CALL FOR PAPERS



Software engineering, testing, and quality assurance for natural language processing

An ACL 2008 workshop

Columbus, OH

June 19 or 20, 2008 (awaiting determination by ACL organizers)

http://alias-i.com/acl-08-software-workshop/



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.



Submissions of full papers and poster abstracts are solicited in all areas of software 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



Submissions due: Friday, March 21, 2008, 11:59 PM East Coast time

Notification of acceptance: Sunday, April 20, 2008

Camera-ready copy due: Saturday, April 26, 2008



SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS



Full papers: Full papers should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. These are intended to be reports of original and mature research.



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://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html.



Submit your paper or abstract via the workshop web site at https://www.softconf.com/acl08/ACL08-WS04/ by 11:59 PM on Friday, March 21, 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.



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 and that other meeting or publication prohibits dual submissions. If your paper is or will be concurrently under consideration by another meeting or publication, please notify us of that fact in a footnote on the first page.



PROGRAM COMMITTEE



Chairs



K. Bretonnel Cohen, MITRE and U. Colorado School of Medicine

Bob Carpenter, Alias-i



Members



William A. Baumgartner, Jr., U. Colorado School of Medicine

Hamish Cunningham, U. Sheffield

Dan Flickinger, Stanford U.

Michael Gamon, Microsoft

Martin Jansche, Google

Marc Light, Thomson

James Lyle, Microsoft

Kevin Markey, Silver Creek Systems

Stephan Oepen, Stanford U.

Martha Palmer, U. Colorado at Boulder

Jeff Reynar, Google

Jun'ichi Tsujii, U. Tokyo and UK National Centre for Text Mining

Martin Volk, U. Stockholm