Appel: Grammar Systems

[Philippe Blache]

From: Carlos Martin Vide <cmv at nil.fut.es>


                   (Apologies for multiple posting.)

                         Final Call for Papers

Workshop: GRAMMAR SYSTEMS: A FORMAL LANGUAGE THEORETIC MULTI-AGENT
ARCHITECTURE

To be held at the 9th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (EACL'99), Bergen, Norway, June 12, 1999.

In cooperation with the IFIP Working Group 1.2 on Descriptional Complexity.

Scope:

The theory of grammar systems is a recent branch of formal language theory
intending to model complex distributed systems. A basic reference in the
field is E. Csuhaj-Varju, J. Dassow, J. Kelemen & Gh. Paun (1994), Grammar
systems: a grammatical approach to distribution and cooperation. Gordon &
Breach, London. For a more recent survey, see J. Dassow, Gh. Paun & G.
Rozenberg, "Grammar systems", in G. Rozenberg & A. Salomaa, eds. (1997),
Handbook of formal languages, 2: 155-213. Springer, Berlin. For the most
recent work, see Acta Cybernetica, 12.4 (1996), ed. E. Csuhaj-Varju;
Computers and Artificial Intelligence, 15.2-3 (1996), eds. J. Kelemen & Gh.
Paun; Grammars, 1.3 (1998), ed. J. Kelemen; and Gh. Paun & A. Salomaa, eds.
(1999), "Grammatical models of multi-agent systems". Gordon & Breach, London.

In traditional formal language theory, a language is usually generated by
one grammar. In contrast, in this new framework language generation is
regarded as a joint activity of several grammars working together under
different strategies. In this way, for instance, the non-context-free
language a^nb^nc^n is easily generated using only context-free rules
suitably distributed through several machines.

There are two main classes of devices of this kind: Cooperating Distributed
Grammar Systems (CDGS, where, all the grammars starting from the same
axiom, at each step of the derivation process one grammar rewrites the
string according to a cooperation protocol) and Parallel Communicating
Grammar Systems (PCGS, where, each grammar starting from its own axiom, at
each step of the derivation process each grammar rewrites its own string
and, at a certain moment, some communication symbol appears forcing the
combination of such strings in a certain manner). Some recent derivations
of the theory include eco-grammar systems, colonies and networks of
language processors.

Grammar systems intend to model distribution, at the same time increasing
the generative capacity and decreasing the descriptional complexity. They
are being preliminarily used to model natural language
understanding/generation systems as well as other empirical data from
artificial intelligence. Each one of the grammars is an agent and the whole
is a modular architecture. This formal architecture seems potentially close
to the kind of data natural language processing systems face.

So far, developments in the field have mainly come from theoretical
computer science, and now it's time to check these systems against natural
language processing problems. The aims of the workshop are to present this
new theory and to suggest trends of development in the field of natural
language processing. As well, the organizers welcome contributions from
theoretical as well as applied closely related areas, especially those
discussing formal language theoretic-inspired models of natural language
problems and those presenting other multi-agent processing systems.

The workshop may be of interest to the community attending EACL'99 in
search of new formal processing architectures.

Programme committee:

Erzsebet Csuhaj-Varju (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest)
Jurgen Dassow (University of Magdeburg, Germany)
Rudolf Freund (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
Lila Kari (University of Western Ontario, London, Canada)
Jozef Kelemen (Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic; University of
 Economics, Bratislava, Slovakia)
Alica Kelemenova (Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic)
Carlos Martin-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain)
Alexandru Mateescu (University of Turku, Finland)
Victor Mitrana (University of Bucharest, Romania)
Gheorghe Paun (Romanian Academy, Bucharest)
Grzegorz Rozenberg (University of Leiden, The Netherlands)
Arto Salomaa (University of Turku, Finland)
Detlef Wotschke (University of Frankfurt, Germany)

Organizers:

Erzsebet Csuhaj-Varju (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest)
Jurgen Dassow (University of Magdeburg, Germany)
Jozef Kelemen (Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic; University of
 Economics, Bratislava, Slovakia)
Carlos Martin-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain)
Gheorghe Paun (Romanian Academy, Bucharest)

Contact person:

Carlos Martin-Vide
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics and Language Engineering (GRLMC)
Rovira i Virgili University
Pl. Imperial Tarraco, 1
43005 Tarragona
Spain
Phone: +34-977-55-9543
Fax: +34-977-55-9597
E-mail: cmv at astor.urv.es, cmv at tinet.fut.es
Web site: http://www.urv.es/centres/Grups/grlmc/grlmc.html

Submissions:

Full submissions should preferably be sent through e-mail to the contact
person as postscript files. Technical instructions for camera-ready
formatting will be provided to the authors of the papers selected.
Proceedings will be available at the workshop.

Schedule:

March 26, 1999: Submission deadline
April 9, 1999:  Notification of acceptance
April 23, 1999: Camera-ready copy
June 12, 1999:  Workshop