GEAF 2008

Call for Papers Grammar Engineering across Frameworks (GEAF08) August 24 Manchester, UK       http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~thking/GEAF08/GEAF08.html

This workshop is part of The 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-08).

This workshop aims to bring together grammar engineers from different frameworks to compare research and methodologies, particularly around the themes of evaluation, modularity, maintainability, relevance to theoretical and computational linguistics, and applications of "deep" grammars to real-world domains and NLP tasks.

Recent years have seen the development of techniques and resources to support robust, deep grammatical analysis of natural language in real-world domains and applications. The demands of these types of tasks have resulted in significant advances in areas such as parser efficiency, hybrid statistical/symbolic approaches to disambiguation, and the acquisition of large-scale lexicons. The effective acquisition, development, maintenance and enhancement of grammars is a central issue in such efforts, and the size and complexity of realistic grammars makes these tasks extremely challenging; indeed, these tasks are often tackled in ways that have much in common with software engineering. This workshop aims to bring together grammar engineers from different frameworks --- for example LFG, HPSG, TAG, CCG, dependency grammar --- to compare their research and methodologies.

The workshop is a follow-up to the first GEAF workshop (http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/GEAF/2007/geaf07.html) which was held at Stanford in 2007.

Paper Topics: The workshop is soliciting submissions for papers on the following themes:

1. Evaluation: Proposals concerning evaluation methodologies and metrics which can capture the added benefits of deep linguistic analysis; evaluation techniques which can compare grammars across varieties/languages.

2. Modularity: Reflections on which aspects of linguistic structure can most easily be separated out from each other, why and how the analyses of separate linguistic phenomena are interconnected/interdependent, and the role of frameworks on   promoting or inhibiting modularity.

3. Maintainability: Techniques for improving long-term and multideveloper maintainability of grammars; impacts of   considerations of maintainability on choices of linguistic analysis.

4. Relevance to theoretical and computational linguistics: Reflections on how to present grammar engineering work to other research communities.

5. Regression testing: Evaluation for internal purposes; methodologies and techniques for test suite construction, role of test suites in   day-to-day progress on grammars.

6. Applications of "deep" grammars to real-world domains and NLP tasks, such as parsing, machine translation, question answering, dialogue, generation; with a focus on how the use of deep grammars can lead to improved performance on such tasks.

Organizing Committee: Tracy Holloway King, PARC Stephen Clark, Oxford University

Program Committee:

Jason Baldridge, Texas Emily Bender, Washington Miriam Butt, Konstanz Aoife Cahill, Stuttgart John Carroll, Sussex Ann Copestake, Cambridge Berthold Crysmann, Bonn Mary Dalrymple, Oxford Stefanie Dipper, Bochum Dan Flickinger, Stanford Josef van Genabith, Dublin Ron Kaplan, Powerset Montserrat Marimon, Barcelona Yusuke Miyao, Tokyo Owen Rambow, Columbia Jun'ichi Tsujii, Tokyo

Important Dates and Submission Details:

Paper submission deadline:           5 May Notification of acceptance of Papers: 6 June Camera-ready copy of papers due:     1 July Demo session requests due:           1 July Workshop:                            24 August

The maximum length of submissions is 8 pages. Please use the COLING-08 style files, available from: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/harold.somers/coling/style.html

Please use the START system to submit a paper: https://www.softconf.com/coling08/GEAF/submit.html

Contact for inquiries: Tracy Holloway King (thking "at" parc.com) Stephen Clark (stephen.clark "at" comlab.ox.ac.uk)

Special Demo Session: In addition to the papers, there will be a demo session. If you wish to give a demonstration of a system relevant to the GEAF theme, please submit a title of the demo and a one-page description by July 1, 2008, through the START system (URL above). You do not have to have a paper in the workshop in order to give a demo.

Proceedings: Accepted papers will form part of the workshop proceeedings.

-- Stephen Clark Lecturer in Computer Science Oxford University Computing Laboratory Fellow of Keble College Member of the Oxford Computational Linguistics Group

http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/stephen.clark/ This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP