EFFICIENCY IN LARGE-SCALE PARSING SYSTEMS
a workshop to be held at
Coling 2000, the 18th International Conference
on Computational Linguistics
Luxembourg, 5 August 2000
This workshop will focus on methods, grammars, and data to facilitate
empirical assessment and comparison of the efficiency of large-scale
parsing systems.
Organisers
John Carroll, University of Sussex
Robert C. Moore, Microsoft Research
Stephan Oepen, Saarland University
Programme
9:00 Registration
9:30 Efficient Large-Scale Parsing - a Survey
John Carroll
9:45 Invited Talk: Why not Cubic?
Ronald M. Kaplan
10:45 Discussion
11.00 Coffee Break
11:30 Large Scale Parsing of Czech
Pavel Smrz, Ales Horak
12:05 Precompilation of HPSG in ALE into a CFG for Fast Parsing
John C. Brown, Suresh Manandhar
12:40 Demo: Cross-Platform, Cross-Grammar Comparison - Can it be Done?
Ulrich Callmeier, Stephan Oepen
13:00 Lunch
14:30 Demo: Tools used in creating Microsoft's Large-Scale Parsers
Hisami Suzuki, Jessie Pinkham
14:50 Measuring Efficiency in High-accuracy, Broad-coverage Statistical Parsing
Brian Roark, Eugene Charniak
15:25 Time as a Measure of Parsing Efficiency
Robert C. Moore
16:00 Coffee Break
16:30 Some Experiments on Indicators of Parsing Complexity for Lexicalized Grammars
Anoop Sarkar, Fei Xia, Aravind Joshi
17:05 Discussion
18:00 Close
Workshop Scope and Aims
Interest in large-scale, grammar-based parsing has recently seen a
large increase, in response to the complexities of language-based
application tasks such as speech-to-speech translation, and enabled by
the availability of more powerful computational resources and by
efforts in large-scale and collaborative grammar engineering.
There are two main paradigms in the evaluation and comparison of the
performance of parsing algorithms and implemented systems: (i) the
formal, complexity-theoretic analysis of how an algorithm behaves,
typically focussing on worst-case time and space complexity bounds;
and (ii) the empirical study of how properties of the parser and input
(possibly including the grammar used) affect actual, observed run-time
efficiency.
It has often been noted that the theoretical study of algorithms alone
does not (yet) suffice to provide an accurate prediction about how a
specific algorithm will perform in practice, when used in conjunction
with a specific grammar (or type of grammar), and when applied to a
particular domain and task. Therefore, empirical assessment of
practical parser performance has become an established technique and
continues to be the primary means of comparison among algorithms. At
the same time, system competence (i.e. coverage and overgeneration
with respect to a particular grammar and test set) cannot be decoupled
from the evaluation of parser performance, because two algorithms can
only be compared meaningfully when they really solve the same problem,
i.e. either directly use the same grammar, or at least achieve
demonstrably similar competence on the same test set.
The focus of the workshop is on large-scale parsing systems and
precise, comparable empirical assessment. We envisage discussion at
the workshop will centre on methods, reference grammars, and test data
that will facilitate improved comparability. The workshop is intended
to bring together representatives from sites working on grammar-based
parsing (both in academic and corporate environments) to help the
field focus and converge on a common, pre-standard practice in
empirical assessment of parsing systems.
Workshop Fees
DM 100 (regular participants), DM 50 (students); registration includes
one copy of the workshop proceedings and refreshments. Please register
on-line at `https://www.coling.org/registration3.php3' (secure form).
Programme Committee
John Carroll, University of Sussex, UK
Gregor Erbach, Telecommunications Research Centre Vienna, Austria
Bernd Kiefer, DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany
Rob Malouf, Rijkuniversitet Groningen, The Netherlands
Robert Moore, Microsoft Research, USA
Gertjan van Noord, Rijkuniversitet Groningen, The Netherlands
Stephan Oepen, Saarland University, Germany
Gerald Penn, Bell Labs Research, USA
Hadar Shemtov, Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre, USA
Kentaro Torisawa, Tokyo University, Japan
Conference Information
General information about Coling 2000 is at `http://www.coling.org/'.
See `http://www.coling.org/workshops.html' for information about this
and other Coling workshops.
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