ATANLP 2012 - EACL 2012 Workshop on Applications of Tree Automata Techniques in Natural Language Processing (ATANLP 2012)

EACL 2012 Workshop on Applications of Tree Automata Techniques in Natural Language Processing (ATANLP 2012)

April 24, 2012
Avignon, France

http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/atanlp/

Workshop Description

Tree automata techniques, in the sense of this workshop, are finite-state based methods that use or manipulate trees as their central data structure. Examples are tree grammars, tree acceptors, tree transducers, and logics for specifying properties or transformations of trees. Tree automata techniques have an increasing number of applications in natural language processing; examples for this can be found in work on topics as diverse as grammar formalisms, computational semantics, language generation, and machine translation.

The goals of this workshop are to provide a dedicated venue for the presentation of work that relates tree automata techniques and their formal theory to natural language processing. In this way, we create a forum where researchers from the two areas can meet and exchange ideas. Specifically, the workshop aims at increasing the awareness for theoretical results useful for applications in natural language processing, and at identifying open theoretical problems raised by such applications.

Topics of Interest

The workshop invites substantial, original, unpublished submissions on topics related to or motivated by the application of tree automata techniques in natural language processing. This includes but is not limited to the following topics:

representations of languages by tree automata and tree grammars;
tree transducers, synchronous grammars, and related devices and their application to, e.g., machine translation;
tree logics and their application to, e.g., natural language syntax and semantics;
weighted extensions of the aforementioned;
algorithms related to the implementation of tree automata, such as algorithms for matching, accepting, and parsing;
learning and training algorithms for tree automata;
tree-based query languages for, e.g., treebanks and parallel syntactic corpora;
case studies concerning the application of tree automata techniques in natural language processing.
Invited Speaker