23.1239, Calls: Comp Ling, Text/Corpus Ling, Syntax, Semantics, Morphology/South Korea

Mon Mar 12 17:21:02 UTC 2012

LINGUIST List: Vol-23-1239. Mon Mar 12 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.1239, Calls: Comp Ling, Text/Corpus Ling, Syntax, Semantics, Morphology/South Korea

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Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:19:17
From: Yuval Marton [yuvalmarton at gmail.com]
Subject: Workshop on Statistical Parsing and Semantic Processing of Morphologically Rich Languages

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Full Title: Workshop on Statistical Parsing and Semantic Processing of Morphologically Rich Languages 
Short Title: SP-Sem-MRL 

Date: 12-Jul-2012 - 14-Jul-2012
Location: Jeju Island, Korea, South 
Contact Person: Yuval Marton
Meeting Email: sp.sem.mrl2012 at gmail.com
Web Site: http://sites.google.com/site/spsemmrl2012/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Morphology; Semantics; Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Mar-2012 

Meeting Description:

ACL 2012 Joint Workshop on Statistical Parsing and Semantic Processing of Morphologically-Rich Languages (SP-Sem-MRL)
http://sites.google.com/site/spsemmrl2012/

This workshop is endorsed by SIGLEX & SIGPARSE and sponsored by the PASCAL Network of Excellence & the INRIA's Alpage project.

Morphologically Rich Languages (MRLs) are languages in which grammatical relations such as Subject, Predicate, Object, etc., are indicated morphologically (e.g. through inflection) instead of positionally (as in, e.g. English), and the position of words and phrases in the sentence may vary substantially. The tight connection between the morphology of words and the grammatical relations between them, and the looser connection between the position and grouping of words to their syntactic roles, pose serious challenges for syntactic and semantic processing. Furthermore, since grammatical relations provide the interface to compositional semantics, morphosyntactic phenomena may significantly complicate processing the syntax-semantics interface. In statistical parsing, which has been a cornerstone of research in NLP and had seen great advances due to the widespread availability of syntactically annotated corpora, English parsing performance has reached a high plateau in certain genres, which is however not always indicative of parsing performance in MRLs, dependency-based and constituency-based alike. Semantic processing of natural language has similarly seen much progress in recent years. However, as in parsing, the bulk of the work has concentrated on English, and MRLs may present processing challenges that the community is as of yet unaware of, and which current semantic processing technologies may have difficulty coping with. These challenges may lurk in areas where parses may be used as input, such as semantic role labeling, distributional semantics, paraphrasing and textual entailment, or where inadequate pre-processing of morphological variation hurts parsing and semantic tasks alike.

This joint workshop aims to build upon the first and second SPMRL workshops (at NAACL-HLT 2010 and IWPT 2011, respectively) while extending the overall scope to include semantic processing where MRLs pose challenges for algorithms or models initially designed to process English. In particular, we seek to explore the use of newly available syntactically and/or semantically annotated corpora, or data sets for semantic evaluation that can contribute to our understanding of the difficulty that such phenomena pose. One goal of this workshop is to encourage cross-fertilization among researchers working on different languages and among those working on different levels of processing. Of particular interest is work addressing the lexical sparseness and out-of-vocabulary issues that occur in both syntactic and semantic processing.

The workshop will be organised around three broad themes:

- Syntactic Models: Models and architectures that explicitly integrate morphological analysis and parsing; Cross-language and cross-model comparison of strengths and weaknesses regarding particular linguistic phenomena.

- Semantic Models: State-of-the-art semantic analysis and generation methods for MRLs, including semantic similarity and entailment criteria and their task-specific instantiation, and suitable representations for semantic tasks in MRLs.

- Joint Modeling Aspects: Improving lexical coverage and handling of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words by utilising lexical knowledge or unsupervised/semi-supervised learning techniques; The role of parsing in semantic analysis for MRLs; Preprocessing issues that jointly affect parsing and semantic analysis; Syntax-Semantics interfaces for monolingual or multilingual systems. 

Call for Papers:

The areas of interest for this joint workshop include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Syntactic Parsing of MRLs:

- Parsing models and architectures that explicitly integrate morphological analysis and parsing
- Parsing models and architectures that focus on lexical coverage and the handling of OOV words either by incorporating linguistic knowledge or through the use of unsupervised/semi-supervised learning techniques
- Cross-language and cross-model comparison of models' strengths and weaknesses in the face of particular linguistic phenomena (e.g. morphosyntactic characteristics, degree of word-order freedom)
- Comprehensive analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of various parsing models on particular linguistic (e.g. morphosyntactic) phenomena with respect to variation in tagsets, annotation schemes and additional data transformations

Semantic Processing of MRLs:

- Semantic distance and entailment criteria in the MRL space (e.g., with respect to inflection, derivation, root, pattern, lemma, tense, and/or aspect, etc.); possibly task-specific criteria
- Lexical resources and morphological analysis tools facilitating semantic distance measures and semantic relation detection
- Methods and models for semantic similarity/distance calculation, clustering and paraphrasing relying on MRL properties, and using: probability, vector/graph representation, data-driven and/or linguistic rules, pivoting/SMT, machine-learning, etc.
- Paraphrase and textual entailment detection or generation, specific to MRLs (e.g., task-specific issues of inclusion or exclusion of certain paraphrase and textual entailment patterns differing in inflection)
- Use of morphological analysis for semantic calculation aimed at reducing sparsity/OOV rate, preferably without losing information due to mere lemmatization
- Semantic role labeling (SRL) for MRLs; verbal/nominalized selectional preferences

The Syntax-Semantics Interface:

- Parsing-based semantic processing tasks, e.g., semantic role labeling (SRL)
- Processing of compounds and multi-morphemic words: optimal level(s) of tokenization, representation, and morphological analysis for either/both tasks
- Syntax-aware semantic distance measures, paraphrasing and textual entailment
- Semantic classes and/or relations as input to syntactic parsing

In addition to the standard (oral or poster) presentations in the sessions, the SP-Sem-MRL workshop will feature a panel of commentators for a selection of the talks, allowing for an extended discussion period. This new feature is introduced in order to foster in-depth discussions and to nurture interactions among researchers. It is our hope that these interactions will help to bring ideas (and solutions) to the fore and promote a more rapid advance of the state-of-the-art in the field.

Shared Task:

There will be no shared task on MRLs this year. However, we will take this opportunity to disclose, during a special session of SP-Sem-MRL, the data sets and evaluation procedures for the cross-linguistic cross-framework shared task which was discussed at previous SPMRL panels, and which is planned for SPMRL 2013 at IWPT 2013. Researchers who are interested in participating in the shared task or teams that wish to add their data sets or extrinsic evaluation procedures to the task are encouraged to attend the session and contribute to the discussion.

Submission:

Authors are invited to submit long papers (up to 10 pages + any number of reference pages) and short papers (up to 5 pages + any number of reference pages). Long papers should describe unpublished, substantial and completed research. Short papers should be position papers, papers describing work in progress or short, focused contributions.

Papers may be submitted until 31 March 2012 in PDF format via the START system:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2012/sp-sem-mrl-2012/

Submitted papers must follow the styles and the formatting guidelines available from the current ACL recommendations (http://www.acl2012.org/call/sub01.asp). As the reviewing will be blind, the papers 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 previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...' Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. In addition, please do not post your submissions on the web until after the review process is complete.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: March 31, 2012
Notification to authors: April 21, 2012
Camera-ready deadline: April 30, 2012
Workshop dates: TBD, during the ACL-2012 workshop period (July 12-14, 2012)

Registration and Financial Support:

We are pleased to announce financial support in workshop registration fees to up to five students, through the generous sponsorship of PASCAL Network of Excellence. Priority will be given to PASCAL students, but all students are encouraged to apply. (Details to follow closer to beginning of registration period.) Registration Date: TBD.

Contact:

Email: sp.sem.mrl2012 at gmail.com
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/spsemmrl2012/

Organizing Committee:

General Chairs:

Marianna Apidianaki (LIMSI-CNRS, France)
Ido Dagan (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
Jennifer Foster (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Yuval Marton (IBM Watson Research Center, US)
Djamé Seddah (University of Paris 4, France)
Reut Tsarfaty (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Shared Session Chairs:

Katrin Erk (University of Texas at Austin, US)
Ines Rehbein (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Peter Turney (National Research Council, Canada)
Yannick Versley (University of Tuebingen, Germany)

Program Committee: 

Ion Androutsopoulos (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)
Mohammed Attia (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Bernd Bohnet  (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Marie Candito (University of Paris 7, France)
Aoife Cahill (Educational Testing Service, US)
Ozlem Cetinoglu (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Jinho Choi (University of Colorado at Boulder, US)
Grzegorz Chrupala  (Saarland University, Germany)
Benoit Crabbé (University of Paris 7, France)
Gülşen Cebiroğlu Eryiğit, (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey)
Josef van Genabith (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Yoav Goldberg (Google Research NY, US)
Spence Green (Stanford University, US)
Veronique Hoste (University College Ghent, Belgium)
Samar Husain (Potsdam University, Germany)
Sandra Kübler (Indiana University, US)
Jonas Kuhn (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Alberto Lavelli (FBK-irst, Italy)
Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)
Joseph Le Roux (Université Paris-Nord, France)
Nitin Madnani (Educational Testing Service, NJ)
Wolfgang Maier (University of Düsseldorf, Germany)
Takuya Matsuzaki (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Aurélien Max (LIMSI-CNRS, France)
Yusuke Miyao (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
Kemal Oflazer (Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar)
Sebastian Pado (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
Patrick Pantel (Microsoft Research, US)
Sameer Pradhan (BBN Technologies, US)
Idan Szpektor (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
Kenji Sagae (University of Southern California, US)
Benoit Sagot (INRIA Rocquencourt, France)
Lamia Tounsi (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Tim Van de Cruys (University of Cambridge, UK)
Stephen Wan (CSIRO ICT Centre, Sydney)
Deniz Yuret (Koc University Istanbul, Turkey)
Zdenek Zabokrtsky (Charles University, Czech Republic)
Shiqi Zhao (Baidu Inc., China)

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