Call for Papers
Beyond PARSEVAL
-- Towards Improved Evaluation Measures for Parsing Systems --
http://let.dfki.uni-sb.de/BeyondPARSEVAL/
LREC 2002 Workshop
2nd June
Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain
OVERVIEW
The PARSEVAL metrics for evaluating the accuracy of parsing systems have
underpinned recent advances in stochastic parsing with grammars learned
from treebanks (most prominently the Penn Treebank of English). However,
a new generation of parsing systems is emerging based on different
underlying frameworks and covering other languages. PARSEVAL is not
appropriate for many of these approaches: the NLP community therefore
needs to come together and agree on a new set of parser evaluation
standards.
BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION
In line with increasing interest in fine-grained syntactic and semantic
representations, stochastic parsing is currently being applied to
several high level syntactic frameworks, such as unification-based
grammars, tree-adjoining grammars and combinatory categorial grammars. A
variety of different types of training data are being used, including
dependency annotations, phrase structure trees, and unlabelled text.
Other researchers are building parsing systems using shallower
frameworks, based for example on finite-state transducers. Many of these
novel parsing approaches are using alternative evaluation measures --
based on dependencies, valencies, or exact or selective category match
-- since the PARSEVAL measures (of bracketing match with respect to
atomic-labelled phrase structure trees) cannot be applied, or are
uninformative.
The field is therefore confronted with a lack of common evaluation
metrics, and also of appropriate gold standard evaluation corpora in
languages other than English. We need a new and uniform scheme for
parser evaluation that covers both shallow and deep grammars, and allows
for comparison and benchmarking across different syntactic frameworks
and different language types.
A previous LREC-hosted workshop on parser evaluation in 1998 (see
<http://ceres.ugr.es/~rubio/elra/parsing.html>) brought together a
number of researchers advocating parser evaluation based on dependencies
or grammatical relations as a viable alternative to the PARSEVAL
measures.
The aim of this workshop is to start an initiative by bringing together
four relevant parties:
- researchers in symbolic and stochastic parsing
- builders of annotated corpora
- representatives from different syntactic frameworks
- groups with interests in and proposals for parser evaluation
The workshop will provide a forum for discussion with the aim of
defining a new parser evaluation metric; we also intend the workshop to
kick off a sustained collaborative effort into building or deriving
sufficiently large evaluation corpora, and possibly training corpora
appropriate to the new metric. To maintain the momentum of this
initiative we will work towards setting up a parsing competition based
on new standard evaluation corpora and evaluation metric.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
The workshop organisers invite papers focussing on:
- benchmarking the accuracy of individual parsing systems
- parser evaluation
- design of annotation schemes covering different languages and
grammar frameworks
- creation of high-quality evaluation corpora
Papers on the following topics will be particularly welcome:
- descriptions of experiments using alternative evaluation measures
with existing (stochastic or symbolic) parsers, focussing on
comparison and discussion of qualitative differences
- methods for creation of evaluation (or training) corpora, allowing
flexible adaptation to a new evaluation standard based on
dependencies or grammatical relations
- comparisons of existing or possible new schemes for dependency-based
evaluation (differences, similarities, problems)
MODE OF ORGANISATION
The one-day workshop will consist of (30-minute) paper presentations, a
panel session, and an extended open session at which important results
of the workshop will be summarised and discussed.
As a follow-up, we hope to arrange a half-day meeting outside the
workshop format to discuss concrete action plans, create working groups,
and plan future collaboration.
WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
John Carroll University of Sussex, UK
Anette Frank DFKI GmbH, Saarbruecken, Germany
Dekang Lin University of Alberta, Canada
Detlef Prescher DFKI GmbH, Saarbruecken, Germany
Hans Uszkoreit DFKI GmbH and Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Salah Ait-Mokhtar XRCE Grenoble
Gosse Bouma Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Thorsten Brants Xerox PARC
Ted Briscoe University of Cambridge
John Carroll University of Sussex
Jean-Pierre Chanod XRCE Grenoble
Michael Collins AT&T Labs-Research
Anette Frank DFKI Saarbruecken
Josef van Genabith Dublin City University
Gregory Grefenstette Clairvoyance, Pittsburgh
Julia Hockenmaier University of Edinburgh
Dekang Lin University of Alberta
Chris Manning Stanford University
Detlef Prescher DFKI Saarbruecken
Khalil Sima'an University of Amsterdam
Hans Uszkoreit DFKI Saarbruecken and Saarland University
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 by email, preferably in Postscript or PDF format, to:
to arrive by 1st February 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.
IMPORTANT DATES
1 February 2002 deadline for receipt of abstracts
22 February 2002 notification of acceptance
12 April 2002 camera-ready final version for workshop proceedings
2 June 2002 workshop
TIME AND LOCATION OF THE WORKSHOP
The workshop will take place on 2nd June, following the main LREC 2002
Conference, in the Palacio de Congreso de Canarias, Las Palmas, Canary
Islands.
WORKSHOP REGISTRATION
The registration fee for the workshop is:
If you are also attending LREC: 90 EURO
If you are not attending LREC: 140 EURO
All attendees will receive a copy of the workshop proceedings.
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