**apologies for cross-posting**

2nd Call For Papers: Special issue of the Computational Linguistics journal
on Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages (CLPMRL)
http://cljournal.org/specials/parsing-mrl.html

INTRODUCTION

In the context of computational linguistics, parsing is the task of
automatically analyzing the syntactic structure of sentences in natural
language. Although the performance of parsing systems has improved
tremendously in recent years, there is increasing evidence that performance
is sensitive to typological differences between languages. Thus, statistical
models for phrase structure parsing developed for English often exhibit a
drastic drop in performance when applied to languages such as German, Arabic
and Hebrew. Similarly, multilingual evaluation campaigns for statistical
dependency parsers have shown considerable variation in accuracy that is
partly related to typological characteristics. In both cases, it appears
that the greatest challenges are posed by morphologically rich languages
(MRL), where significant information concerning syntactic structure is
expressed at the word level, where each word can have a very high number of
possible forms, and where word order is weakly constrained by syntactic
structure. The challenges exhibited by MRLs transcend language boundaries,
and emerging insights are often relevant across theoretical frameworks and
methodological traditions. This special issue aims to provide the focal
point for studies of large-scale, broad-coverage parsing models that can
successfully cope with the challenges exhibited by MRLs, from both the
formal and the statistical points of view. It sets out to provide an
overview of the state-of-the-art solutions, shared insights across languages
and frameworks, and lessons relevant to downstream applications.

TOPICS

We solicit novel contributions describing completed work on broad-coverage
parsing of morphologically rich languages, from formal or statistical points
of view. The topics to be covered in this issue include, but are not limited
to:

- Parsing models and architectures that explicitly integrate morphological
and syntactic information
- Cross-language and/or cross-model comparison of models' strengths and
weaknesses in the face of morphosyntactic phenomena
- Comprehensive analyses of parsing models' performance with respect to
variation in tag-sets, annotation schemes and data transformation
- Evaluation of parsers involving different frameworks or different
syntactic theories (e.g. constituency-based or dependency-based) for MRLs
- Better models to cope with high variation in word-form and improved
handling of OOV words, by incorporating linguistic knowledge or through
automatic learning techniques

FORMAT OF SUBMISSION

In order to provide a wide exposure to the state-of-the-art in the field,
covering multiple frameworks as well as multiple languages, the editorial
board of this special issue will use a new format with multiple short papers
of length up to 25 pages (excluding references). Submitted papers must
follow the CL formatting guidelines available at
http://cljournal.org/style.html.

EXPRESSION OF INTEREST

Potential contributors are invited to send an expression of interest (EOI)
to the guest editors by February 20, 2011. The EOIs should consist of a
title, the language(s), and a brief indication of the topic. EOIs and
inquiries should be directed to the guest editors via clpmrl [at]
indiana.edu.

SCHEDULE

call for papers: December 20, 2010
Expression of interest: n/a (was February 20, 2011)
Submission of full articles: September 30, 2011 (was June 1, 2011)
Notification to authors: January 20, 2012 (was September 20, 2011)
Submission of revised articles: April 2012 (was December 20, 2011)
Final decision to authors: May 2012 (was January 15, 2012)
Final version due: June 2012 (was February 1, 2012)
GUEST EDITORS

Reut Tsarfaty (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Djamé Seddah (Alpage & Université Paris Sorbonne, France)
Sandra Kübler (Indiana University, USA)
Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden)

CONTACT

Mail: clpmrl [at] indiana.edu
External website and faq: http://sites.google.com/site/clpmrl2012/