First Call for Papers

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1st Workshop on 'Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity' (CL4LC).

Collocated with COLING 2016 in Osaka (Japan) on Sunday, 11 December 2016.

https://sites.google.com/site/cl4lc2016/home

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Workshop Description

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CL4LC aims at investigating 'processing' aspects of linguistic complexity both from a machine point of view and from the perspective of the human subject to promote a common reflection on approaches for the detection, evaluation and modelling of linguistic complexity.

The term linguistic complexity is highly polysemous and several definitions have been advanced according to different standpoint theories. One major standpoint considers the 'theoretical' distinction between absolute complexity (i.e. the formal properties of linguistic systems) and relative complexity (i.e. covering issues such as cognitive cost, difficulty, level of demand for a user/learner).

CL4LC aims at investigating a complementary standpoint which has long attracted great interest in the Computational Linguistics community. This is focused on 'processing' aspects related to linguistic complexity both from a machine point of view and from the perspective of the human subject.

The objective of the workshop is to promote a common reflection on approaches for the detection, evaluation and modeling of linguistic complexity, with a particular emphasis on  research questions such as:

whether, and to what extent, a machine and human subject perspective can be combined or share commonalities; whether, and to what extent, linguistic complexity metrics specific for the human subject perspective can be extended for handling complexity for machine and vice versa; whether, and to what extent, linguistic phenomena hampering human processing correlate with difficulties in the automatic processing of language.

Despite the two perspectives have been separately treated, the interest for the “processing” aspects of linguistic complexity is shared by several initiatives and workshops within the NLP community where the emphasis has been put more on the achievement of specific tasks than on an overt reflection of linguistic complexity underlying the treated phenomena. From the machine point of view, this is the case, for instance, of initiatives focusing on linguistic complexity raised by e.g. the automatic processing of typologically different languages or language varieties deviant with respect to the standard language or by the challenges of parsing languages with morphology richer than English, or non-canonical varieties of language (e.g. spoken language, the language of social media, historical data etc.).

From the human subject perspective the attention is directed to what is complex (i.e. difficult) for a speaker, hearer, reader, learner with the aim of both modeling the cognitive processing underlying language usage and developing human-oriented applications. This is the case e.g. of computational linguistics methods devoted to unravel the difficulties in online language processing or to build applications to improve text accessibility in different scenarios, e.g. education, social inclusion.

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List of Topics

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We encourage the submission of long and short research papers including, but not limited to the following topics:

Detection and Measurement of Linguistic Complexity:

- methods to measure and modeling human comprehension difficulty, in terms of e.g. Dependency Locality and Surprisal frameworks;

- methods to measure complexity in linguistic systems with respect to different linguistic dimensions (e.g. morphology, syntax);

- methods to measure the distance between texts and learners' competences, according to their literacy skills, native language or language impairments;

- methods and models to measure text quality, in terms e.g. of grammaticality, style, accessibility, readability;

- methods to measure the distance between training corpora and texts in machine learning perspective;

- approaches to compute the processing perplexity of machine learning systems.

Processing of Linguistic Complexity:

- models of human language acquisition in specific linguistic environments, e.g. atypical language acquisition scenarios, Second Language Acquisition (SLA), learning of domain specific sub-languages;

- methods to reduce linguistic complexity for improving human understanding, e.g. text simplification and normalization to improve human comprehension;

- methods to reduce linguistic complexity for improving machine processing, e.g. text simplification for machine translation, word reordering to improve semantic and syntactic parsing;

- experimental approaches to CL4LC: experimental platforms and designs, experimental methods, resources;

- automatic processing of non-canonical languages and cross-lingual model transfer approaches; NLP tools and resources for CL4LC; Vision papers discussing the link between human and machine oriented perspectives on linguistic complexity.

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Submissions

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We invite submissions of both long and short papers, including opinion statements. All of the papers will be included in conference proceedings, this time in electronic form only.

Long papers may consist of up to eight pages (A4), plus two extra pages for references. Short papers may consist of up to four pages (A4), plus two extra pages for references. Authors of accepted papers will be given additional space in the camera-ready version to reflect space needed for changes stemming from reviewers comments.

Papers shall be submitted in English, anonymised with regard to the authors and/or their institution (no author-identifying information on the title page nor anywhere in the paper), including referencing style as usual. Authors should also ensure that identifying meta-information is removed from files submitted for review.

Papers must conform to official COLING 2016 style guidelines, which are available in coling2016.zip. coling2016.zip has LaTeX files, Microsoft Word template file, and sample PDF file.

Submission and reviewing will be managed online by the START system. The only accepted format for submitted papers is in Adobe's PDF. Submissions must be uploaded on the START system (to be anounced soon) by the submission deadlines.

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Important Dates

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June 2016: First call for workshop papers September 25, 2016: Workshop paper due October 16, 2016: Notification of acceptance October 30, 2016: Camera-ready due November 30, 2016: Official proceedings publication date December 11, 2016: Workshop date

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Program committee

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Delphine Bernhard (LilPa, France)

Nicoletta Calzolari (European Language Resources Association (ELRA), France) Angelo Cangelosi, (Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at the University of Plymouth, UK) Benoît Crabbé (Université Paris 7, INRIA, France) Matthew Crocker (Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany) Scott Crossley (Georgia State University, USA) Rodolfo Delmonte (Department of Computer Science, Università Ca’ Foscari, Italy) Piet Desmet (KULeuven, Belgium) Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza (IXA NLP Group, University of the Basque Country) Cédrick Fairon (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Marcello Ferro (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Nuria Gala (Aix-Marseille Université, France) Ted Gibson (MIT, USA) Itziar Gonzalez-Dios (IXA NLP Group, University of the Basque Country) Alex Housen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Frank Keller (University of Edinburgh, UK) Kristopher Kyle (Georgia State University, USA) Alessandro Lenci (Università di Pisa, Italy) Annie Louis (University of Essex, UK) Xiaofei Lu (Pennsylvania State University, USA) Ryan Mcdonald (Google) Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen, Germany) Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Frederick J. Newmeyer (University of Washington, USA, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, CA) Joakim Nivre (Uppsala University, Sweden) Gabriele Pallotti (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy) Magali Paquot (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Katerina Pastra (Cognitive Systems Research Institute, Greece) Vito Pirrelli (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, ILC-CNR, Italy) Barbara Plank (University of Groningen, Netherlands) Massimo Poesio (University of Essex, UK) Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Advaith Siddharthan (University of Aberdeen, UK) Paul Smolensky (John Hopkins University, USA) Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (KULeuven, Belgium) Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii (University of Tokyo, Japan) Joel Tetreault (Yahoo! Labs) Sara Tonelli (FBK, Trento, Italy) Sowmya Vajjala (Iowa State University, USA) Aline Villavicencio (Institute of Informatics Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Elena Volodina (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) Daniel Wiechmann (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Victoria Yaneva (University of Wolverhampton, UK)

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Organisers

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Dominique Brunato,  Felice Dell'Orletta,  Giulia Venturi

    ItaliaNLP Lab @ Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale 'A. Zampolli', Pisa (Italy)

Thomas François

    CENTAL, IL&C, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)

Philippe Blache

    Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS & Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence (France)

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Contact

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For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to: cl4lc.ws@gmail.com