LINGUIST List 13.815

Mon Mar 25 2002

Calls: Grammar Engineering, General Ling

Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis <reneelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Richard.Sutcliffe, Coling Grammar Engineering & Evaluation Workshop
2. Don Hardy, Call for Style General Issue

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

johncacogs.susx.ac.uk
www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/carroll/

Nelleke H. J. Oostdijk
Department of Language and Speech
University of Nijmegen
P.O. Box 9103
6500 HD Nijmegen
The Netherlands

n.oostdijklet.kun.nl
lands.let.kun.nl/TSpublic/tosca/

Richard F. E. Sutcliffe (Contact Person)
Department of Computer Science
and Information Systems
University of Limerick
Limerick, Ireland

Richard.Sutcliffeul.ie
www.csis.ul.ie/staff/richard.sutcliffe


Programme Committee

Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam
Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge
John Carroll, University of Sussex
Anette Frank, DFKI Saarbruecken
Gregory Grefenstette, Clairvoyance, Pittsburgh
Claire Grover, University of Edinburgh
Sadao Kurohashi, The University of Tokyo 
Stephan Oepen, CSLI Stanford
Nelleke Oostdijk, University of Nijmegen
Richard Sutcliffe, University of Limerick
Atro Voutilainen, Conexor oy

The editors of the journal Style would like to announce a call for
papers for a general issue: Volume 37, Number 3.

For this general issue, Style invites submissions that address
questions of style, stylistics, and poetics, including research and
theory in discourse analysis, literary and nonliterary genres,
narrative, figuration, metrics, rhetorical analysis, and the pedagogy
of style. Contributions may draw from such fields as literary
criticism, critical theory, computational linguistics, cognitive
linguistics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric and writing studies.

Major articles should be 5,000 to 9,000 words. The deadline for
submissions is 15 January 2003. Please submit electronic copy (Word or
WordPerfect: MLA style) accompanied by a 150-word abstract to
styleniu.edu. Correspondence concerning articles should be addressed
to Donald E. Hardy (dhardyniu.edu) at Department of English, Northern
Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, 60115-2863.

Style regularly publishes reviews and review-essays on works
concerning style, stylistics, and poetics. Correspondence for the
review editor should be addressed to David Gorman (dgormanniu.edu) at
Department of English, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL,
60115-2863.

Style is a refereed journal publishing studies in stylistics, literary
theory, and literary criticism.