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ACL 2010 Workshop on Applications of Tree Automata in Natural
Language Processing

July 16, 2010 Uppsala, Sweden

http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/atanlp/

1. Workshop Description

The theory of tree automata has an increasing number of
applications in natural language processing; examples for this
can be found in work on topics as diverse as grammar formalisms,
computational semantics, language generation, and machine
translation. Here, the term tree automaton is to be understood in
a generic sense, including all types of formal devices that
specify, generate or transform tree languages or, more generally,
tree series.

The goals of this workshop are to provide a dedicated venue for
the presentation of work that relates the theory of tree automata
to natural language processing, and to create a forum where
researchers from the two areas can meet and exchange ideas.
Specifically, the workshop aims at raising the awareness for
theoretical results useful for applications in natural language
processing, and at identifying open theoretical problems raised
by such applications.

2. Topics of Interest

Topics of interest for the workshop are all topics related to or
motivated by the application of tree automata in natural language
processing. These include but are not limited to the following:

* representations of languages by tree automata and tree
  grammars;
* tree transducers, synchronous grammars, and related devices and
  their application to, e.g., machine translation;
* tree logics and their application to, e.g., natural language
  syntax and semantics;
* weighted extensions of the aforementioned;
* algorithms related to the implementation of tree automata, such
  as algorithms for matching, accepting, and parsing;
* learning and training algorithms for tree automata;
* tree automata-based query languages for, e.g., treebanks and
  parallel syntactic corpora;
* relations between tree languages and string languages with
  motivation in NLP;
* case studies concerning the application of tree automata
  techniques in natural language processing.

3. Invited Speaker

Kevin Knight (ISI/University of Southern California, USA)

4. Submission Information

The workshop invites submission of two kinds of contributions:
full papers and proposals for so-called quickfire presentations.

4.1 Full Papers

Full papers should report original and unpublished research on
topics of interest for the workshop. Accepted papers are expected
to be presented at the workshop, and will be published in the
workshop proceedings. They should emphasize obtained results
rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state
of completion of the reported results. A paper accepted for
presentation at the workshop must not be presented or have been
presented at any other meeting with publicly available
proceedings. If essentially identical papers are submitted to
other conferences or workshops as well, this fact must be
indicated at submission.

Reviewing will be double-blind, and all papers will receive at
least three independent reviews. Submissions will be assessed
with respect to appropriateness, clarity, soundness/correctness,
meaningful comparison, originality/innovativeness, and impact of
ideas or results.

The maximum length of a submitted paper is eight (8) pages of
content, excluding references. If necessary, authors may add an
appendix containing proofs and the like, but the paper should be
accessible without reading the appendix. The final manuscript is
limited to eight (8) pages of content and nine (9) pages in
total.

As reviewing will be double-blind, the paper should not include
the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references
that reveal the author's identity, anonymous citations and
acknowledgements should be avoided.

4.2 Proposals for Quickfire Presentations

Individual researchers and research groups working on topics of
interest for the workshop are invited to present their work to
the workshop audience in the form of a so-called quickfire
presentation of about 10 min each. The idea behind these
presentations is to provide a means for triggering discussions
and an exchange of ideas. Based on the interests of a research
group or an individual researcher, the typical quickfire
presentation will point out potential relations between the
theory of tree automata and natural language processing, thus
indicating ideas and opportunities for future collaboration
rather than presenting specific results obtained. In particular,
we welcome quickfire presentations by researchers in natural
language processing who wish to enter into a scientific
discussion with researchers in tree automata theory, or vice
versa.

Quickfire presentations will be selected based on informal
proposals that briefly describe the planned content of the
presentation and indicate why it is supposed to be of interest
for the other attendees of the workshop. The maximum length of a
submitted proposal is one (1) page. Proposals for quickfire
presentations related to submitted full papers should carefully
point out the difference between the two.

4.3 General Information

All submissions must be electronic in PDF and must be formatted
using the ACL 2010 style files, which are available at the
following address:

http://www.acl2010.org/authors.html

Contributions should be submitted via the submission site:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2010/ATANLP/

The page limits have to be be strictly observed; submissions
exceeding them will not be considered. Final decisions on the
program will be made by the Programme Committee.

The submission deadline is 23:59 CET on 5 April 2010.

5. Important Dates

Submission deadline: April 5, 2010 Notification of acceptance:
May 6, 2010 Camera-ready versions due: May 16, 2010 Workshop:
July 16, 2010, following ACL 2010

6. Workshop Chairs

Frank Drewes, Department of Computer Science, Umeå University,
Sweden

Marco Kuhlmann, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala
University, Sweden

The workshop chairs can be contacted at the joint email address
atanlp2010 AT fastmail DOT net.

7. Programme Committee

Parosh Aziz Abdulla (Uppsala University, Sweden) Leonor
Becerra-Bonache (Yale University, USA) Chris Callison-Burch
(Johns Hopkins University, USA) David Chiang (ISI/University of
Southern California, USA) Loek Cleophas (University of Pretoria,
South Africa) Trevor Cohn (University of Edinburgh, UK) François
Denis (Université de Provence, France) Thomas Hanneforth
(Universität Potsdam, Germany) Johanna Högberg (Umeå University,
Sweden) Liang Huang (ISI/University of Southern California, USA)
Stephan Kepser (codecentric GmbH, Germany) Alexander Koller
(Saarland University, Germany) Andreas Maletti (Universitat
Rovira i Virgili, Spain) Sebastian Maneth (NICTA, Australia)
Jonathan May (ISI/University of Southern California, USA) Brink
van der Merve (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa) Mark-Jan
Nederhof (University of St Andrews, UK) Joachim Niehren (INRIA,
France) Kai Salomaa (Queen's University, Canada) Anoop Sarkar
(Simon Fraser University, Canada) Giorgio Satta (University of
Padua, Italy) Stuart Shieber (Harvard University, USA) Magnus
Steinby (University of Turku, Finland) Marc Tommasi (INRIA,
France)

Heiko Vogler (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)

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