[Corpora-List] ACL-04 Workshop on Incremental Parsing: Bringing Engineering and Cognition Together

From: Frank Keller (keller@inf.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Jan 07 2004 - 18:01:54 MET

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    INCREMENTAL PARSING: BRINGING ENGINEERING AND COGNITION TOGETHER

    Workshop at ACL-2004
    Barcelona, Spain, July 25, 2004

    WORKSHOP TOPIC

    Much recent parsing research has focused on the limited task of
    achieving broad coverage and high accuracy in parsing Treebank
    corpora. The parsing models developed for this task typically work on
    a sentence-by-sentence basis: they often only deliver a valid analysis
    if the input consists of a complete sentence. They are not designed to
    operate incrementally, i.e., to deliver partial analyses (perhaps with
    associated probabilities) that can be updated on a word-by-word basis
    as more of the input becomes available.

    Incrementality is desirable for two reasons. First, incremental
    processing is crucial for many NLP tasks. Language modeling, for
    instance, typically requires that probabilities are assigned
    incrementally as more and more of the speech stream becomes
    available. Recently, a number of parsing models have been proposed
    that have this property and thus can be used for language
    modeling. These models have resulted in lower perplexity scores and
    word error rates than the standard n-gram models. However, the parsing
    accuracy of these models typically falls short of the state of the
    art. The challenge for parsing research is to develop models that
    achieve optimal performance for both parsing and language modeling.

    The second argument for incrementality comes from cognitive
    modeling. There is substantial evidence showing that humans process
    language in an incremental fashion. Any cognitively plausible model of
    human parsing must take incrementality into account, and the modeling
    literature contains considerable discussion on the relevant
    computational mechanisms. Recently, a number of models of human
    parsing have been proposed that are based on computational linguistic
    approaches, such as PCFGs and related statistical models, suggesting a
    potential synergy between cognitively and technologically motivated
    parsing research.

    TARGET AUDIENCE

    The aim of the workshop is to address the dual challenge of defining
    incremental parsing models that are useful for engineering tasks such
    as language modeling, while also contributing to our understanding and
    modeling of the human parsing mechanism. The workshop will bring
    together parsing researchers from the computational linguistics and
    cognitive modeling communities, and we expect extensive
    cross-fertilization from this interaction. From the computational
    linguistic perspective, cognitive modeling presents new challenges for
    parsing research, including new evaluation measures that go beyond
    traditional parseval measures. On the other hand, computational
    linguistics can contribute crucial methodological advances to
    cognitive modeling. For instance, the application of probabilistic
    parsing algorithms to cognitive tasks has important implications for
    the recent debate on the role of frequency information in human
    parsing.

    AREAS OF INTEREST

    Possible topics for workshop submissions include:

    o architectures, methods, and algorithms for incremental parsing;
      including symbolic, probabilistic, connectionist, and hybrid models

    o applications of incremental models to parsing, language modeling,
      and cognitive modeling

    o evaluation using standard metrics (parseval, perplexity, word error
      rate)

    o evaluation against behavioral data (reaction times, eye-tracking
      data, linguistic judgments)

    o applications of incremental parsing models in computational
      linguistics

    SUBMISSION FORMAT

    Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Submissions
    must use the ACL latex style (available from the workshop web
    page). Paper submissions should consist of a full paper. The page
    limit is eight pages.

    SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

    Electronic submission only: send a postscript (preferred) or PDF file
    with your submission to:

    acl04_workshop@inf.ed.ac.uk

    Because reviewing is blind, no author information should be included
    in the paper. Please send the following information separately (as
    plain text): title, authors, keywords, and an abstract of no more than
    5 lines. Late submissions will not be accepted. Notification of
    receipt will be e-mailed to the first author shortly after receipt.

    DEADLINES

    Paper submission deadline: Mar 22, 2004
    Notification of acceptance for papers: May 03, 2004
    Camera ready papers due: May 24, 2004
    Wokshop date: Jul 25, 2004

    WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

    Stephen Clark, University of Edinburgh
    Matthew Crocker, Saarland University
    Frank Keller, University of Edinburgh
    Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh

    KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    Brian Roark, AT&T Labs Research
    Patrick Sturt, University of Glasgow

    PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Steve Abney, University of Michigan
    Thorsten Brants, Google
    Eugene Charniak, Brown University
    Ciprian Chelba, Microsoft Research
    Michael Collins, MIT
    Jeffrey Elman, UCSD
    Ted Gibson, MIT
    John Hale, Michigan State University
    Mark Johnson, Brown University
    Gerard Kempen, University of Leiden
    Stefan Riezler, Palo Alto Research Center
    Brian Roark, AT&T Labs Research
    Douglas Roland, UCSD
    Ed Stabler, UCLA
    Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto
    Patrick Sturt, University of Glasgow

    CONTACT INFORMATION

    The web site of the workshop is:

    http://www.iccs.inf.ed.ac.uk/~keller/acl04_workshop/

    The organizers can be contacted at:

    School of Informatics
    University of Edinburgh
    2 Buccleuch Place
    Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK
    phone: +44-131-650-4407
    fax: +44-131-650-4587
    email: acl04_workshop@inf.ed.ac.uk



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