[Corpora-List] 2nd CfP: EACL 2009 workshop on Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical Inference

Wed Nov 19 14:05:45 UTC 2008

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                        EACL 2009 workshop on
      Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical Inference
                         2nd Call for Papers

                         30 or 31 March 2009
                           Co-located with
                      The 12th Conference of the
  European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
                            Athens, Greece
                Submission deadline: 19 December 2008
                    Submission system is now open
                      http://ilk.uvt.nl/clagi09

Scope

There has been growing interest over the last few years in learning
grammars from natural language text (and structured or semi-structured
text).  The family of techniques enabling such learning is usually
called "grammatical inference" or "grammar induction".

The field of grammatical inference is often subdivided into formal
grammatical inference, where researchers aim to proof efficient
learnability of classes of grammars, and empirical grammatical
inference, where the aim is to learn structure from data.  In this
case the existence of an underlying grammar is just regarded as a
hypothesis and what is sought is to better describe the language
through some automatically learned rules.

Both formal and empirical grammatical inference have been linked with
(computational) linguistics.  Formal learnability of grammars has been
used in discussions on how people learn language.  Some people mention
proofs of (non-)learnability of certain classes of grammars as
arguments in the empiricist/nativist discussion.  On the more
practical side, empirical systems that learn grammars have been
applied to natural language.  Instead of proving whether classes of
grammars can be learnt, the aim here is to provide practical learning
systems that automatically introduce structure in language.  Example
fields where initial research has been done are syntactic parsing,
morphological analysis of words, and bilingual modeling (or machine
translation).

This workshop at EACL 2009 aims to explore the state-of-the-art in
these topics.  In particular, we aim at bringing formal and empirical
grammatical inference researchers closer together with researchers in
the field of computational linguistics.

Topics

We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished
research on all aspects of grammatical inference in relation to
natural language (such as, syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology,
phonetics), including, but not limited to

 * Automatic grammar engineering, including, for example,
   - parser construction,
   - parameter estimation,
   - smoothing, ...
 * Unsupervised parsing
 * Language modelling
 * Transducers, for instance, for
   - morphology,
   - text to speech,
   - automatic translation,
   - transliteration,
   - spelling correction, ...
 * Learning syntax with semantics
 * Unsupervised or semi-supervised learning of linguistic knowledge
 * Learning (classes of) grammars (e.g. subclasses of the Chomsky
   Hierarchy) from linguistic inputs
 * Comparing learning results in different frameworks (e.g. membership
   vs. correction queries)
 * Learning linguistic structures (e.g. phonological features,
   lexicon) from the acoustic signal
 * Grammars and finite state machines in machine translation
 * Learning setting of Chomskyan parameters
 * Cognitive aspects of grammar acquisition, covering, among others,
   - developmental trajectories as studied by psycholinguists working
     with children,
   - characteristics of child-directed speech as they are manifested
     in corpora such as CHILDES, ...
 * (Unsupervised) Computational language acquisition (experimental or
   observational)

Submission

Papers should present original, completed and unpublished research,
not exceeding 8 pages.  All submissions are to be formatted using the
EACL 2009 style files (http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/authors).

Papers should be submitted electronically, no later than Friday 19
December, 2008.  The only accepted format for submitted papers is PDF.
Papers can be submitted using the START system, which can be found on
https://www.softconf.com/eacl09/gram-inf/ .

The reviewing process will be blind; thus papers should not include
the authors' names and affiliations or any references to web sites,
project names etc. revealing the authors' identity.  Each submission
will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee.
Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Important dates

19 December, 2008    - Deadline for paper submission
30 January, 2009     - Notification of acceptance
13 February, 2009    - Camera-ready copies due
30 or 31 March, 2009 - Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical
                       Inference workshop held at EACL-09
                       (exact date to be announced)

Programme Committee

Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs-Research, USA
Leonor Becerra-Bonache, Yale University, USA
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Shimon Edelman, Cornell University, USA
Jeroen Geertzen, University of Cambridge, UK
Jeffrey Heinz, University of Delaware, USA
Colin de la Higuera, UniversitÃ© de Saint-Etienne, France (co-chair)
Alfons Juan, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
Frantisek Mraz, Charles University, Czech Republic
Khalil Sima'an, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Richard Sproat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (co-chair)
Willem Zuidema, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Organizing Committee

Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (co-chair)
Colin de la Higuera, UniversitÃ© de Saint-Etienne, France (co-chair)

Contact

Menno van Zaanen
Department of Communication and Information Sciences
Tilburg University
The Netherlands
mvzaanen (at) uvt.nl

Workshop website

http://ilk.uvt.nl/clagi09

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