[Corpora-List] 1st CFP: EMNLP 2011 Workshop on Unsupervised Learning in NLP

Anna Korhonen alk23 at cam.ac.uk
Thu Jan 27 18:36:00 UTC 2011


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First Call for Paper Submissions

EMNLP 2011 Workshop on Unsupervised Learning in NLP

https://sites.google.com/site/emnlpworkshop2011unsupnlp/

Edinburgh, Scotland - July 30, 2011

***Submission deadline: April 22, 2011 ***
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In recent years, there has been an increased interest in minimizing the 
need for annotated data in NLP. Significant progress has been made in 
the development of both semi-supervised and unsupervised learning 
approaches. Although unsupervised approaches have proved more 
challenging than semi-supervised ones, their further development is 
particularly important because they carry the highest potential in terms 
of avoiding annotation cost.

Such approaches can be applied to any language or genre for which 
adequate raw text resources are available. They also bear theoretical 
promise for their ability to recover novel, valuable information in 
textual data and to expose underlying relations between form and various 
linguistic phenomena. Largely due to these benefits, NLP has recently 
experienced a surge of interest in unsupervised learning techniques. 
Increasingly sophisticated approaches have been proposed and applied to 
a wide range of tasks, including parsing, verb clustering, induction of 
grammatical categories, lexical semantics, POS tagging, and many others.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on 
different areas of unsupervised language learning. The objective is to 
summarize what has been achieved in the topic, to foster discussions on 
current problems in the area, and to discuss future trends.

We welcome submissions of long and short papers and in some cases of 
abstracts as well (see below for exact submission specifications) in any 
area or aspect of unsupervised learning in NLP (e.g., techniques, tasks, 
applications, high level issues that call for discussion), and 
particularly encourage submissions which focus on the current challenges 
in the development and evaluation of fully unsupervised approaches. For 
example:


* Over the last decade several unsupervised techniques were
developed and applied to NLP (e.g. Bayesian, approximate
inference, graph-based methods, and others). However, recent
methods do not always perform better than the more traditional
clustering and pattern recognition algorithms. Discussion on the
contribution of various unsupervised methods to NLP would be
highly valuable.

* A fundamental aim of unsupervised learning in NLP is to devise
language-independent learning mechanisms. However, languages
differ greatly from one another. What is the best way to handle
language specificity in multilingual unsupervised learning?

* A prominent advantage of unsupervised learning is its ability to
induce novel information from data (e.g. new linguistic knowledge,
annotation schemes, etc). How should this information be
evaluated? Is direct evaluation against an existing gold standard
a good approach? Would it be better to opt for intrinsic (i.e.,
"gold-standard independent") evaluation? Or is evaluation in the
context of another NLP task or application ideal? We welcome
discussion on the pros and cons of each method, along with novel
ideas for evaluation.

* The ultimate goal of unsupervised learning is to use it to aid
NLP. How should this be done, and what kind of challenges do we
face when aiming to integrate unsupervised techniques in various
application tasks?


SUBMISSIONS

Three types of submissions will be accepted:

(1) technical papers
(2) position papers (perspectives/speculation)
(3) survey papers (work done on a specific task/in a certain sub-field 
over a few years).

We especially encourage submission of position and survey papers and 
abstracts.

Format requirements are the same as for full papers of EMNLP 2011, see 
http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/emnlp2011/call.html for detailed
description and style files. Submission will be electronic, using the 
workshop's submission webpage at START. We accept both long and short 
papers in all three types of submission. In both cases, paper length is 
limited to 9 pages of content and any number of additional pages with 
references only. We also welcome the submission of abstracts (up to one 
page) of position and survey papers (but not of technical papers). 
Abstracts should be formatted using the EMNLP style files and submitted 
as a separate file (just like short and long papers). Short papers and 
abstracts will neither be favored nor disfavored in the review process.


REVIEWING

The reviewing of the papers will be blind.‭ ‬The paper should not 
include the authors‭' ‬names and affiliations.‭ ‬Furthermore,‭ ‬self‮ 
‬citations and other references‭ (‬e.g.‭ ‬to projects,‭ ‬corpora,‭ ‬or 
software‭) ‬that could reveal the author's identity should be avoided.‭ 
‬For example,‭ ‬instead of‭ "‬We previously showed‭ (‬Smith,‭ 
‬1991‭)‬...‭"‬,‭ ‬write‭ "‬Smith previously showed‭ (‬Smith,‭ ‬1991‭) 
‬...‭"‬.


IMPORTANT DATES

Apr‎il ‏22,‎ ‏2011 Due date for submissions
May 20, 2011 Notification of acceptance
June 3, 2011 Deadline for final camera-ready version
July 30, 2011 Workshop


ORGANIZERS

Omri Abend‭ (‬Hebrew University of Jerusalem,‭ ‬omria01‭@‬cs.huji.ac.il‭)

Anna Korhonen‭ (‬University of Cambridge,‭ ‬alk23‭@‬cam.ac.uk‭)

Ari Rappoport‭ (‬Hebrew University of Jerusalem,‭ ‬arir at cs.huji.ac.il‭)

Roi Reichart‭ (‬MIT,‭ ‬roiri at csail.mit.edu‭)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

‏Eneko Agirre‭ (‬University of the Basque Country,‭ ‬Spain‭)
‏Jason Baldridge‭ (‬University of Texas at Austin,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Tim Baldwin‭ (‬University of Melbourne,‭ ‬Australia‭)
‏Sam Brody‭ (‬Columbia University,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Alexander Clark‭ (‬Royal Holloway,‭ ‬University of London,‭ ‬UK‭)
‏Shay Cohen‭ (‬Carnegie Mellon University,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Mona Diab‭ (‬Columbia University,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Gregory Druck‭ (‬University of Massachusetts Amherst,‭ ‬USA‭)
Jason Eisner‭ (‬Johns Hopkins University,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Sharon Goldwater‭ (‬University of Edinburgh,‭ ‬UK‭)
‏Joao Graca‭ (‬University of Pennsylvania,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Ioannis Klapaftis‭ (‬University of York,‭ ‬UK‭)
‏Lillian Lee‭ (‬Cornell University,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Percy Liang‭ (‬UC Berkeley,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Diana McCarthy‭ (‬Lexical Computing,‭ ‬Ltd.,‭ ‬UK‭)
‏Preslav Nakov‭ (‬National University of Singapore,‭ ‬Singapore‭)
‏Roberto Navigli‭ (‬University of Rome,‭ ‬Italy‭)
‏Vincent Ng‭ (‬UT Dallas,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Ted Pedersen‭ (‬University of Minnesota,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Andrew Rosenberg‭ (‬CUNY,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Sabine Schulte im Walde‭ (‬University of Stuttgart,‭ ‬Germany)
Valentin Spitkovsky (Stanford University, USA)
‏Carlo Strapparava‭ (‬FBK-irst,‭ ‬Italy‭)
‏Ben Taskar‭ (‬University of Pennsylvania,‭ ‬USA‭)
Kristina Toutanova‭ (‬Microsoft Research,‭ ‬USA‭)
‏Andreas Vlachos‭ (‬University of Wisconsin-Madison,‭ ‬USA‭)

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