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Call for Papers
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TextGraphs-4: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing
To be held in conjunction with ACL/IJCNLP 2009, August 2-7, Suntec, Singapore
http://www.textgraphs.org/ws09/index.html
Recent years have shown an increased amount of interest in applying graph theoretic
models to computational linguistics. Both graph theory and computational linguistics
are well studied disciplines which have traditionally been perceived as distinct,
embracing different algorithms, different applications, and different potential
end-users. However, as recent research work has shown, the two seemingly distinct
disciplines are in fact intimately connected, with a large variety of natural
language processing applications adopting efficient and elegant solutions from
graph-theoretical framework. Traditional graph theory, which is studied as a
sub-discipline of mathematics, has been successfully applied in modeling and solving
several applications in Natural Language Processing. More recently, complex network
theory, a popular modeling paradigm in statistical mechanics and physics of complex
systems, was proven to be a promising tool in understanding the structure and
dynamics of languages. Complex network based models have been applied to areas as
diverse as language evolution, acquisition, historical linguistics, mining and
analyzing the social networks of blogs and emails, link analysis and information
retrieval, information extraction, and representation of the mental lexicon.
Similarly, in many NLP applications entities can be naturally represented as nodes
in a graph and relations between them can be represented as edges. Recent research
has shown that graph-based representations of linguistic units as diverse as words,
sentences and documents give rise to novel and efficient solutions in a variety of
NLP tasks, ranging from part-of-speech tagging, word sense disambiguation and
parsing to information extraction, semantic role labeling, summarization, and
sentiment analysis.
The TextGraphs workshop addresses a broad spectrum of research areas and brings
together specialists working on graph-based models and algorithms for natural
language processing and computational linguistics, as well as on the theoretical
foundations of related graph-based methods. This workshop is aimed at fostering an
exchange of ideas by facilitating a discussion about both the techniques and the
theoretical justification of the empirical results among the NLP community members.
Spawning a deeper understanding of the basic theoretical principles involved, such
interaction is vital to the further progress of graph-based NLP applications.
TextGraphs-4 builds on the success of the previous three TextGraphs workshops:
* TextGraphs-1 held at HLT-NAACL 2006 (http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~textgraphs/ws06/)
* TextGraphs-2 held at HLT-NAACL 2007 (http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~textgraphs/ws07/)
* TextGraphs-3 held at Coling 2008 (http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~textgraphs/ws08/)
TextGraphs-3 started the trend of having a special theme for the workshop every
year. Consequently, last year the theme was "lexical representation and
acquisition". Following the same trend, this year TextGraphs-4 will have a special
theme on "Cognitive and Social Dynamics of Languages in the framework of Complex
Networks". Cognitive dynamics of languages include topics focused primarily on
language acquisition, which can be extended to language change (historical
linguistics) and language evolution as well. Since the latter phenomena are also
governed by social factors, we can further classify them under social dynamics of
languages. In addition, social dynamics of languages also include topics such as
mining the social networks of blogs and emails.
The modeling paradigm being complex networks, some of the topics covered by this
special theme are:
* Lexical acquisition and growth of the mental lexicon
* Phonological, syntactic and semantic acquisition
* Lexical change
* Applications of networks in modeling language variation and dialectometry
* Effect of social structure on language change and evolution
* Analysis of blog and email networks for IR and IE
Apart from the special theme, TextGraphs-4 also invites submissions on the following
(but not limited to) general topics:
* Graph-based representations, acquisition and evaluation of lexicon and ontology
* Node and edge labeling for linguistic graphs
* Properties of lexical, semantic, syntactic and phonological graphs
* Graph methods for morpho-syntactic annotation, word sense disambiguation,
information retrieval, information
extraction, summarization, text mining and understanding
* Random walk models in NLP
* Graph clustering algorithms
* Application of spectral graph theory in NLP
* Unsupervised and semi-supervised graph-based methods
* Dynamic graph representations for NLP
* Comparative analysis of graph-based methods and traditional machine leaning
techniques for NLP applications.
Important Dates:
* Paper submissions: May 1, 2009
* Notification of acceptances: Jun 1, 2009
* Camera-ready copies due: Jun 7, 2009
* Workshop: Aug 6/7, 2009
Organizers:
* Monojit Choudhury, Microsoft Research India
* Samer Hassan, University of North Texas
* Animesh Mukherjee, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
* Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University
Program Committee:
* Eneko Agirre, Basque Country University
* Edo Airoldi, Princeton University
* Alain Barrat, C.N.R.S., Marseille, France
* Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
* Chris Biemann, Powerset
* Andras Csomai, Google Inc.
* Hong Cui, Yahoo Inc
* Hal Daume III, University of Utah
* Mona Diab, Columbia University
* Santo Fortunato, ISI Foundation, Italy
* Michael Gammon, Microsoft Research Redmond
* Niloy Ganguly, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
* Lise Getoor, University of Maryland
* Simon Kirby, University of Edinburgh
* Ben Leong, University of Delaware
* Vittorio Loreto, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
* Irina Matveeva, Accenture Technology Labs
* Alexander Mehler, Universität Bielefeld
* Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
* Roberto Navigli, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
* John Nerbonne, University of Groningen
* Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan
* Raghavendra Udupa, Microsoft Research India
* Xiaojun Wan, Peking University, China
* Søren Wichmann, MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology
Endorsement:
The TextGraphs-4 workshop has been endorsed by SIGLEX.
Author Instructions:
Submissions will consist of regular full papers of max. 8 pages and short papers of
max. 4 pages, formatted following the ACL/IJCNLP 2009 guidelines. In order to
facilitate blind reviewing, the authors should omit their names and affiliations
from the paper. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity must
be avoided.
Special Issue:
Some of the high quality submissions pertaining to the special theme of the workshop
will be invited for publication in a special issue named "Network-based Models of
Cognitive and Social Dynamics of Language" in the Computer Speech and Language
journal, Elsevier (IF: 1.094). Computer Speech & Language publishes reports of
original research related to the recognition, understanding, production, coding and
mining of speech and language (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/csl).
Guest Editors:
* Monojit Choudhury, Microsoft Research India
* Samer Hassan, University of North Texas
* Animesh Mukherjee, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
* Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University
Aims and Scope:
In this special issue, we would like to compose a collection of articles selected
from the high-quality submissions pertaining to the special theme of TextGraphs-4.
The topics of interest, therefore, are similar to those listed under the "special
theme" topics of TextGraphs-4.
The important deadlines for the special issue are as follows:
* Paper submissions: October 2009
* Notification of acceptance: January 2010
* Camera-ready papers: March 2010
* Publication: July 2010
Submission Guidelines:
Some of the authors of papers appearing in TextGraphs-4 addressing the special theme
will be invited to submit an extended version of their paper, e.g., by providing
more details, thereby, giving an in-depth discussion of the results and the related
work, by expanding upon the experimental results, and by giving a more thorough and
scholarly treatment of the material (which will usually not be possible in the
workshop paper due to page limits). While submitting the journal version, the
authors are also requested to provide the earlier (published) version accompanied by
a brief letter pointing out the developments in the new version.
For the journal version, all submissions should be formatted according to the
Computer Speech and Language guidelines for writing papers
(http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622808/auth...)
and should be submitted using the Elsevier Editorial System for Computer Speech and
Language (http://ees.elsevier.com/csl/).