Corpora: ESSLLI98 Workshop 2nd CFP

Bill Keller (billk@cogs.susx.ac.uk)
Thu, 22 Jan 1998 15:54:36 +0000 (GMT)

<*** Apologies if you receive this more than once ***>

ESSLLI-98 Workshop on
AUTOMATED ACQUISITION OF SYNTAX AND PARSING.
August 24 - 28, 1998

A workshop held as part of the
10th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
(ESSLLI-98)
August 17 - 28, 1998, Saarbrueken, Germany

** SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS **

ORGANISER: Bill Keller (COGS, University of Sussex)

Web page: http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/keller/esslli98/

BACKGROUND:
Robust, accurate parsing of unrestricted natural language text remains an
elusive goal of computational linguistics despite several decades of
intense research effort. Conventional parsers utilising hand-crafted
generative grammars and knowledge bases require considerable linguistic
expertise and knowledge engineering effort to produce, and suffer from
problems of under-generation, brittle behaviour and domain dependence.
This has lead to a growth of interest in techniques for automatically
acquiring syntactic knowledge and robust parsing heuristics directly from
language data.

This workshop aims to bring together PhD students and other researchers
investigating both practical and theoretical issues in the acquisition of
syntactic competence (grammars) and performance (parsers) from language
data. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

o statistical and symbolic approaches to grammatical inference and
automata induction;
o machine learning of grammars, parsing strategies and heuristics;
o theoretical or empirical studies of approaches to the acquisition
of syntactic knowledge or processing models.
o empirical methods in grammar development and parsing (e.g. the
acquisition of grammars or subcategorization frames from treebanks).

WORKSHOP AIMS:
This workshop aims to:

o provide a setting for PhD students and other young researchers to
present and discuss their work in a focussed and constructive
environment;
o facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers working in
different, but related areas of language acquisition or employing
different techniques;
o foster a spirit of collaborative research.

CALL FOR PAPERS:
All researchers in the area, but especially PhD students and young
researchers are invited to submit short papers (between 4 and 8 pages long)
describing their thesis/research topic, approach and results. Talks will
be 20 minutes long, with 10 minutes for discussion/questions. Authors are
also encouraged to submit a list of topics they would like to see discussed
at the workshop. This will help to identify issues for discussion and
debate.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: February 15, 1998

Paper submissions should be sent to:

Dr Bill Keller

School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
The University of Sussex,
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH
East Sussex,
UK.

Electronic submission is also welcomed. In this case submissions should
be in the form of either PostScript or self-contained LaTex and sent to:

billk@cogs.susx.ac.uk

Authors of accepted papers will be notified by April 15th 1998. The
deadline for receipt of revised papers to appear in the workshop
proceedings is May 15th 1998.

WORKSHOP FORMAT:
The workshop will consist of five sessions of 90 minutes each held over
five days. There will be either two or three presentations at each session
with time for questions and discussion. It is hoped to have at least one
invited paper from a senior researcher working in the field of natural
language learning.

REGISTRATION:
Workshop contributors will be required to register for ESSLLI-98, but they
will be eligible for a reduced registration fee.

IMPORTANT DATES:
Feb 15, 98: Deadline for submissions
Apr 15, 98: Notification of acceptance
May 15, 98: Deadline for final copy
Aug 24, 98: Start of workshop

FURTHER INFORMATION:
To obtain further information about ESSLLI-98 please visit the ESSLLI-98
home page at http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/esslli