ACL 2004 Workshop

INCREMENTAL PARSING: BRINGING ENGINEERING AND COGNITION TOGETHER

Workshop at ACL-2004
Barcelona, Spain, July 25, 2004

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LINKS

• ACL-2004 homepage
• Workshop on Incremental Parsing

MATERIAL

• acl04.sty: LaTeX style file
• acl04.tex: Sample LaTeX paper
• acl.bst: BibTeX bibliography style
• acl04.bib: Sample bibliography

WORKSHOP TOPIC

Much recent parsing research has focused on the limited task of achieving broad coverage and high accuracy in parsing Treebank corpora. The parsing models developed for this task typically work on a sentence-by-sentence basis: they often only deliver a valid analysis if the input consists of a complete sentence. They are not designed to operate incrementally, i.e., to deliver partial analyses (perhaps with associated probabilities) that can be updated on a word-by-word basis as more of the input becomes available.

Incrementality is desirable for two reasons. First, incremental processing is crucial for many NLP tasks. Language modeling, for instance, typically requires that probabilities are assigned incrementally as more and more of the speech stream becomes available. Recently, a number of parsing models have been proposed that have this property and thus can be used for language modeling. These models have resulted in lower perplexity scores and word error rates than the standard n-gram models. However, the parsing accuracy of these models typically falls short of the state of the art. The challenge for parsing research is to develop models that achieve optimal performance for both parsing and language modeling.

The second argument for incrementality comes from cognitive modeling. There is substantial evidence showing that humans process language in an incremental fashion. Any cognitively plausible model of human parsing must take incrementality into account, and the modeling literature contains considerable discussion on the relevant computational mechanisms. Recently, a number of models of human parsing have been proposed that are based on computational linguistic approaches, such as PCFGs and related statistical models, suggesting a potential synergy between cognitively and technologically motivated parsing research.

TARGET AUDIENCE

The aim of the workshop is to address the dual challenge of defining incremental parsing models that are useful for engineering tasks such as language modeling, while also contributing to our understanding and modeling of the human parsing mechanism. The workshop will bring together parsing researchers from the computational linguistics and cognitive modeling communities, and we expect extensive cross-fertilization from this interaction. From the computational linguistic perspective, cognitive modeling presents new challenges for parsing research, including new evaluation measures that go beyond traditional parseval measures. On the other hand, computational linguistics can contribute crucial methodological advances to cognitive modeling. For instance, the application of probabilistic parsing algorithms to cognitive tasks has important implications for the recent debate on the role of frequency information in human parsing.

AREAS OF INTEREST

Possible topics for workshop submissions include:

• architectures, methods, and algorithms for incremental parsing; including symbolic, probabilistic, connectionist, and hybrid models
• applications of incremental models to parsing, language modeling, and cognitive modeling
• evaluation using standard metrics (parseval, perplexity, word error rate)
• evaluation against behavioral data (reaction times, eye-tracking data, linguistic judgments)
• applications of incremental parsing models in computational linguistics

SUBMISSION FORMAT

Submissions are limited to original, unpublished work. Submissions must use the ACL latex style (available from the workshop web page). Paper submissions should consist of a full paper. The page limit is eight pages.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Electronic submission only: send a postscript (preferred) or PDF file with your submission to:

acl04_workshop@inf.ed.ac.uk

Because reviewing is blind, no author information should be included in the paper. Please send the following information separately (as plain text): title, authors, keywords, and an abstract of no more than 5 lines. Late submissions will not be accepted. Notification of receipt will be e-mailed to the first author shortly after receipt.

DEADLINES

Paper submission deadline:             Mar 22, 2004 Notification of acceptance for papers: May 03, 2004 Camera ready papers due:               May 24, 2004 Wokshop date:                           Jul 25, 2004

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

• Stephen Clark, University of Edinburgh
• Matthew Crocker, Saarland University
• Frank Keller, University of Edinburgh
• Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

• Brian Roark, AT&T Labs Research
• Patrick Sturt, University of Glasgow

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• Steve Abney, University of Michigan
• Thorsten Brants, Google
• Eugene Charniak, Brown University
• Ciprian Chelba, Microsoft Research
• Michael Collins, MIT
• Jeffrey Elman, UCSD
• Ted Gibson, MIT
• John Hale, Michigan State University
• Mark Johnson, Brown University
• Gerard Kempen, University of Leiden
• Stefan Riezler, Palo Alto Research Center
• Brian Roark, AT&T Labs Research
• Douglas Roland, UCSD
• Ed Stabler, UCLA
• Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto
• Patrick Sturt, University of Glasgow

CONTACT INFORMATION

The web site of the workshop is:

http://www.iccs.inf.ed.ac.uk/~keller/acl04_workshop/

The organizers can be contacted at:

School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK
phone: +44-131-650-4407
fax:  +44-131-650-4587

email: acl04_workshop@inf.ed.ac.uk

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Tel: +31 30 253 6039

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