence showing that humans process
language in an incremental fashion. Any cognitively plausible model of
human parsing must take incrementality into account, and the modeling
literature contains considerable discussion on the relevant
computational mechanisms. Recently, a number of models of human
parsing have been proposed that are based on computational linguistic
approaches, such as PCFGs and related statistical models, suggesting a
potential synergy between cognitively and technologically motivated
parsing research.


TARGET AUDIENCE

The aim of the workshop is to address the dual challenge of defining
incremental parsing models that are useful for engineering tasks such
as language modeling, while also contributing to our understanding and
modeling of the human parsing mechanism. The workshop will bring
together parsing researchers from the computational linguistics and
cognitive modeling communities, and we expect extensive
cross-fertilization from this interaction. From the computational
linguistic perspective, cognitive modeling presents new challenges for
parsing research, including new evaluation measures that go beyond
traditional parseval measures. On the other hand, computational
linguistics can contribute crucial methodological advances to
cognitive modeling. For instance, the application of probabilistic
parsing algorithms to cognitive tasks has important implications for
the recent debate on the role of frequency information in human
parsing.


AREAS OF INTEREST

Possible topics for workshop submissions include:

o architectures, methods, and algorithms for incremental parsing;
  including symbolic, probabilistic, connectionist, and hybrid models

o applications of incremental models to parsing, language modeling,
  and cognitive modeling

o evaluation using standard metrics (parseval, perplexity, word error
  rate)

o evaluation against behavioral data (reaction times, eye-tracking
  data, linguistic judgments)

o applications of incremental parsing models in computational
  linguistics


SUBMISSION FORMAT

Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Submissions
must use the ACL latex style (available from the workshop web
page). Paper submissions should consist of a full paper. The page
limit is eight pages.


SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Electronic submission only: send a postscript (preferred) or PDF file
with your submission to:

acl04_workshop at inf.ed.ac.uk

Because reviewing is blind, no author information should be included
in the paper. Please send the following information separately (as
plain text): title, authors, keywords, and an abstract of no more than
5 lines. Late submissions will not be accepted. Notification of
receipt will be e-mailed to the first author shortly after receipt.


DEADLINES

Paper submission deadline:              Mar 22, 2004
Notification of acceptance for papers:  May 03, 2004
Camera ready papers due:                May 24, 2004
Wokshop date:                           Jul 25, 2004


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Stephen Clark, University of Edinburgh
Matthew Crocker, Saarland University
Frank Keller, University of Edinburgh
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Brian Roark, AT&T Labs Research
Patrick Sturt, University of Glasgow


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Steve Abney, University of Michigan
Thorsten Brants, Google
Eugene Charniak, Brown University
Ciprian Chelba, Microsoft Research
Michael Collins, MIT
Jeffrey Elman, UCSD
Ted Gibson, MIT
John Hale, Michigan State University
Mark Johnson, Brown University
Gerard Kempen, University of Leiden
Stefan Riezler, Palo Alto Research Center
Brian Roark, AT&T Labs Research
Douglas Roland, UCSD
Ed Stabler, UCLA
Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto
Patrick Sturt, University of Glasgow


CONTACT INFORMATION

The web site of the workshop is:

http://www.iccs.inf.ed.ac.uk/~keller/acl04_workshop/

The organizers can be contacted at:

School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK
phone: +44-131-650-4407
fax:   +44-131-650-4587
email: acl04_workshop at inf.ed.ac.uk