GEAF: Coling Workshop CfP

[Tracy Holloway King]

                 2nd Call for Papers
         Grammar Engineering across Frameworks (GEAF08)
                   August 24
                 Manchester, UK
        http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~thking/GEAF08/GEAF08.html

This workshop is part of The 22nd International Conference on
Computational Linguistics (COLING-08).

This workshop aims to bring together grammar engineers from different
frameworks to compare research and methodologies, particularly around
the themes of evaluation, modularity, maintainability, relevance to
theoretical and computational linguistics, and applications of "deep"
grammars to real-world domains and NLP tasks.

Recent years have seen the development of techniques and resources to
support robust, deep grammatical analysis of natural language in
real-world domains and applications. The demands of these types of
tasks have resulted in significant advances in areas such as parser
efficiency, hybrid statistical/symbolic approaches to disambiguation,
and the acquisition of large-scale lexicons. The effective
acquisition, development, maintenance and enhancement of grammars is a
central issue in such efforts, and the size and complexity of
realistic grammars makes these tasks extremely challenging; indeed,
these tasks are often tackled in ways that have much in common with
software engineering. This workshop aims to bring together grammar
engineers from different frameworks --- for example LFG, HPSG, TAG,
CCG, dependency grammar --- to compare their research and
methodologies.

The workshop is a follow-up to the first GEAF workshop
(http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/GEAF/2007/geaf07.html) which
was held at Stanford in 2007.

Keynote speaker:
Professor Jun'ichi Tsujii
Department of Computer Science, University  of Tokyo
Director, National Center for Text Mining (NacTeM), UK

Paper Topics:
The workshop is soliciting submissions for papers on the following
themes:

1. Evaluation: Proposals concerning evaluation methodologies and
    metrics which can capture the added benefits of deep linguistic
    analysis; evaluation techniques which can compare grammars across
    varieties/languages.

2. Modularity: Reflections on which aspects of linguistic structure
    can most easily be separated out from each other, why and how the
    analyses of separate linguistic phenomena are
    interconnected/interdependent, and the role of frameworks on
    promoting or inhibiting modularity.

3. Maintainability: Techniques for improving long-term and
    multideveloper maintainability of grammars; impacts of
    considerations of maintainability on choices of linguistic analysis.

4. Relevance to theoretical and computational linguistics: Reflections
    on how to present grammar engineering work to other research
    communities.

5. Regression testing: Evaluation for internal purposes; methodologies
    and techniques for test suite construction, role of test suites in
    day-to-day progress on grammars.

6. Applications of "deep" grammars to real-world domains and NLP
    tasks, such as parsing, machine translation, question answering,
    dialog, generation; with a focus on how the use of deep grammars
    can lead to improved performance on such tasks.

Organizing Committee:
   Tracy Holloway King, PARC
   Stephen Clark, Oxford University

Program Committee:

   Jason Baldridge, Texas
   Emily Bender, Washington
   Miriam Butt, Konstanz
   Aoife Cahill, Stuttgart
   John Carroll, Sussex
   Ann Copestake, Cambridge
   Berthold Crysmann, Bonn
   Mary Dalrymple, Oxford
   Stefanie Dipper, Bochum
   Dan Flickinger, Stanford
   Josef van Genabith, Dublin
   Ron Kaplan, Powerset
   Montserrat Marimon, Barcelona
   Yusuke Miyao, Tokyo
   Owen Rambow, Columbia
   Jesse Tseng, Toulouse

Important Dates and Submission Details:

   Paper submission deadline:            5 May
   Notification of acceptance of Papers: 6 June
   Camera-ready copy of papers due:      1 July
   Demo session requests due:            1 July
   Workshop:                             24 August

The maximum length of submissions is 8 pages. Please use the COLING-08
style files, available from:
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/harold.somers/coling/style.html

Please use the START system to submit a paper:
https://www.softconf.com/coling08/GEAF/submit.html

Contact for inquiries:
   Tracy Holloway King <thking "at" parc.com>
   Stephen Clark <stephen.clark "at" comlab.ox.ac.uk>

Special Demo Session: In addition to the papers, there will be a demo 
session. If you wish
to give a demonstration of a system relevant to the GEAF theme, please
submit a title of the demo and a one-page description by July 1,
2008, through the START system (URL above).  You do not have to have a
paper in the workshop in order to give a demo.

Proceedings:
Accepted papers will form part of the workshop proceedings.