TeachCL-08

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The Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics: TeachCL-08 Held in conjunction with ACL 2008: HLT

Columbus, Ohio June 19th and 20th, 2008

http://verbs.colorado.edu/teachCL-08/

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Many of us in this field face the daily challenge of trying to teach Computer Scientists, Linguists and/or Psychologists together. Following the success of the two previous ACL workshops (2002 and 2005, http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~radev/TeachingNLP/) on this theme, we are holding a 2-day workshop associated with ACL-HLT 2008 to carefully examine various approaches to this task, and to explore techniques specifically aimed at teaching computer science to linguists and linguistics to computer scientists. (Details about paper submission are given at the end of this announcement.) As Computational Linguistics (hopefully) becomes of more and more relevance to industrial applications, we must ensure that our students (both undergraduate and graduate) are given adequate preparation for functioning in a practical industrial environment as well as an academic research environment. We will exchange views on appropriate curriculum for both undergraduate students and graduate students, and linguists (including psycholinguists) and computer scientists. There are many questions to be addressed about the necessary background for linguists and computer scientists before they can communicate effectively with each other and learn at the same pace.

How much math is necessary?

Is it possible to teach linguists Natural Language Processing techniques independently of teaching programming?

Can undergraduates hold their own in graduate courses?

Can linguists and computer scientists make separate but equal contributions to term projects?

How can linguistics students get ACL publications?

What special methodologies are needed to evaluate NLP systems in Robot-Human Agent environments?

This is intended to be a "working" workshop that will include lengthy discussion sessions inspired by three panels:

1) Chris Brew will organize a panel of industrialists to address the issue of industry expectations for Computational Linguists;

2) Emily Bender and Fei Xia will organize a panel around the theme of essential curriculum for computational linguistics;

3) Gina Levow will organize a panel on techniques for teaching extremely interdisciplinary classes.

We will also have invited presentations by Lori Levin and Drago Radev showcasing the recent very successful participation of American high school students in the International Linguistics Olympiad.

In addition to these themes we would also like to invite the submission of papers addressing the following topics:

1) Teaching Computer Science to Linguists 2) Teaching Linguistics to Computer Scientists 3) Teaching Computational Linguistics to Computer Scientists and Linguists jointly. 4) Teaching graduate students and/or undergraduate students 5) Tools and technology for aiding the teaching of computational linguistics. 6) Any other topics of general relevance to teaching computational linguistics, such as: # Effective course lectures # Innovative assignments and projects # Web resources # Connecting teaching and research # Seminar-style courses # Choice of programming languages (and programming requirements in general)

We would also encourage all of the participants to come to the workshop with a prepared handout (and possibly a poster) summarizing their university's requirements for studying computational linguistics with short course descriptions of each course. This would allow us to produce a compendium of alternative program styles and ideally a consensus on essential elements comprising the answer to "What should be an ideal curriculum for a CL Major of the 21st century?"

IMPORTANT DATES:

Submission date - March 14, 2008.

Papers to reviewers - March 19, 2008.

Reviews due - April 7

Results to authors - April 14

Camera-ready papers from authors - Apr 21, 2008

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

A paper submitted to TeachCL-08 must describe original, unpublished work. Submit a full paper of no more than 8 pages in PDF format by March 14, 2008, electronically through a web form at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS09/submit.html

Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of the ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files. Papers must conform to the official ACL 2008 style guidelines.

In the submission form, you will be asked for the following information: paper title, authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses, contact author's email address, a list of keywords, abstract, and an indication of whether the paper has been simultaneously submitted to other conferences (and if so which conferences). The contact author of an accepted paper under multiple submissions should inform the program co-chairs immediately whether he or she intends the accepted paper to appear in TeachCL-08. A paper that appears in TeachCL-08 must be withdrawn from other conferences.

Authors of accepted submissions are to produce a final paper to be published in the proceedings of the workshop, which will be available at the conference for participants, and distributed afterwards by ACL. Final papers must follow the ACL 2008 style and are due April 21, 2008.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Steven Bird, Melbourne University, Australia Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia Jason Eisner, Johns Hopkins University, USA Tomaz Erjavec, Josef Stefan Institute, Slovenia Mary Harper, University of Maryland, USA Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, USA Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois - UIUC, USA Ewan Klein, University of Edinburgh, UK Lillian Lee, Cornell University, USA Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Gina Levow, University of Chicago, USA Liz Liddy, Syracuse University, USA Edward Loper, University of Pennsylvania, USA Detmar Meurers, Ohio State University, USA, Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA James Pustejovksy, Brandeis University, USA Massimo Poesio, University of Essex, UK, also University of Trento, Italy, Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan, USA Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University, Canada, Harold Somers, University of Manchester, UK Matthew Stone, Rutgers University, USA, Richard Wicentowski. Swarthmore College, USA, Dekai Wu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Martha Palmer (Colorado), Chris Brew (Ohio State) and Fei Xia (Washington)

Primary contact person:

Martha Palmer Department of Linguistics 295 UCB Hellems 295 University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309

303-492-1300, fax # 303-492-441 Martha.Palmer@colorado.edu This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP