19.3708, Confs: Computational Linguistics/Singapore

Thu Dec 4 17:38:24 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-3708. Thu Dec 04 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.3708, Confs: Computational Linguistics/Singapore

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1)
Date: 03-Dec-2008
From: Animesh Mukherjee < animeshm at gmail.com >
Subject: TextGraphs-4: Graph based Methods for NLP

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:36:20
From: Animesh Mukherjee [animeshm at gmail.com]
Subject: TextGraphs-4: Graph based Methods for NLP 

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TextGraphs-4: Graph based Methods for NLP 
Short Title: TextGraphs-4 

Date: 06-Aug-2009 - 07-Aug-2009 
Location: Suntec, Singapore 
Contact: Animesh Mukherjee 
Contact Email: animeshm at gmail.com 
Meeting URL: http://www.textgraphs.org/ws09/index.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Meeting Description: 

The TextGraphs workshop addresses a broad spectrum of research areas and brings
together specialists working on graph-based models and algorithms for natural
language processing and computational linguistics, as well as on the theoretical
foundations of related graph-based methods. This workshop is aimed at fostering
an exchange of ideas by facilitating a discussion about both the techniques and
the theoretical justification of the empirical results among the NLP community
members. Spawning a deeper understanding of the basic theoretical principles
involved, such interaction is vital to the further progress of graph-based NLP
applications.

This time the workshop has a special theme of 'Cognitive and Social Dynamics of
Languages in the framework of Complex Networks'. Cognitive dynamics of languages
include topics focused primarily on language acquisition, which can be extended
to language change (historical linguistics) and language evolution as well.
Since the latter phenomena are also governed by social factors, we can further
classify them under social dynamics of languages. In addition, social dynamics
of languages also include topics such as mining the social networks of blogs and
emails. 

TextGraphs-4: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing
To be held in conjunction with ACL/IJCNLP 2009, August 2-7, Suntec, Singapore

Recent years have shown an increased amount of interest in applying graph
theoretic models to computational linguistics. Both graph theory and
computational linguistics are well studied disciplines which have traditionally
been perceived as distinct, embracing different algorithms, different
applications, and different potential end-users. However, as recent research
work has shown, the two seemingly distinct disciplines are in fact intimately
connected, with a large variety of natural language processing applications
adopting efficient and elegant solutions from graph-theoretical framework.
Traditional graph theory, which is studied as a sub-discipline of mathematics,
has been successfully applied in modeling and solving several applications in
Natural Language Processing. More recently, complex network theory, a popular
modeling paradigm in statistical mechanics and physics of complex systems, was
proven to be a promising tool in understanding the structure and dynamics of
languages. Complex network based models have been applied to areas as diverse as
language evolution, acquisition, historical linguistics, mining and analyzing
the social networks of blogs and emails, link analysis and information
retrieval, information extraction, and representation of the mental lexicon.
Similarly, in many NLP applications entities can be naturally represented as
nodes in a graph and relations between them can be represented as edges. Recent
research has shown that graph-based representations of linguistic units as
diverse as words, sentences and documents give rise to novel and efficient
solutions in a variety of NLP tasks, ranging from part-of-speech tagging, word
sense disambiguation and parsing to information extraction, semantic role
labeling, summarization, and sentiment analysis.

The TextGraphs workshop addresses a broad spectrum of research areas and brings
together specialists working on graph-based models and algorithms for natural
language processing and computational linguistics, as well as on the theoretical
foundations of related graph-based methods. This workshop is aimed at fostering
an exchange of ideas by facilitating a discussion about both the techniques and
the theoretical justification of the empirical results among the NLP community
members. Spawning a deeper understanding of the basic theoretical principles
involved, such interaction is vital to the further progress of graph-based NLP
applications. TextGraphs-4 builds on the success of the previous three
TextGraphs workshops:

TextGraphs-1 held at HLT-NAACL 2006 (http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~textgraphs/ws06/)
TextGraphs-2 held at HLT-NAACL 2007 (http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~textgraphs/ws07/)
TextGraphs-3 held at Coling 2008 (http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~textgraphs/ws08/)

TextGraphs-3 started the trend of having a special theme for the workshop every
year. Consequently, last year the theme was ''lexical representation and
acquisition''. Following the same trend, this year TextGraphs-4 will have a
special theme on ''Cognitive and Social Dynamics of Languages in the framework
of Complex Networks''. Cognitive dynamics of languages include topics focused
primarily on language acquisition, which can be extended to language change
(historical linguistics) and language evolution as well. Since the latter
phenomena are also governed by social factors, we can further classify them
under social dynamics of languages. In addition, social dynamics of languages
also include topics such as mining the social networks of blogs and emails.

The modeling paradigm being complex networks, some of the topics covered by this
special theme are:

Lexical acquisition and growth of the mental lexicon
Phonological, syntactic and semantic acquisition
Lexical change
Applications of networks in modeling language variation and dialectometry
Effect of social structure on language change and evolution
Analysis of blog and email networks for IR and IE

Apart from the special theme, TextGraphs-4 also invites submissions on the
following (but not limited to) general topics:

-Graph-based representations, acquisition and evaluation of lexicon and ontology
-Node and edge labeling for linguistic graphs
-Properties of lexical, semantic, syntactic and phonological graphs
-Graph methods for morpho-syntactic annotation, word sense disambiguation, 
information retrieval, information extraction, summarization, text mining and
understanding
-Random walk models in NLP
-Graph clustering algorithms
-Application of spectral graph theory in NLP
-Unsupervised and semi-supervised graph-based methods
-Dynamic graph representations for NLP
-Comparative analysis of graph-based methods and traditional machine leaning
techniques for NLP applications. 

Important Dates:

Paper submissions: May 1, 2009
Notification of acceptances: Jun 1, 2009
Camera-ready copies due: Jun 7, 2009
Workshop: Aug 6/7, 2009 

Organizers:

Monojit Choudhury, Microsoft Research India
Samer Hassan, University of North Texas
Animesh Mukherjee, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University 

Program Committee:

Eneko Agirre, Basque Country University
Edo Airoldi, Princeton University
Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Chris Biemann, Powerset
Andras Csomai, Google Inc.
Hong Cui, Yahoo Inc
Hal Daume III, University of Utah
Mona Diab, Columbia University
Michael Gammon, Microsoft Research Redmond
Niloy Ganguly, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Lise Getoor, University of Maryland
Simon Kirby, University of Edinburgh
Ben Leong, University of Delaware
Vittorio Loreto, University of Rome ''La Sapienza''
Irina Matveeva, Accenture Technology Labs
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
Dunja Mladenic, J. Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Roberto Navigli, University of Rome ''La Sapienza''
John Nerbonne, University of Groningen
Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan
Raghavendra Udupa, Microsoft Research India
Søren Wichmann, MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology      

Endorsement:

The TextGraphs-4 workshop has been endorsed by SIGLEX.

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