Final CFP: NAACL 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 17, 2016

Submission deadline: February 25, 2016

----------------------
Final 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 non-local/discontinuous
phenomena.
* Comparisons of different descriptions of the same type of non-local
information.
* Use, development, and comparison, of techniques for handling non-
local/discontinuous within NLP tasks, especially wrt. to examples of
NLP tasks which can benefit from handling discontinuous phenomena are
machine translation, complex question answering, modelling of
discourse, automatic summarisation and coreference resolution.
* "Use cases" that show how information about discontinuity can enhance
an NLP task.
* Annotation of information about non-locality.

---------------------
Submission modalities
---------------------

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/naacl-pubs/). We strongly advise the use of
the provided Word or LaTeX template files.

Reviewing will be double-blind, 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.

Papers can be submitted at https://www.softconf.com/naacl2016/DiscoNLP2016/.

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

February 25, 2016: Workshop paper submission deadline 
March 20, 2016: Notification of Acceptance
March 30, 2016: Camera-ready papers due
June 17, 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
Sylvain Kahane, University Paris 10
Laura Kallmeyer, University of Düsseldorf
Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh
Johannes Leveling, Elsevier
Timm Lichte, University of Düsseldorf
Peter Ljunglöf, University of Gothenburg
Georgiana Marsic, University of Wolverhampton
Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen
Jean-Luc Minel, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Sara Moze, University of Wolverhampton
Philippe Muller, University of Toulouse/IRIT
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Mark-Jan 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


-- 
Dr. Constantin Orasan <C.Orasan at wlv.ac.uk>
Reader in Computational Linguistics
Deputy Head of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics
Research Group in Computational Linguistics
http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~in6093/
University of Wolverhampton