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SPMRL 2010 : First Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages | |||||||||||||||
Link: http://sites.google.com/site/spmrl2010/ | |||||||||||||||
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Call For Papers | |||||||||||||||
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FIRST 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 http://sites.google.com/site/spmrl2010/ Submission Deadline: March 01, 2010 Sponsored by SIGPARSE ************************************************************ 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@paris-sorbonne.fr) Reut Tsarfaty, University of Amsterdam to contact the organizers : spmrl2010org@googlemail.com SPONSORS This worksop is sponsored by SIGPARSE and by the INRIA's Alpage project. |
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