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First Call for Paper Submissions

NAACL-HLT 2010 Workshop on
Active Learning for Natural Language Processing (ALNLP)

June 5 or 6, 2010, Los Angeles, CA

http://www.active-learning.net/alnlp2010

Submission Deadline: March 1, 2010
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Labeled training data is required to achieve state-of-the-art performance for
many machine learning solutions to NLP tasks. While traditional supervised
methods rely exclusively on existing labeled data to induce a model, active
learning allows the learner to select unlabeled data for labeling in an effort to
reduce annotation costs without sacrificing performance. Thus, active learning
appears promising for NLP applications where unlabeled data is readily
available (e.g., web pages, audio recordings, minority language data), but
obtaining labels is cost-prohibitive.

Ample recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of active learning over
a diverse range of applications. Despite these findings, active learning has
not yet been widely adopted for many ongoing large-scale corpora annotation
efforts -- resulting in a dearth of real-world case studies and copious research
questions. Machine learning literature has primarily focused on active learning
in the context of classification, devoting less attention to issues specific to NLP
including annotation user studies, incorporation of semantic information, and
more complex prediction tasks (e.g. parsing, machine translation).


TOPICS

The aim of this workshop is to foster innovation and discussion that advances
our understanding in these and other practical issues for active learning in NLP.
Topics of particular interest include:

-- Alternative query types: labeling features rather than instances,
mixed-resolution queries for structured instances, etc.
-- Creative ways for obtaining data via active learning (e.g., online games,
Mechanical Turk)
-- Managing multiple, possibly non-expert annotators (e.g., "crowdsourcing"
environments)
-- Reusability: using data acquired with one active learner to train other
model classes
-- Domain adaptation and active learning
-- Multi‐task active learning
-- Criteria for stopping and monitoring active learning progress
-- Active learning in coordination with semi-supervised or unsupervised
learning approaches
-- Interactive active learning interfaces and other HCI issues
-- Parallelization of active learning and its computational challenges
-- Software engineering considerations for active learning and NLP
-- Theoretical analysis of active learning

We also welcome case-study papers describing the application of active
learning in real-world annotation projects and lessons learned thereby.
Additionally, we would consider papers with insights applicable to NLP from
other machine learning communities (e.g., computer vision, bioinformatics,
and data mining), where annotation costs are also high.


SUBMISSIONS

We invite submissions of two kinds: 1. original and unpublished work as
full papers, limited to 8 pages (+1 extra page for references); 2. position or
work-in-progress papers, limited to 4 pages (including references). Both kinds
of papers will appear in the proceedings and presented orally. As reviewing
will be double-blind, author information should not be included in the papers
and self-reference should be avoided.

All submissions must be made in PDF format using the START paper
submission website:
https://www.softconf.com/naaclhlt2010/alnlp/
Submissions must follow the NAACL HLT 2010 formatting requirements:
http://naaclhlt2010.isi.edu/authors.html
Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style
files available there. Papers not conforming to these requirements are
subject to rejection without review.


IMPORTANT DATES

March 1, 2010: Paper Submission Deadline
March 30, 2010: Notification of acceptance
June 5 or 6, 2010: Workshop held in conjunction with NAACL-HLT


ORGANIZERS AND CONTACT

- Burr Settles, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Kevin Small, Tufts University, USA
- Katrin Tomanek, University of Jena, Germany

Please address any queries regarding the workshop to:
alnlp2010@gmail.com


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

- Markus Becker (SPSS, UK)
- Claire Cardie (Cornell University, USA)
- Hal Daume III (University of Utah, USA)
- Ben Hachey (University of Edinburgh, UK)
- Robbie Haertel (Brigham Young University, USA)
- Udo Hahn (University of Jena, Germany)
- Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research, USA)
- Rebecca Hwa (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
- Ashish Kapoor (Microsoft Research, USA)
- Prem Melville (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)
- Ray Mooney (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
- Fredrik Olsson (SICS, Sweden)
- Foster Provost (New York University, USA)
- Eric Ringger (Brigham Young University, USA)
- Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
- Burr Settles (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
- Kevin Small (Tufts University, USA)
- Katrin Tomanek (University of Jena, Germany)