Software engineering, testing, and quality assurance for natural language processing
An NAACL-HLT 2009 workshop
Boulder, CO
June 5, 2009
http://compbio.uchsc.edu/SETQA-NLP2009

Natural language, as an input type, has unique characteristics that present special problems for software testing, quality assurance, and even requirements specification. This workshop is intended to stimulate research in all areas of software engineering for natural language processing. The goals of the workshop include raising awareness of the need for good software engineering practices in NLP, stimulating research on same, and disseminating the results of current work in this area.

The target audience is researchers interested in natural language processing software, including testing and standardization, as well as grammar engineering.

Submissions of full papers and poster abstracts are solicited in all areas of software and grammar engineering, testing and quality assurance as they relate to natural language processing. Some suggested areas are:

* Patterns for design, coding, refactoring, and unit testing of language processing systems
* Test suite design and generation
* Special issues in metrology for natural language processing
* Grammar/rule engineering
* Usability
* Standardization of tools and/or resources
* Design for and evaluation of reliability and robustness
* Scalability issues in training and deployment
* Reusability and toolkit design
* Concurrency and multithreading for NLP
* Theoretical issues in software engineering for NLP

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: Monday, March 6, 2009, 11:59 PM East Coast time
Notification of acceptance: Monday, April 6, 2009
Camera-ready copy due: Monday, April 13, 2009
Workshop: Friday, June 5, 2009

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Full papers: Revised ACL guidelines for full papers this year allow for 8 pages of text plus one page of references.

Poster abstracts: Poster abstracts should not exceed two (2) pages. Accepted abstracts will be published in a separate section of the workshop proceedings. Appropriate poster topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc.

Submission format: Submissions must be in PDF and should follow the two-column format of the ACL proceedings. Ensure that you are *not* in A4 format. Please see the conference website for detailed typesetting specifications. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available on the ACL meeting website at http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/stylefiles.html.

Submit your paper or abstract via the workshop web site at https://www.softconf.com/naacl-hlt09/SETQANLP2009/ by 11:59 PM on Monday, March 6, East Coast time. Submissions need not be anonymous. Authors who cannot submit a PDF file electronically should contact the workshop organizers well in advance of the submission deadline.

Dual submission policy: Papers may not be submitted to the software engineering, testing, and quality assurance workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted to another meeting or publication.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Chairs

K. Bretonnel Cohen, U. Colorado School of Medicine and MITRE
Marc Light, Thomson Reuters Research

Members

William A. Baumgartner, Jr., U. Colorado School of Medicine
Shannon Bradshaw, Drew U.
Bob Carpenter, Alias-i
Hamish Cunningham, U. Sheffield
Dan Flickinger, Stanford U.
Michael Gamon, Microsoft
Tracy King, PowerSet
James Lyle, Microsoft
Kevin Markey, Silver Creek Systems
Stephan Oepen, Stanford U.
Martha Palmer, U. Colorado at Boulder
Jeff Reynar
Charles Schafer, Google
Jun'ichi Tsujii, U. Tokyo and UK National Centre for Text Mining
Martin Volk, U. Stockholm
Scott A. Waterman, Powerset
Ken Williams, Thomson Reuters Research