19.3923, Calls: Computational Ling/USA; Computational Ling/South Africa

Sat Dec 20 17:32:01 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-3923. Sat Dec 20 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.3923, Calls: Computational Ling/USA; Computational Ling/South Africa

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1)
Date: 19-Dec-2008
From: Kevin Bretonnel Cohen < kevin.cohen at gmail.com >
Subject: Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing 

2)
Date: 19-Dec-2008
From: Jakub Piskorski < Jakub.Piskorski at jrc.it >
Subject: Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:25:04
From: Kevin Bretonnel Cohen [kevin.cohen at gmail.com]
Subject: Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing

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Full Title: Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural
Language Processing 
Short Title: SETQA-NLP 2009 

Date: 05-Jun-2009 - 05-Jun-2009
Location: Boulder, CO, USA 
Contact Person: Kevin Bretonnel Cohen
Meeting Email: kevin.cohen at gmail.com
Web Site: http://compbio.uchsc.edu/SETQA-NLP2009/index.shtml 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 06-Mar-2009 

Meeting Description:

SETQA-NLP 2009 is a workshop being held in conjunction with NAACL-HLT 2009 in
Boulder, Colorado. 

Call for Papers

Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing
An NAACL-HLT 2009 workshop
Boulder, CO 
June 5, 2009
http://compbio.uchsc.edu/SETQA-NLP2009

Natural language, as an input type, has unique characteristics that present
special problems for software testing, quality assurance, and even requirements
specification.  This workshop is intended to stimulate research in all areas of
software engineering for natural language processing.  The goals of the workshop
include raising awareness of the need for good software engineering practices in
NLP, stimulating research on same, and disseminating the results of current work
in this area.

The target audience is researchers interested in natural language processing
software, including testing and standardization, as well as grammar engineering.

Submissions of full papers and poster abstracts are solicited in all areas of
software and grammar engineering, testing and quality assurance as they relate
to natural language processing.  Some suggested areas are:
- Patterns for design, coding, refactoring, and unit testing of language
processing systems
- Test suite design and generation
- Special issues in metrology for natural language processing
- Grammar/rule engineering
- Usability
- Standardization of tools and/or resources
- Design for and evaluation of reliability and robustness
- Scalability issues in training and deployment
- Reusability and toolkit design
- Concurrency and multithreading for NLP
- Theoretical issues in software engineering for NLP

Important Dates
Submission deadline: Monday, March 6, 2009, 11:59 PM East Coast time
Notification of acceptance: Monday, April 6, 2009
Camera-ready copy due: Monday, April 13, 2009
Workshop: Friday, June 5, 2009

Submission Instructions
Full papers: Revised ACL guidelines for full papers this year allow for 8 pages
of text plus one page of references.

Poster abstracts: Poster abstracts should not exceed two (2) pages.  Accepted
abstracts will be published in a separate section of the workshop proceedings. 
Appropriate poster topics include preliminary results, application notes,
descriptions of work in progress, etc.

Submission format: Submissions must be in PDF and should follow the two-column
format of the ACL proceedings.  Ensure that you are *not* in A4 format.  Please
see the conference website for detailed typesetting specifications.  Authors are
strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available on
the ACL meeting website at http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html.

Submit your paper or abstract via the workshop web site at
https://www.softconf.com/naacl-hlt09/SETQANLP2009/ by 11:59 PM on Monday, March
6, East Coast time.  Submissions need not be anonymous.  Authors who cannot
submit a PDF file electronically should contact the workshop organizers well in
advance of the submission deadline.

Dual submission policy: Papers may not be submitted to the software engineering,
testing, and quality assurance workshop if they are or will be concurrently
submitted to another meeting or publication.

Program Committee
Chairs

K. Bretonnel Cohen, U. Colorado School of Medicine and MITRE
Marc Light, Thomson Reuters Research

Members

William A. Baumgartner, Jr., U. Colorado School of Medicine
Shannon Bradshaw, Drew U.
Bob Carpenter, Alias-i
Hamish Cunningham, U. Sheffield
Dan Flickinger, Stanford U.
Michael Gamon, Microsoft
Tracy King, PowerSet
James Lyle, Microsoft
Kevin Markey, Silver Creek Systems
Stephan Oepen, Stanford U.
Martha Palmer, U. Colorado at Boulder
Jeff Reynar
Charles Schafer, Google
Jun'ichi Tsujii, U. Tokyo and UK National Centre for Text Mining
Martin Volk, U. Stockholm
Scott A. Waterman, Powerset
Ken Williams, Thomson Reuters Research

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:25:14
From: Jakub Piskorski [Jakub.Piskorski at jrc.it]
Subject: Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing

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Full Title: Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing 
Short Title: FSMNLP 2009 

Date: 21-Jul-2009 - 24-Jul-2009
Location: Pretoria, South Africa 
Contact Person: Jakub Piskorski
Meeting Email: Jakub.Piskorski at jrc.it
Web Site: http://fsmnlp2009.fastar.org 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; General Linguistics; Morphology 

Call Deadline: 22-Mar-2009 

Meeting Description:

Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing FSMNLP 2009
Eight International Workshop
University of Pretoria, South Africa
http://fsmnlp2009.fastar.org
21-24 July 2009

As in 2008, FSMNLP is merged with the FASTAR (Finite Automata Systems
Theoretical and Applied Research) workshop. 

Call for Papers

Scope
Aim
The International Workshop Series of Finite State Methods and Natural Language
Processing (FSMNLP), is a forum for researchers and practitioners working on
- NLP applications or language (technology) research resources,
- theoretical and implementation aspects, or
- their combinations
having obvious relevance or an explicitly discussed relation to
Finite-State Methods in NLP.

In the past, seven FSMNLP workshops have been organised (Budapest 1996, Ankara
1998, Helsinki 2001, Budapest 2003, Helsinki 2005, Potsdam 2007, Ispra 2008).

We invite submissions related to all obvious or traditional FSMNLP topics, see
e.g. FSMNLP 2008. The updated list of topics includes All the obvious or
traditional topics plus some new topics such as: 
- common interfaces, portability, and shared methods for testing/benchmarking/
evaluation of finite-state tools
- coping with large alphabets during finite-state compilation and in real- word
applications
- fixed parameter tractability and narrowness in streamed NLP
- conventional/parallel algorithms using/manipulating conventional/ stochastic
finite-state automata/paths
- applications of rational kernels to active/statistical machine learning of
finite-state models.

Special Theme
In recognition of its location on the African continent, this year's FSMNLP has
Finite- State Methods for Under-Resourced Languages as a special theme. The
theme is relevant to finite-state methods
- applied to practical tasks such as language survey, elicitation, data
collection, computer-aided annotation, morphological description, modelling and
normalization,
- considering demanding conditions such as linguistic complexity and diversity,
scarce resources, research infrastructures, real- time grammar updates,
- in language processing fields such as comparative linguistics, field
linguistics, applied linguistics, language teaching, and computer-aided translation.

The special theme does not restrict the scope but attempts to draw the attention
of contributors to the challenges of computational linguistics in Africa. We
hope that the theme teases out promising and useful applications of Finite-State
Methods in this context.

Special Sessions

Related Events
Our plan is to catalyze discussion and subworkshopping under some intense topics
by providing tutorials, competitions (shared tasks), and sessions/submissions
suited for e.g. researcher training. Our special effort to catalyze discussion
and joint subworkshopping includes the following topic areas that have been
selected considering the opportunities provided by the location of this year's
event:
1. "Finite-State Methods for African and Other Under-Resourced/ Low- Density
Languages" including knowledge and data-driven methods and their combinations
2. "Practical Aspects and Experience of FS Methods and Systems" including
exchange formats, performance, tool demos, compression
3. "Tree Automata and Transducers" including all applications of formal tree
language theory in NLP.

Each such program is organized by international experts related to the topics.
The organizers are also represented in the main event Program Committee.

Tutorials and Invited Talks
We expect to have tutorials on the following tentative topics:
- "Developing Computational Morphology for Low/Middle-Density Languages" by
Kemal Oflazer
- "Machine Learning with Automata" by Colin de la Higuera

The Invited Speakers will be announced later.

Competitions
We hope to be able to include small competitions / shared tasks:
- machine learning of morphology
- compression of dictionaries

Business Meeting
We wish to provide a slot for a business meeting of a special interest group on
finite-state methods and models provided that the necessary initial actions for
getting such a SIG in Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) have been
carried out successfully before the FSMNLP 2009.

Submission

Paper Categories and Formats
We initially invite submissions of full papers i.e. scientific contributions
presenting new theoretical or experimental results. Papers should present
original, unpublished research results and should not be submitted elsewhere
simultaneously.

At a later stage, submission of extended abstracts on on-going research,
systems, interactive software demos, and joint projects will likely be invited
for each of the subworkshopping areas. (Note that the early acceptance
notification date for full papers may help to keep travel costs for
international participants reasonably low.) If you come from far away and have
only an extended abstract, the abstract can be submitted earlier as if it were a
full paper.

The information about the author(s) should be omitted in the submitted papers
since the review process will be double blind (submissions by ordinary PC
members are such as well). Submissions are electronic and in PDF format via a
web-based submission server.

Authors are encouraged to use Springer LNCS style (Proceedings and Other
Multiauthor Volumes) for LaTeX in producing the PDF document. For graph
visualization, Vaucanson-G LaTeX style, Graphviz/dot and XFig are recommended.
If you use a non- roman script or Microsoft Word, it is advisable to warn the
organizers as early as possible. The page limit is 12 pages for full papers.

Proceedings and Special Journal Issue
The on-site proceedings will be on CD.
The actual proceedings with revised regular papers will be published after the
conference in a volume of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence as a part of
the LNCS Series by Springer-Verlag.  LNCS banner

In addition, a special journal issue on Finite-State Methods and Models in NLP
is being planned. Extended versions of the papers and abstracts may be submitted
to this special issue (the publication involves a second review/selection cycle).

Important Dates
First call for papers: December 2008
Full paper submissions due: 22 March 2009
Notification of acceptance for full papers: 22 April 2009
Camera-ready versions of full papers due: 10 May 2009

Charis and Committees

Conference Chair
Bruce Watson (University of Pretoria)

Program Committee
Andras Kornai (Budapest Institute of Technology and MetaCarta) (chair)
Jacques Sakarovitch (Ecole nationale supérieure des Télécomm.) (chair)
Anssi Yli-Jyrä (University of Helsinki) (chair)

Sonja Bosch  (University of South Africa)
Francisco Casacuberta  (Instituto Tecnologico De Informática)
Jean-Marc Champarnaud  (Université de Rouen)
Maxime Crochemore  (King's College)
Jan Daciuk  (Gda?sk University of Technology)
Dafydd Gibbon  (University of Bielefeld)
Karin Haenelt  (Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and University of Heidelberg)
Thomas Hanneforth  (University of Potsdam)
Colin de la Higuera  (Jean Monnet University)
Arvi Hurskainen  (University of Helsinki)
Lauri Karttunen  (Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University)
André Kempe  (Yahoo Search Technologies)
Kevin Knight  (University of Southern California)
Derrick Kourie  (University of Pretoria)
Marcus Kracht  (Univeristy of California)
Hans-Ulrich Krieger  (DFKI GmbH)
Eric Laporte  (Université de Marne-la-Vallée)
Stoyan Mihov  (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Kemal Oflazer  (Sabanci University)
Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Center of the European Commission)
Michael Riley  (Google Research)
Strahil Ristov (Ruder Boskovic Institute)
James Rogers  (Earlham College)
Max Silberztein  (Université de Franche-Comté)
Bruce Watson  (University of Pretoria)
Sheng Yu  (University of Western Ontario)
Menno van Zaanen  (Tilburg University)
Lynette van Zijl (Stellenbosch University)
(a few more to be added)

Organizing Committee
Loek Cleophas  (University of Pretoria) (OC chair)
Derrick Kourie  (University of Pretoria)
Jakub Piskorski  (Joint Research Center of the European Commission)
Bruce Watson  (University of Pretoria)
Anssi Yli-Jyrä (University of Helsinki)

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