[Corpora-List] CFP: ACL 2005 Workshop on Feature Engineering for Machine Learning in NLP

[Eric Ringger]

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                       SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

               Feature Engineering for Machine Learning
                    in Natural Language Processing

                  Workshop at the Annual Meeting of
       the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005)

  http://research.microsoft.com/~ringger/FeatureEngineeringWorkshop/

              ** SUBMISSION DEADLINE: April 20, 2005 **
                                   

                         Ann Arbor, Michigan
                            June 29, 2005

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As experience with machine learning for solving natural language processing tasks accumulates in the field, practitioners are finding that feature engineering is as critical as the choice of machine learning algorithm, if not more so.  Feature design, feature selection, and feature impact (through ablation studies and the like) significantly affect the performance of systems and deserve greater attention.  In the wake of the shift away from knowledge engineering and of the successes of data-driven and statistical methods, researchers in the field of NLP are likely to make further progress by incorporating additional, sometimes familiar, sources of knowledge as features.  Although some experience in the area of feature engineering is to be found in the theoretical machine learning community, the particular demands of natural language processing leave much to be discovered.

This workshop aims to bring together practitioners of NLP, machine learning, information extraction, speech processing, and related fields with the intention of sharing experimental evidence for successful approaches to feature engineering, including feature design and feature selection.  We welcome papers that address these goals.  We also seek to distill best practices and to discover new sources of knowledge and features previously untapped.

Submissions are invited on all aspects of feature engineering for machine learning in NLP.  Topics may include, but are not necessarily limited to:

- Novel methods for discovering or inducing features, such as mining the web 
  for closed classes, useful for indicator features.

- Comparative studies of different feature selection algorithms for NLP 
  tasks.

- Interactive tools that help researchers to identify ambiguous cases that 
  could be disambiguated by the addition of features.

- Error analysis of various aspects of feature induction, selection, 
  representation.

- Issues with representation, e.g., strategies for handling hierarchical 
  representations, including decomposing to atomic features or by employing 
  statistical relational learning.

- Techniques used in fields outside NLP that prove useful in NLP.

- The impact of feature selection and feature design on such practical 
  considerations as training time, experimental design, domain independence, 
  and evaluation.

- Analysis of feature engineering and its interaction with specific machine 
  learning methods commonly used in NLP.

- Combining classifiers that employ diverse types of features.

- Studies of methods for defining a feature set, for example by iteratively 
  expanding a base feature set.

- Issues with representing and combining real-valued and categorical 
  features for NLP tasks.


INVITED TALK

The workshop will include an invited talk by Andrew McCallum of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

The language of the workshop is English.  Submitted papers should be prepared in PDF format (all fonts included) or Microsoft Word .doc format and not longer than 8 pages following the ACL style.  More detailed information about the format of submissions can be found here: http://www.aclweb.org/acl2005/index.php?stylefiles  

Submissions should be sent as an attachment to the following email address:  ringger AT microsoft DOT com .  In the body of the submission email, please include the following identification information:

   * Title
   * Author(s) name(s), affiliation(s), and e-mail address(es)
   * Abstract: short summary (up to 5 lines)

The papers themselves should contain no identifying information, and reviewing will be conducted in a blind fashion.

All accepted papers will be presented in during the workshop and collected in the printed proceedings.


IMPORTANT DATES

- Paper submission deadline: April 20, 2005; Noon, PST (GMT-8)

- Notification of acceptance: May 10, 2005

- Submission of camera-ready copy: May 17, 2005

- Workshop: June 29, 2005


ORGANIZATION

Chair and contact person:

       Eric Ringger
       Microsoft Research
       One Microsoft Way
       Redmond, WA 98052  USA 
       ringger AT microsoft DOT com

Program Committee:

- Simon Corston-Oliver, Microsoft Research, USA
- Kevin Duh, University of Washington, USA
- Matthew Richardson, Microsoft Research, USA
- Oren Etzioni, University of Washington, USA
- Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA
- Dan Bikel, IBM Research, USA
- Olac Fuentes, INAOE, Mexico
- Chris Manning, Stanford University, USA
- Kristina Toutanova, Stanford University, USA
- Hideki Isozaki, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan
- Caroline Sporleder, University of Edinburgh, UK