Appel: NAACL-HLT 2010 Workshop SPMRL 2010

Tue Feb 9 21:37:04 UTC 2010

Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 02:49:55 +0100
From: Djamé Seddah <djame.seddah at inria.fr>
Message-Id: <96447B1D-16D4-4A21-B3B6-0FC46FB08C1A at inria.fr>
X-url: http://sites.google.com/site/spmrl2010/

** Apologies for multiple postings **

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    	SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS
NAACL-HLT 2010  First Workshop on Statistical Parsing
     of Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL 2010)
June 5 or 6, 2010, Los Angeles, CA

Submission Deadline: March 01, 2010
http://sites.google.com/site/spmrl2010/

Sponsored by SIGPARSE
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OUTLINE
The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested
in parsing languages with richer morphological structures than in
English, and to provide a forum for discussing the challenges
associated with parsing such languages and sharing strategies towards
their solutions. We are interested in presentations relating to
actively studied areas of research including the adaptation of
existing parsing techniques to new languages, the design of new models
that take morphological information into account, the implementation
of models that allow robust statistics to be obtained in the face of
high word-form variation, and so on.

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: March 1, 2010
Notification to authors: March 30, 2010
Camera ready copy: April 12, 2010
Workshop: June 5 or 6, 2010

PRESENTATION

The availability of large syntactically annotated corpora led to an
explosion of interest in statistical parsing methods, and to the
development of successful models for parsing English using the Wall
Street Journal Penn Treebank (PTB, Marcus et al, 1993). In recent
years, parsing performance on the PTB has reached a performance
ceiling of 90-92% f-score using the Parseval evaluation metrics
(Black et al, 1991). When adapted to other language/treebank pairs
(such as German, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian or French), these models have
been shown to be considerably less successful.

Among the arguments that have been proposed to explain this
performance gap are the impact of small training data size,
differences in treebank annotation schemes, inadequacy of evaluation
metrics, as well as linguistic factors such as the degree of word
order freedom and the use of morphological information in the
parser. None of these arguments in isolation can account for the
systematic performance deterioration, but observed from a wider,
cross-linguistic perspective, a picture begins to emerge -- the
morphologically rich nature of some of the languages makes them
inherently more susceptible to such performance degradation.

Morphologically rich languages (MRLs) are particularly challenging for
the application of algorithms primarily designed to parse English.
These algorithms focus on learning word order but they often do not
take morphological information into account. Another typical problem
associated with parsing MRLs is increased lexical data sparseness due
to high morphological variation in surface forms. In a more general
setup, this problem is akin to handling out-of-vocabulary or rare
words for robust statistical parsing and techniques for domain
adaptation via lexicon enhancement (also explored for English and less
morphologically rich languages).

As well as technical and linguistic difficulties, lack of
communication between researchers working on different MRLs can lead
to a reinventing the wheel syndrome; the prominence of English parsing
in the literature reduces the visibility of research aiming to solve
the problems particular to MRLs. By offering a platform to this
growing community of interests we hope to overcome this potential
cultural obstacle.

We solicit papers describing parsing experiments with models and
architectures for languages with morphological structure richer than
English, or studies that address the lexical sparseness challenges
(for any language). The workshop's areas of interest include, but are
not limited to, the following list of topics:

* 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' strength 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

SUBMISSION
Authors are invited to submit long papers (up to 8 pages + 1 extra
page for references) and short papers (up to 4 pages + 1 extra page
for references).  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 will be accepted until  March 1, 2010  in PDF format
via the START system. Please watch the workshop page for additional
last-minute details:
http://sites.google.com/site/spmrl2010/

Submitted papers must follow the styles and the formating guidelines
used for the NAACL conference, see the details at:
http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/authors.html

As the reviewing will be blind, 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 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.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Djamé Seddah, Jennifer Foster, Sandra Kübler, Reut Tsarfaty,
Lamia Toumsi, Yannick Versley, Marie Candito, Ines Rehbein,
Yoav Goldberg

REVIEW COMMITEE
Mohamed Attia (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Adriane Boyd (Ohio State University, USA)
Aoife Cahill (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Marie Candito (University of Paris 7,  France)
Grzegorz Chrupala  (Saarland University, Germany)
Benoit Crabbé (University of Paris 7,  France)
Michael Elhadad (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
Jennifer Foster (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Josef van Genabith (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Yoav Goldberg (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois, USA)
Deirdre Hogan (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Sandra Kübler  (Indiana University, USA)
Alberto Lavelli (FBK-irst, Italy)
Joseph Le Roux (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Wolfgang Maier (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Takuya Matsuzaki (University of Toyko, Japan)
Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Yusuke Miyao (University of Toyko, Japan)
Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Ines Rehbein  (Saarland University, Germany)
Kenji Sagae (University of Southern California, USA)
Djamé Seddah (University of Paris Sorbonne, France)
Khalil Sima'an (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Nicolas Stroppa (Yahoo! Research Paris, USA)
Lamia Toumsi (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Reut Tsarfaty (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Yannick Versley (University of Tübingen, Germany)

ORGANIZERS AND CONTACTS
Sandra Kübler, Indiana University
Djamé Seddah, Université Paris-Sorbonne
(Contact: djame.seddah at paris-sorbonne.fr)
Reut Tsarfaty, University of Amsterdam
to contact the organizers : spmrl2010org at googlemail.com

INVITED SPEAKER
Kevin Knight, University of Southern California, United States

SPONSORS
This worksop is sponsored by SIGPARSE  and  by the INRIA's Alpage  
project.

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