Final Call for Papers for TLT8

Sun Aug 9 13:53:50 UTC 2009

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

THE EIGHTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON TREEBANKS AND LINGUISTIC THEORIES (TLT8)

4-5 DECEMBER 2009

CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF THE SACRED HEART

MILAN, ITALY

The Eighth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories
(TLT8) will be held in Milan (Italy) on 4-5 December 2009 at the Catholic
University of the Sacred Heart (http://tlt8.unicatt.it). Submissions are
invited for papers, posters and demonstrations presenting high quality,
previously unpublished research on the topics described below. Contributions
should focus on results from completed as well as ongoing research, with an
emphasis on novel approaches, methods, ideas, and perspectives, whether
descriptive, theoretical, formal or computational. Papers and poster
abstracts will be published both on paper and as online proceedings.

TLT8 will be co-located with ‘FrameNet Masterclass and Workshop’, which will
be held on 3 December 2009. The Masterclass will be given by Charles
Fillmore. For more details on this event and on how to submit a
contribution, please see the co-located event Web page
(http://tlt8.unicatt.it/framenet.htm).

WORKSHOP MOTIVATION AND AIMS

Treebanks are language resources that provide annotations at various levels
of linguistic structure beyond the word level. They typically provide
syntactic constituent or dependency structures for sentences and sometimes
functional and predicate-argument structures. Treebanks have become
crucially important for the development of data-driven approaches to natural
language processing, human language technologies, grammar extraction and
linguistic research in general. There are a number of ongoing projects
aiming at compiling representative treebanks for less-resourced languages
(like ancient, or dead languages, such as Old English, Medieval Portuguese,
Latin and Greek) and a number of on-going projects on compilation of
treebanks for specific purposes for high-resourced languages (like English).
In addition, there are projects that develop tools or explore annotation
beyond syntactic structure (including, for instance, semantic, pragmatic and
rhetoric annotation) and beyond a single language (creating parallel
treebanks, with cross-language annotation schemas, theories and applications).

Experiences in building syntactically processed corpora have shown that
there is a relation between formal linguistic theory and the practice of
syntactic annotation. Since the practices of building syntactically
processed corpora have proved that aiming at more detailed description of
the data becomes more and more theory-dependent, the connection between
treebank development and linguistic theories and paradigms need to be
tightly connected in order to ensure the necessary information flow between
them. This series of workshops aims to provide a forum for researchers and
advanced students working in these areas. We encourage interested potential
participants to read the proceedings of the previous workshops (see the LINK
page).

WORKSHOP TOPICS

The workshop invites submissions that discuss relevant innovative work in
treebanking, including the relations and links between, and possibly merging
of, various aspects of morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic
annotation; furthermore, submissions describing work on parallel treebanks
and/or cross-language annotation schemas, on the relation between linguistic
theory and the practice of annotation, and on applications of information in
treebanks are encouraged as well.

We invite submission of papers and posters on the following topics:

- design principles and annotation schemes for treebanks
- applications of treebanks in acquiring linguistic knowledge and in NLP
- the role of linguistic theories in treebank development
- treebanks as a basis for linguistic research
- semantically and pragmatically annotated treebanks
- evaluation and quality control of treebanks
- tools for creation and management of treebanks
- treebanks of less-resourced languages and ancient and dead languages
- theories, schemas and applications for parallel treebanks
- standards for treebanks

INVITED SPEAKERS

- Roberto Busa SJ, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy
(confirmed)
- Eva Hajicová, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (confirmed)

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadlines: always midnight, UTC (‘Coordinated Universal Time’), ignoring DST
(‘Daylight Saving Time’)

- Deadline for paper submission: 11 September 2009
- Notification of acceptance: 9 October 2009
- Final version of paper for workshop proceedings: 3 November 2009
- Workshop: 4-5 December 2009

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION

We invite the submission of full papers describing original, unpublished
research related to the topics of the workshop. Please see the paper
submission page (http://tlt8.unicatt.it/authorskit.htm) on how to submit and
what style to use. Papers should not exceed 12 pages.

Please note that as reviewing will be blind, the papers should not include
the authors' names and affiliations or any references to web-sites, project
names etc. revealing the authors' identity. Furthermore, any self-reference
should be avoided. For instance, instead of "We previously showed (Brown,
2001)...", use citations such as "Brown previously showed (Brown, 2001)...".

Submitted papers can be for oral, poster or demo presentations. There is no
difference between the different kinds of presentation both in terms of
reviewing process and publication in the proceedings.

This year we particularly encourage PhD and Master students to submit short
papers (not exceeding 6 pages) for poster or demo presentations, describing
their ongoing research related to the topics of the workshop. The short
papers will be reviewed. The accepted short papers will be published in the
proceedings, as well as the others.

PRESENTATION

The oral presentations at the workshop will be 30 minutes long (25 minutes
for presentation and 5 minutes for questions and discussion).

Please forward this call to colleagues of yours who may be interested.

Program Committee Chairs:

- Marco Passarotti, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy
- Savina Raynaud, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy
- Adam Przepiórkowski, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
- Frank Van Eynde, University of Leuven, Belgium

Program Committee Members:

- David Bamman, USA
- Eckhard Bick, Denmark
- Igor Boguslavsky, Russia
- Gosse Bouma, the Netherlands
- Aoife Cahill, Germany
- Stephanie Dipper, Germany
- Dan Flickinger, USA
- Anette Frank, Germany
- Eva Hajicová, Czech Republic
- Dag Haug, Norway
- Erhard Hinrichs, Germany
- Julia Hockenmaier, USA
- Anna Kupsc, France
- Anke Lüdeling, Germany
- Yosuke Miyao, Japan
- Simonetta Montemagni, Italy
- Petya Osenova, Bulgaria
- Victoria Rosén, Norway
- Manfred Stede, Germany
- Marco Tadic, Croatia

Local Organization Committee Members:

- Aldo Frigerio
- Marco Passarotti
- Savina Raynaud
- Paolo Ruffolo
- Piero Slocovich