EACL 2009 Workshop on the Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: Final Call for Participation

[Valia Kordoni]

# Apologies for cross-postings



                         Final Call for Participation


                              EACL 2009 Workshop
                                    on the
                             Interaction between
                  Linguistics and Computational Linguistics:
                        Virtuous, Vicious or Vacuous?


                                March 30, 2009

                                Athens, Greece

                 http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~tim/events/eacl2009/


NEW: We are pleased to announce that the workshop will be webcast live on
the day. We will post technical details on the website closer to
the date of the workshop.

Deadline for pre-registration: March 23, 2009
(http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/registration)

We are delighted to announce this unique event, bringing together a
formidable group of invited speakers and panelists to explore the
interaction between linguistics and computational linguistics. Join us to
reflect on the past, present and future of the linguistics--computational
linguistics interface, and explore the nature of the relationship between
the two fields: virtuous, vicious or
vacuous.

Invited Speakers:

  Mark Johnson (Brown University, USA)
  Frank Keller (University of Edinburgh, UK)
  Mark Liberman (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
  Stelios Piperidis (Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Greece)
  Geoffrey Pullum (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Panelists:
  Emily Bender (University of Washington, USA)
  Gregor Erbach (European Union)
  Bob Moore (Microsoft Research, USA)
  Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
  Hans Uszkoreit (Saarland University, Germany)

The programme for the workshop and talk titles have now been finalised, and
are detailed on the workshop web page.

Overview:

This workshop is an attempt to bring together linguists and computational
linguists across the broad spectrum of the two fields who operate across or
near the computational "divide", to reflect on the relationship
between the two fields, including the following questions:

  * What contributions has computational linguistics made to linguistics,and
    vice versa?

  * What are examples of success/failure of marrying linguistics and
    computational linguistics, and what can we learn from them?

  * How can we better facilitate the virtuous cycle between computational
    linguistics and linguistics?

  * Is modern-day computational linguistics relevant to current-day
    linguistics, and vice versa? If not, should it be made more relevant,and
    how?

  * What do computational and core linguistics stand to gain from greater
    cross-awareness between the two fields?

  * What untapped areas/aspects of linguistics are ripe for
    cross-fertilisation with computational linguistics, and vice versa?

On the basis of exploring answers to these and other questions, the
workshop aims to explore possible trajectories for linguistics and
computational linguistics, in terms of both concrete low-level tasks and
high-level aspirations/synergies.

Background:

In its infancy, computational linguistics drew heavily on theoretical
linguistics. There have been numerous examples of co-development successes
between computational and theoretical linguistics over the years
(e.g. syntactic theories, discourse processing and language resource
development), and significant crossover with other areas of linguistics
such as psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics.

Throughout the history of the field, however, there has always been a
subset of computational linguistics which has openly distanced itself
from theoretical linguistics, perhaps most famously in the field of machine
translation (MT) where there is relatively little in the majority of
"successful" MT systems that a core linguist would identify with. In the
current climate of hard-core empiricism within computational linguistics it
is appropriate to reflect on where we have come from and where
we are headed relative to the various other fields of linguistics. As part
of this reflection, it is timely to look beyond theoretical
linguistics to the various other fields of linguistics which have
traditionally received less exposure in computational linguistics,
including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, neurolinguistics and
evolutionary linguistics.

Target Audience:

The workshop is intended to be of interest to both the large numbers of
people interested in deep linguistic processing (e.g. grammar
developers, computational syntacticians, computational semanticists,
researchers working on parsing and generation, and researchers applying deep
linguistic processing in various application areas), but also those who
have perhaps explicitly distanced themselves from linguistics, or
who come from a linguistic background but have moved away from it in their
computational linguist research. We also strongly encourage
(pure) linguists to come along.

Workshop Organisers:

  Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne)
  Valia Kordoni (DFKI and Saarland University)

The workshop is endorsed by the Erasmus Mundus European Masters Program in
Language and Communication Technologies (LCT).

Address any queries regarding the workshop to:

  eacl2009-ling at unimelb.edu.au