IWPT 2007


10th International Conference on Parsing Technology

Sponsored by ACL/SIGPARSE

23rd-24th June, 2007

Prague, Czech Republic


HOMEFINAL PROGRAMME  ACL 2007

                              
ACL/SIGPARSE will  host the  10th International Conference  on Parsing Technologies (IWPT'07) on June 23rd and 24th, 2006 in conjunction with the  2007   Annual  Meeting  of  the   Association  for  Computational Linguistics (ACL'07; see http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007). IWPT'07  continues  the tradition  of  biennial  workshops on  parsing technology  organized  by  SIGPARSE,  the Special  Interest  Group  on Parsing of  the Association for Computational  Linguistics (ACL).  The first  workshop, in  Pittsburgh  and Hidden  Valley,  was followed  by workshops in Cancun (Mexico) in 1991; Tilburg (Netherlands) and Durbuy (Belgium) in 1993;  Prague and Karlovy Vary (Czech  Republic) in 1995; Boston/Cambridge  (Massachusetts)  in 1997;  Trento  (Italy) in  2000; Beijing  (China)  in  2001;  Nancy  (France) in  2003;  and  Vancouver (Canada) (2005). Topics  of interest  for  IWPT'07  include, but  are  not limited  to: theoretical and  practical studies  of parsing and transduction algorithms   for natural language sentences, texts, fragments, dialogues, ill-formed  sentences, speech  input,  multi-dimensional  (pictorial)  or  signed  languages, multimedia (web) documents, and parsing  issues arising or viewed in a multimodal  and multilingual context. Both  knowledge-based and  statistical  approaches are welcome.




Invited Speaker

Stuart Shieber   
 Harvard University

Synchronous Grammars and Transducers: Good News and Bad News


Much of the activity in linguistics, especially computational  linguistics, can be thought of as characterizing not languages  simpliciter but relations among languages.  Formal systems for  characterizing language relations have a long history with two  primary branches, based respectively on tree transducers and  synchronous grammars.  Both have seen increasing use in recent work,  especially in machine translation.  Indeed, evidence from millennia  of experience with bilingual dictionaries argues for synchronous  grammars as an appropriate substrate for statistical machine  translation systems. On the positive side, some new results have integrated the two branches through the formal-language-theoretic construct of the bimorphism.  I  will present some background on this integration, and briefly  describe two applications of synchronous grammars: to tree-adjoining  grammar semantics and to syntax-aware statistical machine translation. On the negative side, algorithms for making use of these formalisms  are  computationally complex, perhaps prohibitively so.  I will close  with a plea for novel research by the parsing technology community in  making the systems practical.


Co-located Events Spotlight Presentations
Data-Driven Dependency Parsing across Languages and Domains: 
Perspectives from the CoNLL-07 Shared Task
Joakim Nivre

The shared task of the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) for 2007 has been dependency parsing, with two tracks (see http://depparse.uvt.nl/depparse-wiki/SharedTaskWebsite). In the multilingual track, the task was to train a parser for ten different languages. In the domain adaptation track, the task was to adapt a parser developed for one domain to parsing in a new domain. This presentation will highlight some of the experiences and results that have emerged from the CoNLL shared task that are of relevance to the main topic of IWPT, that is, parsing technology.

The Impact of Deep Linguistic Processing on Parsing Technology
          Timothy Baldwin, Mark Dras, Julia Hockenmaier, Tracy Holloway  King, Gertjan van Noord

As the organizers of the ACL 2007 Deep Linguistic Processing  workshop, we were asked to discuss our perspectives  on the role of  current trends in deep linguistic processing for parsing technology.  We are particularly interested in the ways in which efficient, broad  coverage parsing systems for linguistically expressive grammars can  be built and integrated into applications which require richer  syntactic structures than shallow approaches can provide. This often  requires hybrid technologies which use shallow or statistical methods  for pre- or post-processing, to extend coverage, or to disambiguate  the output. With the recent advances in deep, and hybrid, natural  language processing, we believe that applications that require  natural language understanding will finally be able to reap the  benefits from the more detailed representations provided by  expressive grammars.



Final programme

The complete programme can be found here




Time schedule:

              Deadline for paper submission: CLOSED (was 26th March, 2007)
              Notification of acceptance : 26th April, 2007
              Final papers due : 7th May, 2007
              Workshop : 23rd-24th June, 2007


Instruction for accepted authors

Accepted   authors   must  send   their  camera ready  electronically  through the  web page of the conference by the 7th of May. Papers should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings. Papers should not exceed 12 pages for long papers and 3 pages for short papers, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference. A description of the format is also available in case you are unable to use these style files directly. Please include all fonts necessary to view and print your paper.

 Papers must be uploaded using  software accessible through  the following link. 

    http://www.softconf.com/acl07/IWPT07


The only accepted format for final version of  papers is Adobe PDF.

For all inquiries send mail to iwpt2007@lettres.unige.ch


Requirements


Papers should describe original  work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work,  and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the  reported results. A paper accepted for presentation  at IWPT 2007 cannot be presented or have  been presented  at  any other  meeting  with publicly  available published  proceedings.  Papers  that  are being  submitted  to  other conferences or workshops must indicate this on the title page, as must papers  that  contain significant  overlap  with previously  published work.The  reviewing of  the  papers will  be  blind. The  paper should  not include   the   authors'   names   and   affiliations.    Furthermore, self-citations  and other  references (e.g.  to projects,  corpora, or software)  that   could  reveal   the  author's  identity   should  be avoided. For  example, instead of "We previously  showed (Smith, 1991)...", write "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".


Submitting Papers
Two types of submissions are invited:
- full papers, to be presented as such during the workshop and to be published in the workshop proceedings (maximally 12 pages);
- short papers, to be presented at the workshop in the form of a short oral presentation; three-page summaries will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Programme Committee

All submitted papers have been reviewed by  the international IWPT'07 Programme Committee, consisting of the following members:

Harry Bunt (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
David Chiang(USC/ISI,USA)
John Carroll (University of Sussex, Brighton, UK)
Stephen Clark (Oxford University, UK)
James Henderson(University of Edinburgh,UK)
Ulf Hermjakob (USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, USA)
Julia Hockenmaier (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA)
Ronald Kaplan (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, USA)
Martin Kay (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, USA)
Sadao Kurohashi (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Alon Lavie (Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA)
Rob Malouf (San Diego State University, USA)
Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
Bob Moore (Microsoft, Redmond, USA)
Mark-Jan Nederhof (MPI, Groeningen, Netherlands)
Joakim Nivre (Växjö University, Sweden)
Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
Stephan Oepen (University of Oslo, Norway)
Stefan Riezler (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, USA)
Giorgio Satta (University of Padua, Italy)
Kenji Sagae (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Khalil Sima'an (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Eric Villemonte de la Clergerie (INRIA, Rocquencourt, France)
K. Vijay-Shanker (University of Delaware, USA)
Dekai Wu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China)

Organization

General Chair: Harry Bunt (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
Programme Chair: Paola Merlo (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Logistic Arrangements Chair: Alon Lavie (Carnegie-Mellon University,
                                                Pittsburgh, USA)

Further information

Additional information about IWPT'07 is available at the URL:

     http://www.latl.unige.ch/iwpt2007/index.html

At the site http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/sigparse/ you can also obtain information about previous IWPTs, proceedings, books based on IWPTs, and SIGPARSE related activities.