SPMRL 2011 - Second Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL 2011)

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in parsing languages with richer morphological structures than in English, and to provide a forum for discussing the challenges associated with parsing such languages and sharing strategies towards their solutions. We are interested in presentations relating to actively studied areas of research including the adaptation of existing parsing techniques to new languages, the design of new models that take morphological information into account, the implementation of models that allow robust statistics to be obtained in the face of high word-form variation, and so on.

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: July 31, 2011 (PDT, GMT-8) .

Notification to authors: September 5, 2011

Camera ready copy: September 20, 2011

Workshop: October 6, 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

Since the advent of large syntactically annotated corpora, statistical parsing has been a cornerstone of research in NLP. While Penn Treebank parsing performance, be it dependency-based or constituency-based, seems to have reached a high plateau, the same cannot be said of other languages, data sets and domains.

Statistical parsing of morphologically-rich languages (MRLs) has repeatedly been shown to exhibit a plethora of nontrivial challenges, including sparse lexica in the face of rich inflectional systems, parsing deficiency in the face of free word order and tree- bank annotation idiosyncrasies in the face of morphosyntactic interactions. Recent studies on parsing languages such as German, Arabic, Hebrew or French using newly available treebanks contribute to our understanding of the extent of the difficulty that such phenomena pose when reusing parsing models initially designed to parse English. Beyond the technical and linguistic difficulties, the lack of communication between researchers working on different MRLs can lead to a reinventing the wheel syndrome.

Following the warm reception of the first SPMRL workshop at NAACL-HLT 2010, the second SPMRL workshop aims to build upon the success of the first and offer a platform to this growing community of interests. We solicit papers describing parsing experiments with models and architectures for languages with morphological structure richer than English, or studies that address the lexical sparseness challenges (for any language). In order to provide a realistic indication of the performance of parsing systems on unstructured and unanalyzed data, we particularly encourage contributions reporting parsing results for non-gold as well as gold morphological analysis of the test data, before or jointly with the parser.

The areas of interest of the second SPMRL workshop include, but are not limited to, the following list of topics:
parsing models and architectures that explicitly integrate morphological analysis and parsing
parsing models and architectures that focus on lexical coverage and the handling of OOV words either by incorporating linguistic knowledge or through the use of unsupervised/semi-supervised learning techniques
Cross-language and cross-model comparison of models' strength and weaknesses in the face of particular linguistic phenomena (e.g. morphosyntactic characteristics, degree of word-order freedom ...)
comprehensive analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of various parsing models on particular linguistic (e.g. morphosyntactic) phenomena with respect to variation in tagsets, annotation schemes and additional data transformations

SUBMISSION

Authors are invited to submit long papers (up to 9 pages + references) and short papers (up to 5 pages + references). Long papers should describe unpublished, substantial and completed research. Short papers should be position papers, papers describing work in progress or short, focused contributions.
Papers will be accepted until July, 31 , 2011, (PDT, GMT-8) in PDF format via the START system (https://www.softconf.com/c/spmrl2011/
Submitted papers must follow the styles and the formating guidelines available from the last ACL-HLT recommendations (http://www.acl2011.org/authors.shtml). As the reviewing will be blind, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. In addition, please do not post your submissions on the web until after the review process is complete.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Marie Candito, Jennifer Foster, Yoav Goldberg, Ines Rehbein, Djamé Seddah, Lamia Tounsi, Reut Tsarfaty, Yannick Versley

REVIEW COMMITTEE

Mohammed Attia (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Bernd Bohnet (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Adriane Boyd (Ohio State University, US)
Marie Candito (University of Paris 7, France)
Ozlem Cetinoglu (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Grzegorz Chrupala (Saarland University, Germany)
Benoit Crabbé (University of Paris 7, France)
Michael Elhadad (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
Jennifer Foster (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Josef van Genabith (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Yoav Goldberg (Ben Gurion University, Israel)
Deirdre Hogan (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Samar Husan (Inter. Institute of Information Technology, India)
Sandra Kübler (Indiana University, US)
Jonas Kuhn (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Alberto Lavelli (FBK-irst, Italy)
Joseph Le Roux (Université de la Méditérranée, France)
Wolfgang Maier (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Yuval Marton (IBM Watson Resarch Center, US)
Takuya Matsuzaki (University of Toyko, Japan)
Yusuke Miyao (University of Toyko, Japan)
Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Owen Rambow (Columbia University)
Ines Rehbein (Saarland University, Germany)
Kenji Sagae (University of Southern California, US)
Benoit Sagot (Inria Rocquencourt, France)
Djamé Seddah (University of Paris Sorbonne, France)
Lamia Tounsi (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Reut Tsarfaty (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Yannick Versley (University of Tübingen, Germany)
ORGANIZERS AND CONTACTS

Djamé Seddah, Université Paris-Sorbonne & Alpage project
Reut Tsarfaty, Uppsala University
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University
To contact us : spmrl2011-AT-gmail.com

SPONSORS

This workshop is sponsored by SIGPARSE and by the INRIA's Alpage project.

PREVIOUS EVENTS

The first SPMRL event took place in October 2009 at IWPT'09 in the form of a discussion panel which followed 7 presentations on different issues related to statistical parsing of German, Arabic, Modern Hebrew and French. It was followed by SPMRL 2010, a NAACL/HLT 2010 workshop which featured 13 presentations with more languages added to the original set (Basque, Hindi and Korean in addition to Arabic, French, German and Modern Hebrew) and a very animated discussion panel. This workshop was the second most successful workshop in terms of registered attendees (more than 50). The SPMRL 2010 proceedings include an overview of the field in the form of a long preface co-authored by the SPMRL programme committee.

RELATED EVENTS

The SPMRL group is editing an upcoming special issue of Computational Linguistics devoted to the parsing of MRLs. (Expected publication date: first quarter of 2012. Deadline June 1st, 2011)

FAQ

Can I submit the same paper to IWPT and SPMRL?
Yes, double submissions are permitted but obviously the same paper will not be published at both venues. Another possibility for those working on parsing MRLs is submit two different papers: in this scenario, we encourage authors to view the SPMRL workshop as a venue for more detailed analysis papers.