[CFP] French journal TAL issue on Evolutions in Parsing

[Eric de la Clergerie]

[ Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this call. ]

Call for papers for the special issue of the TAL journal

           Title: Evolutions in Parsing

           Submission deadline: May 9th 2003

           Guest Editors: Éric de la Clergerie (INRIA, France)
                          Martin Rajman (EPFL, Switzerland)

           http://www.atala.org/tal/appel-syntaxe.html

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Parsing is a very important component in Natural Language Processing.
It still raises many problems, for instance at the level grammatical
formalisms or at the level of the algorithmic complexity, especially
to handle ambiguity. However, because of recent advances, parsers are
nowadays more and more widely used in large scale applications.

Many approaches exist in the Parsing community that differ on the
methods and objectives. The methods include for instance stochastic
parsing, local parsing cascades, or more traditional complete or deep
parsing. Objectives range from segmentation into chunks to deep
parsing based on wide coverage grammars, including shallow and/or
robust parsing. Anyway, these various methods and objectives are not
necessarily in opposition and may be perceived as complementary.

Despite the large number of existing grammatical formalisms, there are
hints of convergences between them which open ways for (partial)
conversions between formalisms (for instance between TAG and HPSG or
HPSG and CFG) or toward "operational" formalisms. Also, some parsing
techniques are "generic" and may be applied for several formalisms.
Some parsing systems also aim to be multi-formalisms, relying on
generic and efficient infrastructures (indexing, memory management by
structure sharing or copying, powerful unification). Finally, the
notion of lexicalization is present in most formalisms.

Last but not least, the generalization of parsers raises the issue of
their evaluation.

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Themes:

The main objective of this special issue is a better understanding of
the various approaches and techniques found in Parsing, highlighting
the convergences and complementarities that may exist between them. We
welcome works on any of the following issues.

    * Convergence between grammatical formalisms
                  * conversions of formalisms
                  * operational formalisms vs declarative ones
    * Convergence and complementarity in parsing approaches
                  * robustness (unknown words, error corrections)
                  * lexicalization
                  * Integration of stochastic methods
                  * Cascade parsing vs one-pass parsing
    * Evolution of parsing techniques for new formalisms
    * (generic) Optimizations in Parsing
                * parsing strategies
                * ambiguity management
                * chart indexing
                * memory management (structure sharing and copying)
    * Wide coverage grammars
                * parsing efficiency
                * maintenance and modularity
    * Parsing evaluation

Reviewers
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        Pierre Boullier         (INRIA, France)
        John Carroll            (University of Sussex, UK)
        Jean-Pierre Chanod      (XRCE, France)
        Alexandra Kinyon        (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
        Guido Minnen            (Motorola, USA)
        Alexis Nasr             (LATTICE, France)
        Mark-Jan Nederhof       (University of Groningen, NL)
        Gertjan van Noord       (University of Groningen, NL)
        Patrick Paroubek        (LIMSI, France)
        Gerald Penn             (University of Toronto, Canada)
        Anoop Sarkar            (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
        Giorgio Satta           (University of Padua, Italy)
        Manuel Vilares          (University of Vigo, Spain)
        David Weir              (Université of Sussex, UK)
        Rémi Zajac              (Systran Software, USA)


Format
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Papers (25 pages maximum) may be submitted in Word, LaTeX, Postscript
or PDF. The style sheets are available at HERMES
<http://tal.e-revues.com/appel.jsp>

Language
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Papers may be written either in French or in English (non-French
speaking authors only)

Schedule
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The submission deadline is May 9th 2003. People intending to submit a
paper should contact Éric de la Clergerie
(Eric.De_La_Clergerie at inria.fr).

Articles will be reviewed by a member of the editorial board of the
journal (http://www.atala.org/tal/redaction.html) and two external
reviewers chosen by the editors of the special issue. Editorial board
decisions and referees' reports will be transmitted to the authors by
July 1st, 2003.

Final versions of accepted papers will be required by October 1st,
2003. Publication is planned for the end of 2003.

Submission
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Submissions (25 pages maximum, following the Hermes style sheet)
should be sent either electronically (Eric.De_La_Clergerie at inria.fr),
or by surface mail (five copies) to

   Éric de la Clergerie
   INRIA Rocquencourt
   Domaine de Voluceau - B.P. 105
   78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, France

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