CFP for nlpling workshop

[Emily M. Bender]

         First Call for Papers

 ACL 2010 workshop on "NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground"
 Uppsala, Sweden
 July 16, 2010

 Workshop website:
   http://faculty.washington.edu/fxia/nlpling2010/

 Submission website:
   https://www.softconf.com/acl2010/NLPLing/


1. Workshop Description

This workshop aims at examining the relationship between linguistics and
NLP and studying
(1) the new methods in incorporating linguistic knowledge into statistical
   systems to advance the state of the art of NLP, and
(2) the feasibility of using NLP techniques to acquire linguistic knowledge
   for a large number of languages and to assist linguistic studies.

 Since early 1990s, with the advancement of machine learning methods and the
availability of data resources such as treebanks and parallel corpora,
data-driven approaches to NLP have made  significant progress. The success
of such data-driven approaches has cast doubt on the relevance of
linguistics to NLP.  Conversely, NLP techniques are rarely used to help
linguistics studies. We believe that there is room to expand the
involvement of linguistics in NLP, and likewise, NLP in linguistics, and
believe that the cross-pollination of ideas between the disciplines can
greatly benefit both fields.

 One common approach to take advantage of linguistic knowledge is to train
a statistical system on linguistically annotated data such as treebanks.
Another approach is to represent linguistic knowledge as rules in a
rule-based approach. This workshop is interested in research that goes
BEYOND these common approaches and explores new methods in incorporating
linguistic knowledge into statistical systems or using statistical systems
for linguistic knowledge discovery.

 The workshop will consist of one invited talk, 2-3 panels, group discussion,
and paper/poster sessions.


2. Topics of Interest

 The workshop is interested in research that explores new methods in
incorporating linguistic knowledge into statistical systems or using
statistical systems for linguistic knowledge discovery.
These include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

 [T1] Research that shows awareness of particular linguistic phenomena
      and its effects on statistical systems.

      For instance, being aware of syntactic phenomena such as scrambling,
      cross-serial dependencies and long-distance movement is very relevant
      to parsing (e.g., earlier work on using different grammar formalisms
      such as LTAG/CCG/HPSG/LFG to handle these phenomena or more recent
      work on non-projective dependency parsing).

      Similarly, being aware of word formation patterns (e.g., reduplication
      in Chinese) or allomorphic variation patterns (e.g., vowel harmony in
      Turkish) could help word segmentation and morphological analysis.


 [T2] New methods in incorporating linguistic knowledge into
      statistical systems to improve the start of the art.
     (e.g., as rules in a preprocessing step, as linguistic features in
      a statistical system, as filters for pruning a search space, as priors
      in an objective function).


 [T3] Research that demonstrates the feasibility of creating NLP systems to
      automatically acquire linguistic knowledge for a large number of
      languages.
      %
      In order to make generalizations about language universals, linguists
       need to gather information about as many individual languages as
       possible.  However, knowledge about most languages is not complete.
       Can we use NLP techniques to acquire knowledge (e.g., basic word
       order, case marking, tense, aspect, word formation rules, etc.) for
       hundreds of languages, which could help in the construction of
       resources such as WALS (http://wals.info) (Haspelmath et al., 2005)?


 [T4] Research that demonstrates the benefits of using NLP techniques to
      help particular linguistic studies. For instance, given some language
      data, can the categorization of languages into families be automated?
      Can historical interactions between languages be identified
      automatically (e.g., areal effects and borrowings, but beyond just
      lexical borrowings)?  Can NLP tools run over corpora
      of different dialects of the same language systematically identify
      differences in the two dialects (e.g., not just word choice
      differences, but also choice and frequency of particular
      constructions)?


 The systems described in the paper should be properly evaluated and
  compared with the start of the art.

 On the submission form, please specify the theme that your paper falls into.



3. Important dates:
 * Submission deadline: Apr 5, 2010, 23:59 PST
 * Notification: May 6, 2010
 * Camera-ready deadline: May 16, 2010
 * Workshop: Jul 16, 2010



4. Submission Information

 The papers should report original and unpublished research on topics of
interest for the workshop. Accepted papers are expected to be presented
at the workshop, and will be published in the workshop proceedings. They
should emphasize obtained results rather than intended work, and should
indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results.

 A paper accepted for presentation at the workshop must not be presented or
have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings.


4.1 Submission Format: All submissions must be electronic in PDF and must be
    formatted using the ACL 2010 style files, which are available at
    http://www.acl2010.org/authors.html

4.2 Maximum Length: The maximum length of a submitted paper is
    eight (8) pages of content, excluding references. One additional
    page is allowed for the References section.  Thus, your PDF file
    is limited to eight (8) pages of content and nine (9) pages in total.


4.3 Anonymous Review: Reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore,
   the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations.
   Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g.,
   "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use
   citations such as "Smith (1991) previously showed ...". Papers that do
   not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.


4.4 Double Submitting: Papers that have been or will be submitted to other
   meetings or publications must provide this information on the START
   online submission page. If NLPLing 2010 accepts a paper, authors must
   notify the program chairs *immediately* indicating which meeting they
   choose for presentation of their work. NLPLing 2010 cannot accept for
   publication or presentation work that will be (or has been) published
   elsewhere.


4.5 Submission site: Authors must submit papers online at
   https://www.softconf.com/acl2010/NLPLing/

4.6 The submission deadline is April 5, 2010 23:59 PST. Papers
   submitted after the deadline will not be reviewed.


5. ACL mentoring service:

ACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from
regions of the world where English is less emphasized as a language of
scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to
read the scientific literature in English, have little or no
experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the
ACL meetings. The service will be arranged as follows. A set of
potential mentors will be identified by Mentoring Service Chairs Björn
Gambäck (SICS, Sweden and NTNU, Norway) and Diana McCarthy (Lexical
Computing Ltd., UK), who will organize this service for ACL 2010. If
you would like to take advantage of the service for a submission to
this workshop, please upload your paper in PDF format using the paper
submission software for the mentoring service available at:


https://www.softconf.com/acl2010/acl2010mentor/

The deadline for the mentoring service is six weeks before the
workshop submission deadline. An appropriate mentor will be assigned
to your paper and the mentor will get back to you no later than two
weeks before the submission deadline.

Please note that this service is for the benefit of the authors as
described above. It is not a general mentoring service for authors to
improve the technical content of their papers.

Questions about the mentoring service should be referred to
mentoring at acl2010.org.



6. Workshop Chairs
 * Lori Levin, CMU, USA
 * William Lewis, Microsoft Research, USA
 * Fei Xia, Univ. of Washington, USA



7. Program committee:

 * Anthony Aristar, LinguistList, USA
 * Jason Baldridge, University of Texas at Austin, USA
 * Timothy Baldwin, University of Melbourne, Australia
 * Dorothee Beermann, NTNU, Norway
 * Emily M. Bender, University of Washington, USA
 * Steven Bird, University of Melbourne, Australia
 * Chris Brew, Ohio State University, USA
 * Michael Collins, MIT, USA
 * Michael Cysouw, Max Planck Inst. for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany,
 * Hal Daume III, Univ of Utah, USA
 * Markus Dickinson, University of Indiana, USA
 * Alexis Dimitriadis, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS,
        The Netherlands
 * Helen Aristar Dry, LinguistList
 * Jason Eisner, JHU, USA
 * Erhard Hinrichs, Univ. of Tubingen, Germany
 * Chu-Ren Huang,
        The Hong Kong Polytechnic Univ., Hong Kong, China,
 * Julia Hockenmaier, UIUC, USA
 * Mark Johnson, Macquarie University, Australia
 * Kevin Knight, ISI, USA
 * Mark Liberman, Univ of Pennsylvania, USA
 * Dekang Lin, Google, USA
 * Paola Merlo, University of Geneva, Switzerland
 * Kathy McKeown, Columbia Univ, USA
 * Martha Palmer, University of Colorado, USA
 * Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan, USA
 * Owen Rambow, Columbia Univ., USA
 * Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT, India
 * Richard Sproat, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
 * Mark Steedman, Edinburgh, UK
 * Michael White, Ohio State University, USA
 * Richard Wicentowski, Swarthmore College, USA,
 * Peter Wittenburg, Max Planck Inst. for Psycholinguistics,
           The Netherlands
 * Andreas Witt, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Germany,
 * Nianwen Xue, Brandeis University, USA


8. Contact info

 If you have any questions about the workshop, please contact us at
nlpling2010 at uw.edu.












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