SPMRL 2013 - 4th Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages

The 4th Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages will be held in conjunction with the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2013) which will take place in October, 18-21, 2013 in Seattle, Washington.
IMPORTANT DATES
Jul 01, 2013 Paper submission deadline
Aug 01, 2013 Notification of acceptance
Sep 01, 2013 Camera-ready deadline
October 2013 SPMRL workshop at EMNLP 2013
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
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 treebank 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 three SPMRL workshops, the fourth SPMRL workshop aims to build on the success of the previous ones 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 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.
SCOPE AND TOPICS
The areas of interest of the fourth 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
parsing models and architectures that focus on domain adaptation for non-canonical text from morphologically rich languages
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