Call for Papers
Grammar Engineering across Frameworks (GEAF08)
August 24
Manchester, UK
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~thking/GEAF08/GEAF08.html

This workshop is part of The 22nd International Conference on
Computational Linguistics (COLING-08).

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.

The workshop is a follow-up to the first GEAF workshop
(http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/GEAF/2007/geaf07.html) which
was held at Stanford in 2007.

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.

Organizing Committee:
Tracy Holloway King, PARC
Stephen Clark, Oxford University

Program Committee:

Jason Baldridge, Texas
Emily Bender, Washington
Miriam Butt, Konstanz
Aoife Cahill, Stuttgart
John Carroll, Sussex
Ann Copestake, Cambridge
Berthold Crysmann, Bonn
Mary Dalrymple, Oxford
Stefanie Dipper, Bochum
Dan Flickinger, Stanford
Josef van Genabith, Dublin
Ron Kaplan, Powerset
Montserrat Marimon, Barcelona
Yusuke Miyao, Tokyo
Owen Rambow, Columbia
Jun'ichi Tsujii, Tokyo

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

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

Contact for inquiries:
Tracy Holloway King (thking "at" parc.com)
Stephen Clark (stephen.clark "at" comlab.ox.ac.uk)

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 above). 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.

--
Stephen Clark
Lecturer in Computer Science
Oxford University Computing Laboratory
Fellow of Keble College
Member of the Oxford Computational Linguistics Group

http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/stephen.clark/