Workshop on Discontinuous Structures in Natural Language Processing

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Friday, 17 June 2016
State: 
California
Country: 
USA
Contact Email: 
City: 
San Diego
Contact: 
Wolfgang Maier (University of Düsseldorf, Germany)
Sandra Kübler (Indiana University, USA)
Constantin Orasan (University of Wolverhampton, GB)
Submission Deadline: 
Thursday, 25 February 2016

The modeling of certain structures in natural language requires a mechanism for discontinuity, in the sense that we must account for two or more parts of the structure that are not adjacent. This is true across many languages and on different description levels. For instance, on the lexical level, this concerns discontinuous morphological phenomena such as transfixation (templatic morphology), as well as phrasal verbs, and non-­contiguous multiword expressions.

On the syntactic level, discontinuity is caused by phenomena such as extraposition and topicalization, or argument scrambling. Morphologically rich languages (MRLs) are particularly likely to exhibit such phenomena. Other examples include disfluency and anaphora/coreference resolution with discontinuous antecedents; modeling in both of the latter areas requires an extended domain of locality. On a higher level, discontinuity is a relevant factor in machine translation, as well as in complex question answering and in topic structure modeling.

Discontinuity has been studied intensively in a range of different areas, including but not limited to grammar development, syntactic and semantic parsing, morphological analysis, machine translation, anaphora resolution, discourse modeling, automatic summarization and complex question answering.

Nevertheless, the treatment of discontinuous structures remains a challenge, because on the one hand, recovering of non-­local information is generally associated with a high computational cost, and on the other hand, discontinuities are inherently a low ­frequency phenomenon, which means that statistical approaches have a tendency to analyze them incorrectly as more frequent local phenomena. Additionally, it is not always clear if and how NLP tasks can benefit from knowing about discontinuity, that is, why one should care, particularly considering the given computational cost. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the different areas to give them a forum to exchange ideas and problem solutions, to create synergy effects, and to enable more powerful solutions. This encompasses not only linguistic analyses and work on analyzing or recovering the corresponding structures, such as, e.g., in non­-projective dependency parsing, but also studies on "use cases", which show how information about discontinuity can be used to enhance NLP tasks.

The areas of interest of this workshop include but are not limited to the following topics:

  • Theoretical and empirical analyses of nonlocal/discontinuous phenomena.
  • Comparisons of different descriptions of the same type of non­local information.
  • Use, development, and comparison, of techniques for handling non­local/discontinuous within NLP tasks, especially wrt. to examples of NLP tasks which can benefit from handling discontinuous phenomena are machine translation, complex question answering, modeling of discourse, automatic summarization and coreference resolution.
  • "Use cases" that show how information about discontinuity can enhance an NLP task.
  • Annotation of information about nonlocality. ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Submission modalities

We invite papers which present completed research including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques. The maximum length of the papers is 8 pages plus an unlimited number of pages for references. All submissions must be in PDF format and must follow the NAACL 2016 formatting requirements (available at the NAACL 2016 website: http://naacl.org/naacl-pubs/). We strongly advise the use of the provided Word or LaTeX template files.

Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be included in the papers; self-reference should be avoided as well. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings.

Papers can be submitted at https://www.softconf.com/naacl2016/DiscoNLP2016/.

Program Committee

Anne Abeille, University Paris 7
Laura Alonso Alemany, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
Marianna Apidianaki, LIMSI
Eric de la Clergerie, INRIA
Andreas van Cranenburgh, Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences
Joachim Daiber, University of Amsterdam
Corina Forascu, University "Al. I. Cuza" Iaşi
Carlos Gomez Rodriguez, University of A Coruña
Eva Hasler, University of Cambridge
Mijail Kabadjov, University of Essex
Sylvain Kahane, University Paris 10
Laura Kallmeyer, University of Düsseldorf
Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh
Johannes Leveling, Elsevier
Timm Lichte, University of Düsseldorf
Peter Ljunglöf, University of Gothenburg
Georgiana Marsic, University of Wolverhampton
Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen
Jean-Luc Minel, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Sara Moze, University of Wolverhampton
Philippe Muller, University of Toulouse/IRIT
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Mark-Jan Nederhof, University of St. Andrews
Yannick Parmentier, University of Orléans
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota
Irene Renau, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile
Lonneke van der Plas, University of Malta
Djamé Seddah, University Paris 4
Khalil Sima'an, University of Amsterdam
Yannick Versley, University of Heidelberg
Suzan Veberne, University of Nijmegen
Andy Way, Dublin City University