Call for Papers: Formal Grammar

[Shuly Wintner]

                      FORMAL GRAMMAR CONFERENCE

                            to be held
                         jointly with the

                   FIRST COLOGNET-ELSNET SYMPOSIUM
       "Combining logical and data-oriented approaches in NLP"


                   August 3-4, 2002, Trento, Italy

		   http://cs.haifa.ac.il/~shuly/fg/

                        FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

FGTrento is the 7th conference on Formal Grammar held in conjunction
with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information,
which takes place in 2002 in Trento. Previous meetings were held in
Barcelona (1995), Prague (1996), Aix-en-Provence (1997), Saarbruecken
(1998), Utrecht (1999) and Helsinki (2001).

AIMS and SCOPE

FGTrento provides a forum for the presentation of new and original
research on formal grammar, with particular regard to the application
of formal methods to natural language analysis.

Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:

* formal and computational syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology;
* model-theoretic and proof-theoretic methods in linguistics;
* constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to grammar;
* foundational, methodological and architectural issues in grammar.

Previous conferences in this series have welcomed papers from
a wide variety of frameworks.

Special Session: Formal Grammar and Finite-State Methods

This year's conference will feature a special session on finite-state
methods as they pertain to formal grammar.  Potential topics include
areas in which finite-state methods have traditionally played a larger
role, such as computational morphology and text analysis, as well as:

* finite-state models of other levels of linguistic structure,
* (extended) finite-state models for processing with formal
  linguistic frameworks,
* finite-state approximation methods for more expressive formal
  devices, and
* finite-state methods for integrating multiple levels of linguistic
  structure or heterogeneous formal frameworks in applications.

Round-table Panel: Formal Grammar and the Curriculum

The conference will feature a panel on "Formal Grammar and the
Curriculum". Courses focussing on Formal Grammar (introductory /
advanced) are being offered at several universities and appropriate
educational material has been developed over the last few years. The
aim of this panel is to stimulate discussion and exchange of ideas on
the following topics (among others):

* software and tools for teaching FG;
* web resources related to FG;
* innovative assignments and projects in teaching FG

The panel should create the basis for the development of an archive of
educational material related to FG such as course notes, assignments,
software and demos.

We solicit poster presentations which will create the basis for the
panel discussion. Submissions should be 1 page long and do not have to
be anonymous. Accepted abstracts will be included in a special section
of the Proceedings.

CologNet-ELSNET Symposium

The 2002 Formal Grammar conference will also host a Symposium Session,
co-sponsored by the Networks of Excellence in Computational Logic
(CologNet) and Human Language Technologies (ELSNET).
This is the first of three symposia devoted to the exploration
of the common ground between the Logic and NLP Area of CologNet
and the ELSNET agenda. The theme of the first installment is
"Combining logical and data-oriented approaches in NLP". The
symposium program will feature invited talks by leading researchers
in the area as well as a number of contributed talks.


SUBMISSION DETAILS

We invite E-MAIL submissions of abstracts for 30-minute papers
(including questions, comments, and discussion).

A submission should consist of two parts:

 - an information sheet (in plain text), containing:
        title,
        the name of the author(s),
        affiliation(s),
        e-mail and postal address(es),
        an indication of whether the submission is for
          the main conference,
          the special session on FG and finite-state methods,
          the CologNet-ELSNET Symposium, or
          the panel on Formal Grammar in the Curriculum.

 - an *anonymous* abstract, consisting of a description of not more
 than 5 pages, including figures and references (1 page for the round
 table panel on Formal Grammar and the Curriculum). Abstracts should be
 sent as email attachments in plain text (ASCII), PostScript or PDF.
 Preparation of the manuscript in LaTeX is highly recommended.

Abstracts should be sent to shuly at cs.haifa.ac.il (Shuly Wintner).

PROCEEDINGS

A full version of each accepted paper will be included in the conference
proceedings, to be distributed at the conference. All papers will also
be made available electronically.

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract submission deadline:   May 20, 2002
Notification of acceptance:     June 20, 2002
Full papers due:                July 10, 2002
Conference dates:               August 3-4, 2002

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Tonia Bleam (Northwestern)
Gosse Bouma (Groningen)
Miriam Butt (Konstanz)
Maarten de Rijke (Amsterdam)
Thilo Goetz (IBM)
Mark Johnson (Brown)
Ruth Kempson (London)
Andras Kornai (Northern Light)
Marcus Kracht (Berlin)
Uwe Moennich (Tuebingen)
Michael Moortgat (Utrecht)
Mark-Jan Nederhof (Groningen)
James Rogers (Earlham)
Mark Steedman (Edinburgh)


Formal Grammar organizing committee:

Gerhard Jaeger       (ZAS Berlin/University of Potsdam)
Paola Monachesi      (OTS Utrecht)
Gerald Penn          (University of Toronto)
Shuly Wintner        (University of Haifa)

COLOGNET-ELSNET symposium organizers:

Raffaella Bernardi      (OTS Utrecht, bernardi at let.uu.nl)
Michael Moortgat        (OTS Utrecht, moortgat at let.uu.nl)

		   http://cs.haifa.ac.il/~shuly/fg/