Call for papers: Workshop on Discontinuous Structures in Natural Language Processing

[Orasan, Constantin]

(apologies for cross-­posting)

Workshop on Discontinuous Structures in Natural Language Processing
-------------------------------------------------------------------

http://rgcl.wlv.ac.uk/disco/

to be held at NAACL 2016 (San Diego, California, USA), June 16, 2016

Submission deadline: February 25, 2016


Call For Papers
---------------------

The modeling of certain structures in natural language requires a
mechanism for discontinuity, in the sense that we must account for two
or more parts of the structure that are not adjacent. This is true
across many languages and on different description levels. For
instance, on the lexical level, this concerns discontinuous
morphological phenomena such as transfixation (templatic morphology),
as well as phrasal verbs, and non-­contiguous multiword expressions. 

On the syntactic level, discontinuity is caused by phenomena such as
extraposition and topicalization, or argument scrambling.
Morphologically rich languages (MRLs) are particularly likely to
exhibit such phenomena. Other examples include disfluency and
anaphora/coreference resolution with discontinuous antecedents;
modeling in both of the latter areas requires an extended domain of
locality. On a higher level, discontinuity is a relevant factor in
machine translation, as well as in complex question answering and in
topic structure modeling. 

Discontinuity has been studied intensively in a range of different
areas, including but not limited to grammar development, syntactic and
semantic parsing, morphological analysis, machine translation, anaphora
resolution, discourse modeling, automatic summarization and
complex question answering. 

Nevertheless, the treatment of discontinuous structures remains a
challenge, because on the one hand, recovering of non-­local
information is generally associated with a high computational cost, and
on the other hand, discontinuities are inherently a low ­frequency
phenomenon, which means that statistical approaches have a tendency to
analyze them incorrectly as more frequent local phenomena.
Additionally, it is not always clear if and how NLP tasks can benefit
from knowing about discontinuity, that is, why one should care,
particularly considering the given computational cost. The goal of this
workshop is to bring together researchers from the different areas to
give them a forum to exchange ideas and problem solutions, to create
synergy effects, and to enable more powerful solutions. This
encompasses not only linguistic analyses and work on analyzing or
recovering the corresponding structures, such as, e.g., in non­-
projective dependency parsing, but also studies on "use cases", which
show how information about discontinuity can be used to enhance NLP
tasks.

The areas of interest of this workshop include but are not limited to
the following topics:

* Theoretical and empirical analyses of nonlocal/discontinuous
phenomena.

* Comparisons of different descriptions of the same type of non­local
information.

* Use, development, and comparison, of techniques for handling
non­local/discontinuous within NLP tasks, especially wrt. to examples
of NLP tasks which can benefit from handling discontinuous phenomena
are machine translation, complex question answering, modeling
of discourse, automatic summarization and coreference resolution.

* "Use cases" that show how information about discontinuity can enhance
an NLP task.

* Annotation of information about nonlocality. ­­­­­­

Submission information
------------------------

We invite papers which present completed research including new
experimental results, resources and/or techniques. The maximum 
length of the papers is 8 pages plus an unlimited number of pages for
references. All submissions must be in PDF format and must follow
the NAACL 2016 formatting requirements (available at the NAACL 2016
website: http://naacl.org/naacl­pubs/). We strongly advise the use of
the provided Word or LaTeX template files.

Reviewing will be double­blind, and thus no author information should
be included in the papers; self-­reference should be avoided as well.
Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected
without review. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop
proceedings.

The submission site will be published on the workshop webpage as soon
as it is available. ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Important dates
---------------------

February 25, 2016: Workshop paper submission deadline 
March 20, 2016: Notification of Acceptance
March 30, 2016: Camera ­ready papers due
June 16, 2016: Workshop Date

Program Committee
----------------------

Anne Abeille, University Paris 7
Laura Alonso Alemany, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
Marianna Apidianaki, LIMSI
Eric de la Clergerie, INRIA
Andreas van Cranenburgh, Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and
Sciences
Joachim Daiber, University of Amsterdam
Corina Forascu, University "Al. I. Cuza" Iaşi
Carlos Gomez Rodriguez, University of A Coruña
Eva Hasler, University of Cambridge
Mijail Kabadjov, University of Essex
Laura Kallmeyer, University of Düsseldorf
Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh
Johannes Leveling, Elsevier
Timm Lichte, University of Düsseldorf
Georgiana Marsic, University of Wolverhampton
Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen
Jean­Luc Minel, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Sara Moze, University of Wolverhampton
Philippe Muller, University of Toulouse/IRIT
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Mark­Jan Nederhof, University of St. Andrews
Yannick Parmentier, University of Orléans
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota
Irene Renau, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile
Lonneke van der Plas, University of Malta
Djamé Seddah, University Paris 4
Khalil Sima'an, University of Amsterdam
Yannick Versley, University of Heidelberg
Suzan Veberne, University of Nijmegen
Andy Way, Dublin City University


Workshop Organizers
------------------------------

Wolfgang Maier (University of Düsseldorf, Germany)
Sandra Kübler (Indiana University, USA)
Constantin Orasan (University of Wolverhampton, GB)

The workshop organizers can be contacted at

discows2016 at gmail.com



-- 
Constantin Orasan <C.Orasan at wlv.ac.uk>
University of Wolverhampton
http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~in6093/