Call for Papers

1st Computational Systemic Functional Grammar Conference

http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~rcdmnl/csfgc.html

University of Sydney
Sydney, Australia
16th July, 2005

INTRODUCTION
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is now a well developed linguistic theory that has been used in many domains as a powerful resource for analysis of texts of a wide range of types, comprehensive descriptions of English, Chinese, Japanese, and a significant number of other languages, and theoretical modeling of language and other semiotic systems. One key domain since the 1960s has been computational linguistics (CL). It influenced Terry Winograd's work, contributed to the development of Martin Kay's functional unification grammar, and played a major role in the development of text generation, as this strand within CL expanded in the 1980s. The seminal work in this area was the Penman project; and this has led to the development of the current KPML system. However, there are many areas of CL where SFL has not played a role but where it could have made a significant contribution; and there are many lines of research in NLP that are highly relevant to SFL. Developments within both CL and SFL in the last decade or so have created a context where a much wider exchange and collaboration would now be very timely. For example, in SFL, there is a small emerging group of scholars who have independently developed tools for SFG text annotation, and grammars for analysis and text generation, as well as dialects of SFG itself. The theory now has enough coverage for use on larger tasks and the movement in CL to give more attention to semantic processing clearly makes the time ripe to bring the two communities together to explore mutual engagement and learn from each other's knowledge.

This conference is organised to satisfy the needs of and bring together two communities of scholars, providing a supportive context for linguists interested in pursuing computational applications and in using computational tools and for computational linguists who wish to exploit SFL's rich descriptions, extensive experience with text analysis, and theoretical modeling for computing meaning. The goal is to enrich both CL and SFL, and to facilitate the development of news areas of research and application.

Papers relating SFL and CL to one another are invited, including papers dealing with the use of SFL in both the development of operational or research systems and the experience of working in technology projects no matter the language. Some specific topics are:

PRAXIS
Language technology in the service of community needs
Experience as linguists in NLP projects

TOOLS & RESOURCES
Development and provision of specific linguistic resources
Descriptions of grammar dialects
Computational tools for linguistic research
Tools for SFG markup
Tools for SFG parsing

APPLICATIONS
Document Classification
Q&A
Discourse analysis
Text generation systems
Machine Translation
Specialised Semantic Processing, e.g. Sentiment, Persuasion, etc.

SHARED TASK
A shared task has been developed to encourage computational linguists to engage in developing methods for computing SFG phenomena. The task consist of clause boundary detection as defined by SFG. Papers for the shared task may be up to 5-pages. Authors do NOT have to attend the conference for their papers to be accepted and all papers will be discussed in a critical analysis of the results prepared by the organisers. Authors are encouraged to address investigations and discussions into specific issues relating to understanding the theoretical and algorithmic implications of their solutions rather than just obtaining the best scores.

The details of the shared task can found at http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~casey/fcbd

Papers for the shared task should be submitted by 27th May, 2005.

THE 1ST CSFG CONFERENCE IS TO BE HELD IN CONJUNCTION WITH
Pre-Congress Institute at Macquarie University, Sydney
http://www.asfla.org.au/isfc2005/institute/home.html

ORGANISERS
Jon Patrick, University of Sydney
Christian Matthiessen, Macquarie University

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Shlomo Argamon
John Bateman
Wu Canzhong
Marilyn Cross
Ed Hovy
Graeme Hirst
Kentaro Inui
Ichiro Kobayashi
Jim Martin
Michael O'Donnell
Cecile Paris
Robin Fawcett
Serge Sharoff
Erich Steiner
Kazuhiro Teruya
Michio Sugeno
Elke Teich
Gordon Tucker

DATES
Paper Submission
Full Papers: 14th April, 2005
Notification of Acceptance: 14 May, 2005
Camera ready final papers Due: 14 June, 2005

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
Papers can be at most 10 pages long, and should use the ACL style files (available from the Association for Computational Linguistics website.).

The pdf file containing the camera-ready version of your paper must be e-mailed to csfg05@it.usyd.edu.au.

ENDORSED BY
Association for Computational Linguistics