EACL 2009 workshop on Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical Inference
Call for Papers
30 or 31 March 2009
Co-located with The 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Athens, Greece
Submission deadline: 19 December 2008
http://ilk.uvt.nl/clagi09
Scope
There has been growing interest over the last few years in learning grammars from natural language text (and structured or semi-structured text). The family of techniques enabling such learning is usually called “grammatical inference” or “grammar induction”.
The field of grammatical inference is often subdivided into formal grammatical inference, where researchers aim to proof efficient learnability of classes of grammars, and empirical grammatical inference, where the aim is to learn structure from data. In this case the existence of an underlying grammar is just regarded as a hypothesis and what is sought is to better describe the language through some automatically learned rules.
Both formal and empirical grammatical inference have been linked with (computational) linguistics. Formal learnability of grammars has been used in discussions on how people learn language. Some people mention proofs of (non-)learnability of certain classes of grammars as arguments in the empiricist/nativist discussion. On the more practical side, empirical systems that learn grammars have been applied to natural language. Instead of proving whether classes of grammars can be learnt, the aim here is to provide practical learning systems that automatically introduce structure in language. Example fields where initial research has been done are syntactic parsing, morphological analysis of words, and bilingual modeling (or machine translation).
This workshop at EACL 2009 aims to explore the state-of-the-art in these topics. In particular, we aim at bringing formal and empirical grammatical inference researchers closer together with researchers in the field of computational linguistics.
Topics
We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of grammatical inference in relation to natural language (such as, syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, phonetics), including, but not limited to
* Automatic grammar engineering, including, for example,
o parser construction,
o parameter estimation,
o smoothing, …
* Unsupervised parsing
* Language modelling
* Transducers, for instance, for
o morphology,
o text to speech,
o automatic translation,
o transliteration,
o spelling correction, …
* Learning syntax with semantics
* Unsupervised or semi-supervised learning of linguistic knowledge
* Learning (classes of) grammars (e.g. subclasses of the Chomsky Hierarchy) from linguistic inputs
* Comparing learning results in different frameworks (e.g. membership vs. correction queries)
* Learning linguistic structures (e.g. phonological features, lexicon) from the acoustic signal
* Grammars and finite state machines in machine translation
* Learning setting of Chomskyan parameters
* Cognitive aspects of grammar acquisition, covering, among others,
o developmental trajectories as studied by psycholinguists working with children,
o characteristics of child-directed speech as they are manifested in corpora such as CHILDES, …
* (Unsupervised) Computational language acquisition (experimental or observational)
Submission
Papers should present original, completed and unpublished research, not exceeding 8 pages. All submissions are to be formatted using the EACL 2009 style files (http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/authors).
Papers should be submitted electronically, no later than Friday 19 December, 2008. The only accepted format for submitted papers is PDF.
The reviewing process will be blind; thus papers should not include the authors’ names and affiliations or any references to web sites, project names etc. revealing the authors’ identity. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.
Important dates
19 December, 2008 – Deadline for paper submission
30 January, 2009 – Notification of acceptance
12 February, 2009 – Camera-ready copies due
30 or 31 March, 2009 – Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical
Inference workshop held at EACL-09
(exact date to be announced)
Programme Committee
Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs-Research, USA Leonor Becerra-Bonache, Yale University, USA
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Shimon Edelman, Cornell University, USA
Jeroen Geertzen, University of Cambridge, UK
Jeffrey Heinz, University of Delaware, USA
Alfons Juan, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
Frantisek Mraz, Charles University, Czech Republic
Khalil Sima’an, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Richard Sproat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Willem Zuidema, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Others to be confirmed
Organizing Committee
Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Colin de la Higuera, Université de Saint-Etienne, France
Contact
Menno van Zaanen
Department of Communication and Information Sciences Tilburg University
The Netherlands
mvzaanen (at) uvt.nl
Workshop website
http://ilk.uvt.nl/clagi09
