21.410, Calls: Computational Ling/Sweden

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-410. Mon Jan 25 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.410, Calls: Computational Ling/Sweden

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1)
Date: 24-Jan-2010
From: Fei Xia < fxia at uw.edu >
Subject: NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:53:25
From: Fei Xia [fxia at uw.edu]
Subject: NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground

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Full Title: NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground 
Short Title: nlpling2010 

Date: 16-Jul-2010 - 16-Jul-2010
Location: Uppsala, Sweden 
Contact Person: Fei Xia
Meeting Email: nlpling2010 at uw.edu
Web Site: http://faculty.washington.edu/fxia/nlpling2010/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 05-Apr-2010 

Meeting Description:

This workshop aims at examining the relationship between linguistics and 
natural language processing (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. 

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 tree banks 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 tree banks.
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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