Coling 2008
Workshop on
Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks

Manchester, 24 August, 2008

In connection with Coling 2008, the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics
August 18-22

Call for Papers

This workshop aims to bring together grammar engineers from different frameworks to compare research and methodologies, particularly around the themes of evaluation, modularity, maintainability, relevance to theoretical and computational linguistics, and applications of "deep" grammars to real-world domains and NLP tasks.

Recent years have seen the development of techniques and resources to support robust, deep grammatical analysis of natural language in real-world domains and applications. The demands of these types of tasks have resulted in significant advances in areas such as parser efficiency, hybrid statistical/symbolic approaches to disambiguation, and the acquisition of large-scale lexicons. The effective acquisition, development, maintenance and enhancement of grammars is a central issue in such efforts, and the size and complexity of realistic grammars makes these tasks extremely challenging; indeed, these tasks are often tackled in ways that have much in common with software engineering. This workshop aims to bring together grammar engineers from different frameworks --- for example LFG, HPSG, TAG, CCG, dependency grammar --- to compare their research and methodologies.

Invited Talk: Jun'ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo and University of Manchester

Paper Topics

The workshop is soliciting submissions for papers on the following themes:
  1. Evaluation: Proposals concerning evaluation methodologies and metrics which can capture the added benefits of deep linguistic analysis; evaluation techniques which can compare grammars across varieties/languages.
  2. Modularity: Reflections on which aspects of linguistic structure can most easily be separated out from each other, why and how the analyses of separate linguistic phenomena are interconnected/interdependent, and the role of frameworks on promoting or inhibiting modularity.
  3. Maintainability: Techniques for improving long-term and multideveloper maintainability of grammars; impacts of considerations of maintainability on choices of linguistic analysis.
  4. Relevance to theoretical and computational linguistics: Reflections on how to present grammar engineering work to other research communities.
  5. Regression testing: Evaluation for internal purposes; methodologies and techniques for test suite construction, role of test suites in day-to-day progress on grammars.
  6. Applications of "deep" grammars to real-world domains and NLP tasks, such as parsing, machine translation, question answering, dialogue, generation; with a focus on how the use of deep grammars can lead to improved performance on such tasks.

Organizers

Programme committee

Important Dates and Submission Details

Paper submission deadline: 5 May
Notification of acceptance of Papers: 6 June
Camera-ready copy of papers due: 1 July
Demo session requests due: 1 July
Workshop: 24 August

The maximum length of submissions is 8 pages. Please use the COLING-08 style files, available from:
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/harold.somers/coling/style.html

Submissions should be anonymous. Please do not put your name in the author field.

Please use the START system to submit a paper:
https://www.softconf.com/coling08/GEAF/submit.html

Contact for inquiries:

Special Demo Session

In addition to the papers, there will be a demo session. If you wish to give a demonstration of a system relevant to the GEAF theme, please submit a title of the demo and a one-page description by July 1, 2008, through the START system (url).

You do not have to have a paper in the workshop in order to give a demo.

Proceedings

Accepted papers will form part of the workshop proceeedings.

Previous GEAF Workshops

GEAF07, Stanford University, Proceedings (CSLI Publications)

Last updated: Thu Feb 28 08:02:08 PST 2008