The Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and
Related Formalisms (TAG+8)

endorsed by
The Association for the Mathematics of Language (ACL SigMoL)

15-16 July 2006
Sydney, Australia


CALL FOR PAPERS


An important subfield of computational linguistics and natural
language processing is research that centers around formal machinery
for describing language.  This covers a wide range of
interdisciplinary work in the cognitive science of language, including
the mathematical and algorithmic properties of this machinery, the
grammatical description of natural language, and the mechanisms of
human language use.  The results of this research will often drive
more applied and empirical areas such as efficient algorithms and
models for machine learning.

Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) is a prominent formalism in the study of
natural language because of its attractive formal properties and its
extended domain of locality. TAG has been studied extensively in the
last three decades with respect to both its mathematical properties
and computational applications, as well as its role in constructing
grammatical theories, models of language processing and applications.

This workshop, the latest in a series that has been running
successfully since 1990, aims at bringing together researchers
interested in various aspects of the TAG formalism including relations
to other grammar formalisms -- this is the reason for the "+" in the
workshop's name. In the past, interaction between such formalisms has
been productive, leading for example to the development of
broad-coverage grammars, and to new insights into properties of
different formalisms. Such related formalisms would include minimalist
syntax, categorial grammar, dependency grammars, HPSG, LFG, and others
which share with TAG general properties such as lexicalization of
syntactic structure, a simple notion of local grammatical dependency,
or mildly context sensitive generative capacity.

Invited speakers:

  * Mark Johnson, Brown University
  * TBA

We invite submissions on all aspects of TAG and related systems and
anticipate holding sessions devoted to:

  * syntactic and semantic theory; 
  * mathematical properties; 
  * computational and algorithmic studies of parsing, 
    interpretation and generation; 
  * psycholinguistic modeling; and 
  * applications to natural language processing.

A key goal is thus to deepen knowledge of the formalisms that can be
used to describe natural language; the intention is for this workshop
to act as a forum for doing this, in the context of an increasing
empirical focus in the fields of computational linguistics and natural
language processing.  Equally, however, it is a goal of the workshop
to encourage the connection of formal results to this empirical work.

Anonymous abstracts may be submitted for two sorts of presentations at
the workshop: spoken presentations and poster presentations. Poster
presentations are particularly appropriate for brief descriptions of
specialized implementations, resources under development and work in
progress. Regardless of type of submission, abstracts may not exceed
two pages in length (not including data, figures and references). All
abstracts are to be submitted electronically using the ACL START
conference submission system.

The workshop website is at http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/TAG+8/.

The ACL website is at http://www.acl2006.mq.edu.au/.

Important dates:

  * Deadline for submission of abstracts: April 7 2006.
  * Notification of acceptance: May 9 2006.
  * Deadline for camera-ready submission: June 6 2006.
  * Workshop dates: July 15 to 16 2006.

Proceedings including full papers for accepted abstracts (including
both oral presentations and poster presentations) will be available
on-line and at the workshop. In addition, we will explore
possibilities for subsequent publication of workshop articles, for
example through a special issue of a journal.

Organization:

Local Arrangements Chair

  Mark Dras, Macquarie University

Program Committee

  Tilman Becker (co-chair), DFKI 
  Laura Kallmeyer (co-chair), University of Tuebingen
  Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Research
  Eric de la Clergerie, INRIA
  Dan Flickinger, CSLI, Stanford University
  Robert Frank, Johns Hopkins University
  Akio Fujiyoshi, Ibaraki University
  Claire Gardent, LORIA
  Chung-Hye Han, Simon Fraser University
  Karin Harbusch, University of Koblenz
  Geert-Jan Kruijff, Charles University		
  Vincenzo Lombardo, University of Turin
  David McDonald
  Martha Palmer, University of Colorado
  Owen Rambow, Columbia University
  Frank Richter, University of Tuebingen
  James Rogers, Earlham College
  Maribel Romero, University of Pennsylvania
  Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University
  Giorgio Satta, University of Padua
  Stuart Shieber, Harvard College
  Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
  Matthew Stone, Rutgers University
  Yuka Tateisi, University of Tokyo
  David Weir, University of Sussex
  Vijay-Shanker, University of Delaware
  Naoki Yoshinaga, University of Tokyo

Previous TAG+ meetings have been held at:

  * Dagstuhl (1990)
  * Philadelphia (1992)
  * Paris (1994)
  * Philadelphia (1998)
  * Paris (2000)
  * Venice (2002) 
  * Vancouver (2004)