Call For Papers: 5th Computational Natural Language Learning Workshop

[rzajac at CRL.NMSU.EDU]

CALL FOR PAPERS

                      CoNLL-2001
    Fifth Computational Natural Language Learning Workshop
              Toulouse, France, July 6-7, 2001

BACKGROUND

CoNLL is the yearly workshop organized by SIGNLL, the Association for
Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Natural Language
Learning (http://www.aclweb.org/signll/). Previous CoNLL meetings were
held in Madrid (1997), Sydney (1998), Bergen (1999) and Lisbon
(2000). The 2001 event will be held as a two-days workshop at the 39th
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL),
July 6-11, 2001 in Toulouse, France.

This year, a special theme will be the focus of the workshop:

    Interaction and Automation in Language Learning Resources

Apart from this special theme, the workshop will accept contributions
about language learning topics, including, but not limited to:

 - Computational models of human language acquisition
 - Computational models of the origins and evolution of language
 - Machine learning methods applied to natural language processing
   tasks (speech processing, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
   discourse processing, language engineering applications)
 - Symbolic learning methods (Rule Induction and Decision Tree
   Learning, Lazy Learning,  Inductive Logic Programming, Analytical
   Learning, Transformation-based Error-driven Learning)
 - Biologically-inspired methods (Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computing)
 - Statistical methods (Bayesian Learning, HMM, maximum entropy, SNoW,
   Support  Vector Machines)
 - Reinforcement Learning
 - Active learning, ensemble methods, meta-learning
 - Computational Learning Theory analyses of language learning
 - Empirical and theoretical comparisons of language learning methods
 - Models of induction and analogy in Linguistics

This year's workshop will also accept submissions for a shared task
(segmenting a text into clauses-clausing).

THE WORKSHOP

Main Session Theme: Interaction and Automation in Language Learning
Resources

The purpose of the special theme is to present and discuss
state-of-the-art learning mechanisms for the automated acquisition of
language resources (dictionaries, ontologies, grammars) or the
automated adaptation of natural language resources/processors to new
domains or languages.

The dimensions of learning that are of interest for this session include:

- The integration of humans/linguists in the learning process
- The structure of the training data
- The kind of knowledge that is learned
- General study of learning methods that are suitable for natural
  language related tasks

Lately there have been new learning mechanisms that use either large
amounts of raw data or small sets of carefully constructed tagged
training samples. Learning language can be construed as learning
numbers or parameters for some statistical or symbolic system, or
learning rules assigning structures to input data (or a mix of
those). Learning can be done off-line, which introduces the problem of
interpreting (if needed) the derived knowledge before its use in an
NLP engine; or on-line, which raises user interaction
problems. Different approaches are tailored to solve different kinds
of problems subject to a different balance of requirements (large
vs. small training set, tagged vs. untagged training data, results
needs interpretation or can be used as is, etc.). While this session
aims at presenting the largest panorama of learning techniques, we
encourage submission of work on semi-automated learning techniques
that involve interaction with a human during the learning process or
the intervention of a linguist for interpreting results.

Special Session: Shared Task - Segmenting Text Into Clauses

We invite groups to take part in a shared task: Segmenting a Text Into
Clauses (Clausing).  Participating groups will be provided with the
same training and testing material, and will all use the same
evaluation criteria, thus allowing comparison between various learning
technologies.  After Chunking, the CoNLL-2000 shared task, Clausing
can be seen as the next step towards a full parsing.

More information on this shared task is available at:
   http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/conll2001/clauses/

Invited Session: Learning Computational Grammars

There will be a special session devoted to the presentation and
discussion of results of the EU Learning Computational Grammars
project (Coordinator: John Nerbonne). Project participants include:
the University of Groningen (The Netherlands, coordinator), University
of Antwerp (Belgium), the University of Tuebingen (Germany), SRI
Cambridge (UK), the University College Dublin (Ireland), the
University of Geneva (Switzerland), and Xerox Grenoble (France).

Invited Speaker (to be announced)

SUBMISSIONS

Format for Paper Submissions for Main Session

Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words (Postscript or ASCII) by
April 6, 2001 electronically to the address below. Authors of accepted
abstracts will be invited to produce a full paper to be published in
the proceedings of the workshop, which will be available at the
workshop for participants, and distributed afterwards by the
ACL. Submit main session abstracts to:

Walter Daelemans, walter.daelemans at uia.ua.ac.be
Centrum Nederlandse Taal en Spraak.
Linguistics, Department of Germanic languages and literature
UIA, University of Antwerp
Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium

or

Rémi Zajac, zajac at crl.nmsu.edu
Computing Research Laboratory
New Mexico State University
PO Box 30001 Dept. 3CRL
Las Cruces NM 88003
USA

Format For Shared Task Submissions

Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words describing the learning
approach, and your results on the test set by April 6, 2001 to the
address below (preferably by email). A special section of the
proceedings will be devoted to a comparison and analysis of the
results and to a description of the approaches used. Submit shared
task submissions to:

Erik Tjong Kim Sang, erikt at uia.ua.ac.be
Centrum Nederlandse Taal en Spraak
Linguistics, Department of Germanic languages and literature
UIA, University of Antwerp
Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium

Important dates

Deadline for Abstract Submission: April 6, 2001
Deadline for Shared Task Submission: April 6, 2001
Notification: April 27, 2001
Deadline camera-ready full paper: May 16, 2001
Workshop: July 6/7, 2001

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Walter Daelemans (co-chair)
Rémi Zajac (co-chair)
Thorsten Brants (Xerox PARC, USA)
Michael Brent (Washington University in Saint Louis, USA)
Claire Cardie (Cornell University, USA)
James Cussens (University of York, UK)
Herve Dejean (University of Tuebingen, Germany)
Gregory Grefenstette (Xerox Grenoble, France)
Raymond Mooney (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
John Nerbonne (Groningen University, Netherlands)
Kemal Oflazer (Sabanci University, Turkey)
Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh, UK),
David Powers (Flinders University, Australia)
Ronan Reilly (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
Erik Tjong Kim Sang (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)

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