First Joint Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages and Syntactic Analysis of Non-Canonical Language (SPMRL-SANCL 2014)

ENDORSED BY SIGPARSE

August 24, 2014 in Dublin, Ireland, co-located with COLING 2014


http://www.spmrl.org/spmrl-sancl2014.html

*** NOTE THE EXTENDED Submission Deadline: June 6, 2014 ***



The CFP below is for the SPMRL-SANCL Main Workshop. The workshop also features:

Second Shared Task on Semi-Supervised Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages
http://www.spmrl.org/spmrl2014-sharedtask.html

Special Track on the Syntactic Analysis of Non-Canonical Language
http://www.spmrl.org/sancl-posters2014.html

Follow the links for more details on the Shared Task and Special Track.


Motivation

Statistical parsing of morphologically-rich languages (MRLs) and syntactic analysis of non-canonical languages (NCL) have shown several similar properties and challenges in recent research. Therefore, this year we organize a joint workshop of these two research communities, to foster cross-pollination of ideas and technology for both.

Statistical parsing of morphologically-rich languages has repeatedly been shown to exhibit non-trivial challenges including, among others, sparse lexica in the face of rich inflectional systems, parsing deficiency in the face of free word order and treebank annotation idiosyncrasies in the face of morphosyntactic interactions.

Similar problems arise for parsing of non-canonical languages. Besides technical issues such as lexical sparseness and ad-hoc structures, we also face theoretical problems including constructions that do not occur, or very seldom occur, in standard language, such as verbless sentences or complex hashtags.

The first joint SPMRL-SANCL workshop addresses both the challenge of parsing MRLs and NCL. It provides a forum for researchers addressing the often overlapping issues of both fields with the goal of identifying cross-cutting issues in the annotation and parsing methodology for such languages.


AREAS OF INTEREST

The areas of interest of the SPMRL-SANCL workshop include, but are not limited to, the following list of topics:

* applying cutting-edge parsing techniques to new languages and domains

* identifying the strengths and weaknesses of current parsing techniques when applied to morphologically-rich and/or non-canonical language

* developing techniques that are targeted at improving parsing quality of morphologically-rich and/or non-canonical language

* developing models and architectures that explicitly integrate morphological analysis and parsing

* addressing data sparseness due to lexical variants, out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words and noise, ad-hoc syntactic rules, non-canonical word order, ungrammatical structures, or disfluencies

* using insights from parsing and associated processing problems to motivate decisions in the creation of new syntactically annotated corpora ("treebanks"), especially in domains, genres, and languages that are not yet, or hardly covered; tag set design

* discussing the role of parsing in higher-level NLP applications involving MRLs and NCLs, e.g. syntax-enhanced MT and semantic analysis.




SECOND SHARED TASK ON SEMI-SUPERVISED PARSING OF MORPHOLOGICALLY RICH LANGUAGES

The workshop will also host the second shared task on parsing morphologically rich language (see http://spmrl.org/spmrl2014-sharedtask.html). The first shared task was held in conjunction with SPMRL 2013. It helped show that carefully engineered approaches can help to push the envelope on languages such as Hungarian, Basque, Hebrew and Polish, where the shared task results for constituency parsing are the best current known for those languages. The task embodied a focus on realistic scenarios (no gold tokenization, no gold part-of-speech or morphology), as well as meaningful evaluation measures, including a cross-framework evaluation that permits comparisons between constituent and dependency parsing models.

The second installment of the Shared Task will feature a similar range of languages. Moreover, it will also consider a semi-supervised scenario where larger quantities of in-domain text are available. These unlabeled data are aimed to be used for self-training, co-training, lexical acquisition, generating word clusters, word embeddings and so on. A separate call for the Shared Task is forthcoming.


SPECIAL TRACK ON SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF NON-CANONICAL LANGUAGE

In addition to regular paper submissions, we solicit poster submissions addressing the syntactic analysis of frequent phenomena of non-canonical language, which are difficult to annotate and parse using conventional annotation schemes. Cases in point are the representation of verbless utterances in a dependency scheme, the pros and cons of different representations of disfluencies for statistical parsing, or the analysis of complex hashtags which incorporate and merge different syntactic arguments into one token. The posters should focus, in more detail, on one more of these issues. More details on the submission categories for the poster session can be found below and at: http://spmrl.org/sancl-posters2014.html .



IMPORTANT DATES

* Submission Date (Extended): June 6, 2014 (23:59 UTC - 12)

* Author Notification: July 1, 2014

* Camera-ready papers due: July 13, 2014

* Workshop: August 24, 2014



SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We solicit the following submission categories:

Long papers (up to 11 pages with unlimited references)

Short papers (up to 6 pages with unlimited references)

Abstracts (500 words excluding examples/references, for SANCL poster topics only)

Shared task paper submissions (format will be disclosed later)


Long papers are most appropriate for presenting substantial and completed research addressing a topic relevant to either SANCL or SPMRL.

Short papers are suited for presenting work in progress, position papers or short, focused contributions, relevant to either SANCL or SPMRL (including the poster session topics described above and, in more detail, here).

Both long and short papers should present original, unpublished research. They will be peer reviewed and will be presented as either an oral talk or as a poster at the workshop. Long/short papers will be included in the proceedings. Abstract submissions are most appropriate for presenting an idea for an analysis for one or more of the poster topics. In contrast to long/short paper submissions, abstract submissions do not need to back up their ideas with experimental results. Abstract submission will receive a yes/no review and will not be included in the proceedings.

Submissions will be accepted in PDF format via the START system at:
https://www.softconf.com/coling2014/WS-13
and must conform to the COLING 2014 formatting instructions:
http://www.coling-2014.org/call-for-papers.php



ORGANIZERS

-Workshop-

Yoav Goldberg (Bar Ilan University, Israel)

Yuval Marton (Microsoft Corp., US)

Ines Rehbein (Potsdam University, Germany)

Yannick Versley (Heidelberg University, Germany)

Özlem Çetinoğlu (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Joel Tetreault (Yahoo! Labs, US)



-SANCL Special Session-


Ines Rehbein (Potsdam University, Germany)

Özlem Çetinoğlu (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Djamé Seddah (Université Paris Sorbonne & INRIA's Alpage Project, France)

Joel Tetreault (Yahoo! Labs, US)



-Shared task-


Sandra Kübler (Indiana University, US)

Djamé Seddah (Université Paris Sorbonne & INRIA's Alpage Project, France)

Reut Tsarfaty (The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)



PROGRAM COMMITTEE


Bernd Bohnet (University of Birmingham, UK)

Marie Candito (University of Paris 7, France)

Aoife Cahill (Educational Testing Service, US)

Jinho D. Choi (University of Massachusetts Amherst, US)

Grzegorz Chrupala (Tilburg University, Netherlands)

Gülşen Cebiroğlu Eryiğit (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey)

Markus Dickinson (Indiana University, US)

Stefanie Dipper (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)

Jacob Eisenstein (Georgia Institute of Technology, US)

Richard Farkas (University of Szeged, Hungary)

Jennifer Foster (Dublin City University, Ireland)

Josef van Genabith (DFKI, Germany)

Koldo Gojenola (University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Spence Green (Stanford University, US)

Samar Husain (Potsdam University, Germany)

Joseph Le Roux (Université Paris-Nord, France)

John Lee (City University of Hong Kong, China)

Wolfgang Maier (University of Düsseldorf, Germany)

Takuya Matsuzaki (University of Tokyo, Japan)

David McClosky (IBM Research, US)

Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen, Germany)

Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Kemal Oflazer (Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar)

Adam Przepiorkowski (ICS PAS, Poland)

Owen Rambow (Columbia University, US)

Kenji Sagae (University of Southern California, US)

Benoit Sagot (Inria Rocquencourt, France)

Wolfgang Seeker (IMS Stuttgart, Germany)

Anders Soogard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Lamia Tounsi (Dublin City University, Ireland)

Daniel Zeman (Charles University, Czechia)



CONTACT

* For up-to-date information, please visit http://www.spmrl.org/spmrl-sancl2014.html

* For general questions about the workshop, please email spmrl.sancl@gmail.com

* For specific questions about the shared task, please email spmrl.sharedtask@gmail.com