Call for Papers

Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology
(sfcm 2009)

http://sfcm2009.org

Workshop date: September 4, 2009

Location: University of Zurich, Switzerland

Submission deadline: March 1, 2009



From the point of view of computational linguistics, morphological resources
are the basis for all higher-level applications. This is especially true for
languages with a rich morphology like German. A morphology component should
thus be capable of analyzing single wordforms as well as whole corpora. For
many practical applications, not only morphological analysis, but also
generation is required, i.e., the production of surfaces corresponding to
specific categories.

Apart from uses in computational linguistics, there are practical
applications that can benefit from morphological analysis and/or generation
or even require it, for example in text processing, user interfaces, or
information retrieval. These applications have specific requirements for
morphological components, including requirements from software engineering,
such as programming interfaces or robustness.

In 1994, the first Morpholympics, a competition between several systems for
the analysis and generation of German wordforms, took place at CLUE
(Department of Computational Linguistics at the
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg).

15 years later, some of the systems that participated in the Morpholympics
still exist and are being maintained. However, there are also new
developments in the field of computational morphology, for German and for
other languages. Unfortunately, the publications about morphologic analysis
and generation are spread over many different conferences and journals, so
that it is difficult to get an overview of the current state of the art and
of the available systems. This workshop tries to bring together researchers,
developers, and maintainers of morphology systems for German and of
frameworks for computational morphology from academia and industry.

This workshop concentrates on actual, working systems and frameworks of at
least prototype quality. To ensure fruitful discussions among workshop
participants, submissions on concrete morphology systems are preferrably for
German; submissions on morphological frameworks are relevant if the
framework can be used to implement components for different languages.

In contrast to, for example, Morphochallenge, this workshop focuses on
systems and frameworks based on linguistic principles and providing
linguistically motivated analyses and/or generation on the basis of
linguistic categories.

The workshop has three main goals:
* To stimulate discussion among researchers and developers and to
offer an up-to-date overview of available systems for German
morphology which provide deep analyses and are suitable for
generating specific wordforms.
* To stimulate discussion among developers of general frameworks
that can be used to implement morphological components for
several languages.
* To discuss aspects of evaluation of morphology systems and
possible future competitions or tasks, such as a new edition of
the Morpholympics.


Topics
----------
The topics of this workshop include both technical aspects, applications,
and uses of systems and frameworks for computational morphology. While
purely theoretical submissions may be relevant, the focus of the workshop is
clearly on actual, working systems and prototypes.

The workshop will mainly focus on German, but contributions for other
languages are encouraged in order to demonstrate open-source tools and
runtime software for full-scale morphologies. Topics include, but are not
limited to:
* Frameworks for developing morphological components.
* Open-source tools and resources for morphology.
* Descriptions of systems for analyzing and generating wordforms,
especially for German.
* Suitability of morphological components for interactive use.
* Use cases for morphological analysis and generation in applications.
* Reports on actual uses of morphological analysis and generation
in applications.
* Methods and criteria for evaluating morphologic components with
respect to performance, quality, and coverage.
* Software engineering aspects: APIs, robustness, performance,
hardware/software requirements, resource usage.
* License models and legal aspects.

There will be opportunities for demonstrating systems.


Submissions
-----------------
We invite researchers to submit full papers of up to 20 pages (including
references) or short papers of up to 10 pages. Long papers constitute an
excellent opportunity to publish citable, in-depth descriptions of systems
and frameworks. Submissions must be in English. Reviewing of papers will be
double-blind by the members of the program committee, and all submissions
will receive several independent reviews. Papers submitted at review stage
must not contain the authors' names, affiliations, or any information that
may disclose the authors' identity.

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their research at the
workshop. Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of the
workshop by Springer in their series Communications in Computer and
Information Science.

The papers must use the Springer LNCS format. We recommend to use the
LaTeX2e format. Please strictly follow the Springer LNCS format
guidelines. Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format. For paper
submissions we use EasyChair, see (http://www.sfcm2009.org/?Submissions)


Date and Location
-------------------------
Location: Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of
Zurich, Switzerland
Date: September 4, 2009


Important Dates
----------------------
Deadline for submission: March 1, 2009
Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2009
Revised version of papers: June 5, 2009
Deadline for registration: July 4, 2009
Workshop: Friday, September 4, 2009


Program Committee
----------------------------
* Simon Clematide (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
* Thomas Hanneforth (University of Potsdam, Germany)
* Roland Hausser (Friedrich-Alexander-University
Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
* Ulrich Heid (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
* Lauri Karttunen (PARC Palo Alto, USA)
* Kimmo Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki, Finland)
* Winfried Lenders (University of Bonn, Germany)
* Krister Lindén (University of Helsinki, Finland)
* Anke Lüdeling (Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
* Cerstin Mahlow (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
* Günter Neumann (DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany)
* Michael Piotrowski (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
* Helmut Schmid (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
* Markus Schulze (Munich, Germany)
* Angelika Storrer (University of Dortmund, Germany)
* Martin Volk (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
* Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa, Israel)
* Andrea Zielinski (IDS Mannheim, Germany)


Organizers
----------------
Cerstin Mahlow (University of Zurich, Switzerland), mahlow@cl.uzh.ch
Michael Piotrowski (University of Zurich, Switzerland), mxp@cl.uzh.ch


Further Information
-------------------------
http://sfcm2009.org


Workshop Contact Address
-----------------------------------
info@sfcm2009.org