ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop - Call for Papers

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

Syntactic and Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing Systems


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
The last decade has seen an explosion in the work done in the development
of robust natural language processing systems.  A common methodology used in
building these systems has been to analyze a sample of the data available
(either manually, or automatically for training statistical systems), build
statistical/heuristical schemas based upon the analysis, and test the system
on a blind sample of the data.  Due to this commonly used paradigm, an
important area of research that has not been given the attention it deserves is
the estimation of syntactic and semantic complexity faced by these systems in
the tasks they perform.

At the AAAI 1999 Fall Symposium on Question Answering Systems, the problem of
semantic complexity, a topic of a 90 minutes panel, motivated a lot of interest
and discussion. To continue the investigation of this important issue, in this
workshop, we will address the question of complexity as it pertains to the
syntax and semantics of natural language.  In particular, the workshop will
seek to address the following areas:

1) How can we model syntactic and semantic complexity for formal models of
   natural language?
2) How does complexity impact acquisition of semantic and conceptual
   information?
3) How does syntactic and semantic complexity impact document classification in
   information and text retrieval tasks?
4) How do statistical clustering approaches compare to knowledge-based
   approaches at partitioning and quantifying the semantic space in a document
   set?
5) Concerning NLP systems that are deployed in the field, how can we quantify
   the information extraction task and QA task in ways similar to what is
   currently done with IR tasks and algorithms?
6) How does the estimation of syntactic and semantic complexity impact the
   evaluation of such systems?
7) Can syntactic and semantic complexity coupled with a history of the past
   performance of a system be used to predict future performance of the system
   on a different data set?

The workshop invites short papers, full-length papers, proposals for panel
discussions, and position statements that deal with any aspect of syntactic
and/or semantic complexity of NLP systems.  In particular, the workshop is
interested in addressing the following topics:
    - estimation of the syntactic and semantic complexity of specific NLP tasks
    - semantic complexity and world knowledge
    - role of syntactic and semantic complexity in system design and testing
    - syntactic and semantic complexity and its role in the evaluation of NLP
      systems
    - use of syntactic and semantic complexity as a performance predictor
    - relationship between syntactic and semantic complexity

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION

Paper submissions should consist of either a short paper (2000 words or less,
including references), a position statement (2000 words or less, including
references), or a full paper (5000 words or less, including references).  Each
submission should include a separate title page providing the following
information: the title, the type of paper (short/position/full), the word
count, a short abstract, names and affiliations of all the authors, the full
address of the primary author (or alternate contact person), including phone,
fax, and email.  Proposals for panels should consist of a short (upto 500
words) description of the proposed panel along with the names of the proposed
panelists.

Papers and proposals for panel discussions may be submitted by submitting three
hard copies or one soft copy (ASCII, or PS) to:

Amit Bagga
General Electric CRD
Room K1-5C38B
1 Research Circle
Niskayuna, NY 12309.  USA
phone: 1-518-387-7077
email: bagga at crd.ge.com


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline:                 February 7
Notification of acceptance of panels :     February 21
Notification of acceptance of papers :     February 28
Camera ready papers due:                   March 13


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Co-Chairs:
Amit Bagga
General Electric Corporate Research and Development
P.O. Box 8
Schenectady, NY 12301
bagga at crd.ge.com
518-387-7077 (voice)
518-387-6845 (fax)

James Pustejovsky
Computer Science Department and Volen Center for Complex Systems
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA 02254-9110
jamesp at cs.brandeis.edu
781-736-2709 (voice)
781-736-2741 (fax)

Wlodek Zadrozny
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
30 Saw Mill River Road
Hawthorne, NY 10532
wlodz at us.ibm.com
914-784-7835 (voice)
914-784-7455 (fax)




PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Amit Bagga - GE CRD
Branimir Boguraev - IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
J-P Chanod (Xerox, Grenoble)
Shalom Lappin (Kings College, London);
Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania)
Larry Moss (Indiana)
Rohit Parikh (CUNY),
Adam Pease (Teknowledge)
James Pustejovsky - Brandeis University
Wlodek Zadrozny - IBM T.J. Watson Research Center