ACL 2010 Workshop on Applications of Tree Automata in Natural Language Processing

July 16, 2010
Uppsala, Sweden

http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/atanlp/

1. Workshop Description

The theory of tree automata has an increasing number of applications in natural language processing; examples for this can be found in work on topics as diverse as grammar formalisms, computational semantics, language generation, and machine translation. Here, the term tree automaton is to be understood in a generic sense, including all types of formal devices that specify, generate or transform tree languages or, more generally, tree series.

The goals of this workshop are to provide a dedicated venue for the presentation of work that relates the theory of tree automata to natural language processing, and to create a forum where researchers from the two areas can meet and exchange ideas. Specifically, the workshop aims at raising the awareness for theoretical results useful for applications in natural language processing, and at identifying open theoretical problems raised by such applications.

2. Topics of Interest

Topics of interest for the workshop are all topics related to or motivated by the application of tree automata in natural language processing. These include but are not limited to the following:

* representations of languages by tree automata and tree grammars;
* tree transducers, synchronous grammars, and related devices and their application to, e.g., machine translation;
* tree logics and their application to, e.g., natural language syntax and semantics;
* weighted extensions of the aforementioned;
* algorithms related to the implementation of tree automata, such as algorithms for matching, accepting, and parsing;
* learning and training algorithms for tree automata;
* tree automata-based query languages for, e.g., treebanks and parallel syntactic corpora;
* relations between tree languages and string languages with motivation in NLP;
* case studies concerning the application of tree automata techniques in natural language processing.

3. Invited Speaker

Kevin Knight (ISI/University of Southern California, USA)

4. Submission Information

The workshop invites submission of two kinds of contributions: full papers and proposals for so-called quickfire presentations.

4.1 Full Papers

Full papers should report original and unpublished research on topics of interest for the workshop. Accepted papers are expected to be presented at the workshop, and will be published in the workshop proceedings. They should emphasize obtained results rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. A paper accepted for presentation at the workshop must not be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings. If essentially identical papers are submitted to other conferences or workshops as well, this fact must be indicated at submission.

Reviewing will be double-blind, and all papers will receive at least three independent reviews. Submissions will be assessed with respect to appropriateness, clarity, soundness/correctness, meaningful comparison, originality/innovativeness, and impact of ideas or results.

The maximum length of a submitted paper is eight (8) pages of content, excluding references. If necessary, authors may add an appendix containing proofs and the like, but the paper should be accessible without reading the appendix. The final manuscript is limited to eight (8) pages of content and nine (9) pages in total.

As reviewing will be double-blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, anonymous citations and acknowledgements should be avoided.

4.2 Proposals for Quickfire Presentations

Individual researchers and research groups working on topics of interest for the workshop are invited to present their work to the workshop audience in the form of a so-called quickfire presentation of about 10 min each. The idea behind these presentations is to provide a means for triggering discussions and an exchange of ideas. Based on the interests of a research group or an individual researcher, the typical quickfire presentation will point out potential relations between the theory of tree automata and natural language processing, thus indicating ideas and opportunities for future collaboration rather than presenting specific results obtained. In particular, we welcome quickfire presentations by researchers in natural language processing who wish to enter into a scientific discussion with researchers in tree automata theory, or vice versa.

Quickfire presentations will be selected based on informal proposals that briefly describe the planned content of the presentation and indicate why it is supposed to be of interest for the other attendees of the workshop. The maximum length of a submitted proposal is one (1) page. Proposals for quickfire presentations related to submitted full papers should carefully point out the difference between the two.

4.3 General Information

All submissions must be electronic in PDF and must be formatted using the ACL 2010 style files, which are available at the following address:

http://www.acl2010.org/authors.html

Contributions should be submitted via the submission site:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2010/ATANLP/

The page limits have to be be strictly observed; submissions exceeding them will not be considered. Final decisions on the program will be made by the Programme Committee.

The submission deadline is 23:59 CET on 5 April 2010.

5. Important Dates

Submission deadline: April 5, 2010
Notification of acceptance: May 6, 2010
Camera-ready versions due: May 16, 2010
Workshop: July 16, 2010, following ACL 2010

6. Workshop Chairs

Frank Drewes,
Department of Computer Science, Umeå University, Sweden

Marco Kuhlmann,
Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Sweden

The workshop chairs can be contacted at the joint email address atanlp2010 AT fastmail DOT net.

7. Programme Committee

Parosh Aziz Abdulla (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Leonor Becerra-Bonache (Yale University, USA)
Chris Callison-Burch (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
David Chiang (ISI/University of Southern California, USA)
Loek Cleophas (University of Pretoria, South Africa)
Trevor Cohn (University of Edinburgh, UK)
François Denis (Université de Provence, France)
Thomas Hanneforth (Universität Potsdam, Germany)
Johanna Högberg (Umeå University, Sweden)
Liang Huang (ISI/University of Southern California, USA)
Stephan Kepser (codecentric GmbH, Germany)
Alexander Koller (Saarland University, Germany)
Andreas Maletti (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain)
Sebastian Maneth (NICTA, Australia)
Jonathan May (ISI/University of Southern California, USA)
Brink van der Merve (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa)
Mark-Jan Nederhof (University of St Andrews, UK)
Joachim Niehren (INRIA, France)
Kai Salomaa (Queen's University, Canada)
Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
Giorgio Satta (University of Padua, Italy)
Stuart Shieber (Harvard University, USA)
Magnus Steinby (University of Turku, Finland)
Marc Tommasi (INRIA, France)

Heiko Vogler (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)