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*** 2nd Call for Poster Abstracts ***
Uphill Battles in Language Processing: Scaling Early Achievements to
Robust Methods
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NSF-supported Workshop to be held in conjunction with EMNLP 2016 in
Austin, Texas with partial funding available for students and
post-docs presenting posters at the workshop.
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mroth/UphillBattles/
Submission deadline: 18th August 2016
Workshop date: 5th November 2016
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The workshop on Uphill Battles in Natural Language Processing will
include a sponsored lunch featuring poster presentations. We invite
submissions for this lunchtime poster session in the form of research
summaries (up to 2 pages). Accepted research summaries will be
included in the workshop proceedings, with up-to-two extra pages of
content. The deadline for submission is the 18th of August 2016, and
authors of accepted submissions will be notified on September 5th
2016.
We are planning to partially fund some students and postdoctoral
researchers for travel and registration expenses in connection with
the workshop. We expect to involve these selected students and
postdoctoral researchers in some organization activities on the day of
the workshop itself.
== Focus of the workshop ==
Our workshop seeks to revive a discussion on “uphill battles in
natural language processing” -- problems which early researchers
in NLP focused on but the knowledge they were based on and
the techniques they employed could not be scaled up for practical
use. The workshop will remind researchers of these goals and hopes
to revive them in a context in which much more can be done.
In particular, the workshop will focus on NLP problems within four areas:
Dialogue and Speech
Natural Language Generation
Document Understanding
Grounded Language
A group of eminent researchers will give invited talks on these topics
and take part in discussions.
* Text Understanding *
Hal Daume III, University of Maryland, College Park
Andy Kehler, University of California, San Diego
Chris Manning, Stanford University
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ohio State University
* Dialogue and Speech *
David DeVault, University of Southern California
Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania
Diane Litman, University of Pittsburgh
Amanda Stent, Bloomberg
* Generation *
Ioannis Konstas, University of Washington
Kathy McKeown, Columbia University
Meg Mitchell, Microsoft Research
Donia Scott, University of Sussex
* Grounded language *
James Allen, University of Rochester / IHMC
Joyce Chai, Michigan State University
Yejin Choi, University of Washington
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
== Topics of interest and guidelines for writing your research summary ==
We invite 2-page research summaries which present work on these topics
-- in particular, research which focuses on deeper problems which
still baffle NLP systems, and/or research which seeks to introduce new
tasks, definitions and techniques. While work making incremental
progress in the context of well-established tasks is generally of
value, it is not the focus of this workshop. Nevertheless, we are
happy to include work-in-progress, as well as analyses of negative
findings. We are particularly seeking work which engages with the
workshop topics and goals, and will stimulate discussions among
workshop participants over lunch and beyond.
On our website, you can find a list of early goals which
colleagues suggested to us. You may use these goals in conjunction
with the four topic areas as an indicator of the lines of work we are
interested in.
When writing the summary please make sure you address the following points.
- How does your work engage with one or more of the workshop topics?
(Identify which topics)
- Which challenges are you seeking to address?
- What is your approach and what have you done so far?
- How is the work being evaluated, or how do you plan to evaluate it?
- Are you a student or postdoctoral researcher in need of funding to
attend the workshop? If you can secure funding from other sources for
attending the conference, please let us know, so we can identify
students in need of travel support.
Each summary will be reviewed by at least 2 program committee members
and evaluated along the following dimensions.
- Engagement with one or more topics of the workshop
- Originality
- Expected impact
- Evaluation and/or evaluation plan
The summaries will be published in the proceedings of the workshop
(unless authors indicate otherwise).
== Submission guidelines ==
Please submit your summary at https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2016/UBLP/
Summaries may describe collaborative work. However, students and
postdoctoral researchers who are applying for travel funds should be
the first author of their papers.
The length of the summary should be maximum 2 pages excluding
references. Each submission should follow the EMNLP 2016 formatting
instructions. Submission templates can be downloaded from
http://www.emnlp2016.net/submissions.html
The reviewing will be blind, papers should not include authors' names
and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...”,
should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith (1991)
previously showed ...”. Submissions that do not conform to these
requirements will be rejected without review. Separate author
identification information is required as part of the online
submission process.
== Workshop participation ==
The authors of accepted research summaries will be invited to present
posters at the workshop. The poster presentations will be held during
a session over lunch. Other sessions of the workshop will feature
talks and discussions led by established researchers as well as
younger scientists and we are hopeful that students’ current and
future work will benefit greatly from a dialog between different
groups.
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Organizers:
Annie Louis, University of Essex
Michael Roth, University of Edinburgh
Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh
Michael White, The Ohio State University
Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington