CALL FOR PAPERS

COLING 2008 Workshop TextGraphs-3: Graph-based Algorithms for Natural Language Processing
Manchester, UK, August 24, 2008
http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~textgraphs/ws08/

This workshop is part of The 22nd International Conference on
Computational Linguistics (COLING 2008)

Recent years have shown an increased interest in bringing the field of graph theory into natural language processing. Traditionally, these two areas of study have been perceived as distinct, with different algorithms, different applications, and different potential end-users. However, as recent research work has shown, these two disciplines are in fact intimately connected, with a large variety of natural language processing applications finding efficient solutions within graph-theoretical frameworks.

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 assignment, summarisation, sentiment analysis and up to the study of the evolutionary dynamics of language.

The Textgraphs workshop addresses a broad spectrum of research areas and brings together researchers working on problems related to the use of graph-based algorithms for natural language processing as well as on the theory of graph-based methods. We are interested in looking at graph-based methods from the perspective of diverse applications to facilitate a discussion about the theory of graph-based methods and about the theoretical justification of the empirical results within the NLP community.

Starting with Textgraphs-3 we would like to have one area of graph-based NLP research as the primary topic for discussion. This year's focus is on large scale lexical acquisition and representation. Efficient graph methods can help to alleviate the acquisition bottleneck for lexicon construction and resource building. They also provide smarter representation schemes for the lexicon that facilitate fast search and word retrieval. SIGLEX endorsed our workshop proposal for COLING-08.

We invite submissions of papers on graph-based methods applied to NLP problems. Especially, we encourage submissions regarding

*Large-scale lexical acquisition using graph representations
*Graph-based representation schemes of the mental lexicon

Other topics include, but are not limited to:

*Graph representations for ontology learning
*Graph labeling and edge labeling for semantic representations
*Encoding semantic distances in graphs
*Graph algorithms for word sense disambiguation
*Graph methods for Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Text Mining and Understanding
*Random walk graph methods
*Spectral graph clustering
*Small world graphs in natural language processing
*Semi-supervised graph-based methods
*Statistical network methods and analysis
*Dynamic graph representations for NLP

Organization Committee

Irina Matveeva, Accenture Technology Labs, matveeva at cs.uchicago.edu
Chris Biemann, Powerset, biem at informatik.uni-leipzig.de
Monojit Choudhury, Microsoft Research, monojit at cse.iitkgp.ernet.in
Mona Diab,Columbia University, mdiab AT cs.columbia.edu

Program Committee

Eneko Agirre, University of the Basque Country
Edo Airoldi, Princeton University
Regina Barzilay, MIT
Fernando Diaz, Yahoo! Montreal
Michael Gamon, Microsoft Research
Andrew Goldberg, University of Wisconsin
Hany Hassan, IBM Egypt
Samer Hassan, University of North Texas
Gina Levow, University of Chicago
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
Animesh Mukherjee, IIT Kharagpur
Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan
Uwe Quasthoff, University of Leipzig
Aitor Soroa, University of the Basque Country
Hans Friedrich Witschel, University of Leipzig
Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, University of Rome "Tor Vergata"
Thorsten Zesch, University of Darmstadt

Important Dates

Regular paper submissions May 5, 2008
Short paper submissions May 19, 2008
Notification of acceptance June 6, 2008
Camera-ready papers July 1, 2008
Workshop August 24, 2008

Author Instructions

Submissions will consist of regular full papers of max. 8 pages and short papers of max. 4 pages, formatted following the COLING 2008 formatting guidelines. Papers should be submitted using the online submission form. For any questions, please contact one of the organizers.

Please, follow the instruction on the workshop website:

http://lit.csci.unt.edu/~textgraphs/ws08/