Corpora: CALL FOR PAPERS

Ted Briscoe (Ted.Briscoe@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Tue, 17 Feb 1998 09:39:40 +0000

Apologies if you receive this more than once...

EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

COLING-ACL '98

WORKSHOP

16th August 1998
University of Montreal
Montreal
Quebec
Canada

CALL FOR PAPERS

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the application of
evolutionary theory to the understanding of language development,
typology, acquisition and change, and to the development of NLP
systems. Two significant developments potentially distinguish this new
work from that undertaken 100 years or so ago (and ultimately banned
by the French Philological Society). Firstly, a rich body of
mathematical work in population genetics, (non-linear) dynamic
systems, game-theoretic models of evolution, and so forth has since
been developed by theoretical biologists, complexity theorists and
others. Secondly, the study of evolutionary processes has been further
enhanced by the use of computational modelling techniques (in the
simulation of adaptive behaviour, artificial life, etc.) which have
enabled researchers to gain insight into processes too complex for
full mathematical analysis. Evolutionary computation (in the form of
genetic algorithms, genetic programming, hybrids of GAs and neural
networks, etc.) has also been studied and deployed for practical
engineering purposes, including tasks such as grammar induction,
disambiguation, and so forth.

The evolutionary approach is of direct relevance to NLP, and
computational linguists are in a strong position to make a significant
contribution to the development of this research. Synchronic
generative linguistics models a language as a static well-formed
(grammatical) set of strings (sentences) focussing on the (ideal)
individual speaker and her idiolect at a single moment in time. Much
of current NLP technology is based on implementation of generative
models of idiolects and is consequently brittle when it comes into
contact with the reality of language variation and language change
across idiolects and across time. The crucial shift in perspective
provided by the evolutionary approach is to study *changing
populations* of (ideal, generative) speakers. Once this step has been
taken, language is naturally modelled as a dynamic system emergent from
individual idiolects: variation between idiolects interacts with the
process of language learning, leading to `imperfect' or selective
transmission (inheritance) between generations of speakers. This
changes the distribution and composition of idiolects in the
population and thus causes some forms of language change. Once it is
recognised that `bias' in language learning, production and
interpretation creates selection pressure for more learnable,
producible and interpretable variants, then it becomes natural to
treat language as a (complex) adaptive system responding dynamically
to such (often conflicting) pressures.

We are soliciting papers on any aspect of evolutionary computation and
language for this one-day workshop. We hope that the workshop will
stimulate further interest amongst computational linguists and will
provide a forum for cross-fertilisation of ideas between those
applying evolutionary computation to practical NLP tasks and those
using similar techniques to address issues in language acquisition,
change and variation.

PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS AND ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Bob Berwick (MIT, USA) berwick@ai.mit.edu.
Ted Briscoe (Cambridge Univ, UK) ejb@cl.cam.ac.uk.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Steve Abney ATT Research
Jim Hurford Edinburgh University
Bill Keller Sussex University
Partha Niyogi Bell Labs
Luc Steels Sony, Paris

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION

Submissions should be full length papers between 3500--5000 words
on A4/US letter in 11/12pt Times Roman or similar font. Preferably, email
self-contained latex source to the co-chairs using
http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/colaclsub.sty, or send 5
hardcopies to the address below.

Ted Briscoe
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
Pembroke St.
Cambridge
CB2 3QG, UK

SCHEDULE

Submission Deadline: April 20, 1998
Notification Date: June 1, 1998
Camera ready copy due: June 22, 1998

REGISTRATION

Registration is open only to those registered for the main COLING-ACL
'98 conference (see http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/MainPage.html).
There will be an additional fee for the workshop (yet to be determined).