CLW 2012 - Second Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Writing (CL&W 2012):

Writing, whether professional, academic, or private, needs editors, input tools and display devices, and involves the coordination of cognitive, linguistic, and technical aspects. Most texts composed in the 21st century are probably created on electronic devices; people compose texts in word processors, text editors, content management systems, blogs, wikis, e-mail clients, and instant messaging applications. Texts are rendered and displayed on very small and very large screens, they are meant to be read by experts and laypersons, and they are supposed to be interactive and printable all at the same time.

The production of documents has been researched from various perspectives:

Writing research has been concerned with text processing tools and cognitive processes since the 1970s. The current rise of new writing environments and genres (e.g., blogging), as well as new possibilities to observe text production in the workplace, has prompted new studies in this area of research.
Document engineering is concerned with aspects of rendering and displaying textual and other resources for the creation, maintenance, and management of documents. Writers today use tools for layout design, collaborating with co-authors, and tracking changes in the production process with versioning systems---all of these are active research areas in document engineering.
Computational linguistics has mostly been concerned with static or finished texts. There is now a growing need to explore how computational linguistics can support human text production and interactive text processing. Methods from natural language processing can also provide support for exploring data relevant for writing research (e.g., keystroke-logging data) and document engineering (e.g., tailoring documents to specific user needs).
CL&W 2010, held at NAACL 2010 in Los Angeles, was a successful workshop, offering researchers from different but related disciplines a platform for sharing findings and ideas. This follow-on Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Writing aims to bring together researchers from the communities listed above to stimulate discussion and cooperation between these areas of research. We are interested in research that explores writing processes, text production, and document engineering principles as well as actual working systems that support writers in one or more aspects when producing a document.

Submissions are invited which address questions like the following:

How can the creation of texts and documents be supported by methods, resources, and tools from computational linguistics? This includes NLP tools and techniques that can be used or have been used to support writing (e.g., grammar and style checking, document structuring, thematic segmentation, editing and revision aids).
How can we get a better understanding of writing processes, strategies, and needs? Which methods, resources, and tools from computational linguistics could support research in this area?
How do high-level writing processes and the mechanics of writing relate to each other?
How do writing tools influence composing?
Is there a need for the development of new writing tools? What can we learn from earlier approaches and tools like RUSKIN, Writer's Workbench or Augment, or from source code editors for programming languages?
How can insights from writing research and methods from computational linguistics help writers with special needs?
How can techniques from HCI research and psychology be used to gain new insights concerning the composing and writing process and to improve writing tools?
How can methods and resources from computational linguistics help to scale from controlled lab experiments with only a few participants to workplace observation over a long period of time with dozens of writers?
How can algorithms and methods from document engineering be used to support natural-language writing as the creation of content?
How can aspects of document design be used for the development of (automatic) authoring aids or document processing?