EACL 2006 Workshop on RObust Methods in Analysis of Natural language Data (ROMAND) April 3rd 2006, Trento, Italy http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~vincenzo/romand2006/ The EACL 2006 Workshop on RObust Methods in Analysis of Natural language Data will be hosted in conjunction with the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics that will take place April 3-7, 2006, in Trento, Italy. * TOPICS Robustness in Computational Linguistics has been recognized as an important issue for the design of Natural Language Processing applications but is not particularly well addressed by common evaluation procedures where test and training data are usually obtained from the same source. Robustness, however, can be defined as a smooth degradation in the performance of a system when faced with unexpected input. Therefore, robustness is the ability to deal with deviation from the norm and has much in common with issues like scalability and portability. To develop a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying robust behaviour, papers are invited addressing aspects of robustness in HLT from different perspectives including psycho-linguistic insights. Of particular interest are submissions dealing with issues of robustness for a range of challenging NLP applications such as (but not limited to) Machine Translation, Information Extraction, Summarization, Question-Answering, and Spoken Dialogue Systems. Moreover, the workshop will also make an attempt to strengthen the empirical basis of research into issues of robustness by inviting participants to contribute proposals for the design of Evaluation Frameworks which would allow to measure the degree of robustness and make it comparable, perhaps even across different Natural Language Processing tasks. * SUBMISSIONS Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Submissions should be formatted using the EACL 2006 stylefiles with overt author and affiliation information and not exceeding 8 pages. The EACL 2006 stylefiles are available at http://eacl06.itc.it/submission/submission.htm Please send your PDF file no later than January 6, 2006, to both Vincenzo.Pallotta@unifr.ch and menzel@informatik.uni-hamburg.de Each submission will be reviewed at least by two members of the programme committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Dual submissions to the main EACL 2006 conference and this workshop are allowed; if you submit to the main session, do indicate this when you submit to the workshop. If your paper is accepted for the main session, you should withdraw your paper from the workshop upon notification by the main session. * REGISTRATION Information on registration and registration fees will be provided at the conference web page. * IMPORTANT DATES January 6, 2006 - Deadline for workshop papers January 27, 2006 - Notification of acceptance February 10, 2006 - Camera-ready papers due April 3, 2006 - ROMAND 2006 As the schedule is extremely tight, deadline extensions are NOT possible. * PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Afzal Ballim Alberto Lavelli Alexander Clark Amedeo Cappelli Amalia Todirascu Atro Voutilainen Beth-Ann Hockey Bangalore Srinivas Dan Cristea Dan Tufis Diego Molla-Aliod Eric Wehrli Fabio Massimo Zanzotto Fabio Rinaldi Florentina Hristea Frank Keller Frank Schilder Jean-Cedric Chappelier Jean-Pierre Chanod Joachim Niehren John Dowding Jose Iria Kay-Uwe Carstensen Maria Teresa Pazienza Manny Rayner Martin Kay Michael Hess Geertjan van Noord Gian Lorenzo Thione Roberto Basili Rodolfo Delmonte Salah Ait-Mokhtar Vincenzo Pallotta Violeta Seretan Wolfgang Menzel Yuji Matsumoto Guenther Goerz * FURTHER INFORMATION Workshop web page http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~vincenzo/romand2006/ Conference web page http://eacl06.itc.it/ EACL 2006 Workshops site http://www.science.uva.nl/~mdr/EACL2006Workshops/ * CONTACT INFORMATION Vincenzo Pallotta (Vincenzo.Pallotta@unifr.ch)