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helsinki.fi>CALL FOR PAPERS The Linguistic Association of Finland is organizing a symposium on APPROACHES TO HISTORICAL SYNTAX to be held at the University of Joensuu Mekrijervi Research Station, September 19-22, 2002. The symposium will bring together scholars interested in problems relating to historical syntax. We invite papers and posters dealing with particular language(s) as well as papers taking a crosslinguistic perspective. Suggested themes include changes in argument structure, grammaticalization in historical syntax, and the role of corpora and quantitative analysis in the study of historical syntax. Other topics relating to historical syntax are also welcome. Invited speakers: * Alice C. Harris (Vanderbilt University) * Anthony Warner (University of York) Activities: * lectures by invited speakers * presentations by other participants (20 min + 10 min for discussion) * poster session Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 500 words) is May 30, 2002. Please indicate on the abstract whether your presentation is intended as a paper or a poster. Please submit your abstract by e-mail to the following address mekri-organizersMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
ul.ie>Call for Papers Grammar Engineering and Evaluation Sunday 1 September 2002 Workshop to be held in conjunction with Coling 2002, Taipei 24 August - 1 September 2002 www.coling2002.sinica.edu.tw/ www.csis.ul.ie/gee02 Overview Grammars are central components of many types of NLP system. The workshop will be concerned with methods for the effective engineering and evaluation of grammars with particular emphasis on their use in real-world applications. Background Recent years have seen the development of techniques and resources to support robust, deep grammatical analysis of language in real-world domains, for instance in flexible human-computer dialog systems (e.g. the Dutch OVIS prototype train information system) and speech-to-speech translation (e.g. the Verbmobil system). The demands of these types of tasks have driven significant advances in areas such as parser efficiency, hybrid statistical / symbolic approaches to disambiguation, and the acquisition of large-scale lexicons. In response to these successes deep language processing is starting to be deployed in commercial applications such as automated email response. The effective development, maintenance and enhancement of grammars is a central issue in such efforts, and the size and complexity of realistic grammars forces these processes to be tackled in ways that have much in common with software engineering. Thus, two common metrics defined over grammars are coverage and degree of overgeneration; these can be evaluated by applying the grammar to manually-constructed test suites of grammatical and ungrammatical inputs, ideally supported by automated profiling and visualisation tools. Examples of test suites include those that have been produced on the TSNLP, DiET and Verbmobil projects, while the Saarbruecken [incr tsdb()] system is one of the established profiling tools. Since grammars are expensive to develop, another important concern is the effective re-use of existing grammatical resources: some grammar formalisms facilitate this by for example allowing grammar writers to structure the grammar hierarchically or in terms of individual classes with modularised behaviour. A further issue is how to support a team of grammarians working on the same or related grammars; a notable effort in this area is the Xerox-led collaborative ParGram project developing parallel grammars for several different languages. Objectives The objectives of the workshop will be to summarise what has been achieved in the areas of grammar engineering and evaluation, to establish the common themes between different approaches and to discuss future trends, with particular emphasis on real-world applications. The focus will be on grammars rather than parsing algorithms or the accuracy of parsing systems, on approaches which enable re-use of resources, and on methods which are suitable for multilingual systems. In particular, contributions are solicited in the following areas: * Methods of grammar development and discussions of their strengths and weaknesses; * Standards for encoding grammatical information in a theory-neutral fashion; * Comparisons of manual techniques with those involving learning from treebanks; * Techniques for establishing the effectiveness, coverage or quality of a grammar; * The determination of time or effort required to achieve a level of performance or to adapt an existing grammar to a new application domain; * The application of a grammatical formalism to widely different languages; and * Issues in porting grammars between languages. Submissions Abstracts for workshop contributions should not exceed two A4 pages (excluding references). An additional title page should state: the title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, as well as postal address, telephone and fax numbers. Submission is to be sent by email, preferably in Postscript or PDF format, to Richard Sutcliffe by Friday 26 April 2002. Abstracts will be reviewed by at least 3 members of the program committee. Formatting instructions for the final full version of papers will be sent to authors after notification of acceptance. Accepted papers will appear in the printed proceedings which will be available to all those who register for the workshop. The proceedings of all workshops will also be included in the Coling CD ROM along with the tutorials and the proceedings of the main conference. Important Dates Deadline for Submissions: Fri 26 April 2002 Notification of Acceptance: Fri 24 May 2002 Final Versions of Papers Due: Fri 28 June 2002 Workshop: Sun 1 September 2002 Workshop Chairs John A. Carroll Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH UK johncaMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue