Call for Papers

         ACL-COLING 2006 Workshop on "Linguistic Distances"
                        July 23, 2006
                       Sydney, Australia

Background

In many theoretical and applied areas of computational linguistics
researchers operate with a notion of linguistic distance or,
conversely, linguistic similarity, which is the focus of the present
workshop.  While many CL areas make frequent use of such notions, it
has received little focused attention, an honorable exception being
Lebart & Rajman (2000).

In information retrieval (IR), also the focus of Lebart & Rajman's
work, similarity is at heart of most techniques seeking an optimal
match between query and document.  Techniques in vector space models
operationalize this via (weighted) cosine measures, but older tf/idf
models were also arguably aiming at a notion of similarity.

Word sense disambiguation models often work with a notion of
similarity among the contexts within which word (senses) appear, and
MT identifies candidate lexical translation equivalents via a
comparable measure of similarity.  Many learning algorithms currently
popular in CL, including not only supervised techniqes such as memory-
based learning (k-nn) and support-vector machines, but also
unsupervised techniques such as Kohonen maps and clustering, rely
essentially on measures of similarity for their processing.

Notions of similarity are often invoked in linguistic areas such as
dialectology, historical linguistics, stylometry, second-language
learning (as a measure of learners' proficiency), psycholinguistics
(acounting for lexical "neighborhood" effects, where neighborhoods are
defined by similarity) and even in theoretical linguistics (novel
accounts of the phonological constraints on semitic roots).

The workshop aims to bring together researchers employing various
measures of linguistic distance or similarity, including novel
proposals, especially to demonstrate the importance of the abstract
properties of such measures (validity, stability over corpus size,
computability, fidelity to the mathematical distance axioms), but
also to exchange information on how to analyze distance information
further.  We assume that there is a "hidden variable" in the
similarity relation, so that we should always speak of similarity with
respect to some property, and we suspect that there is such a plethora
of measures in part because researchers are often inexplicit on this
point.  It will useful to tease the different notions apart.  Finally,
it is most intriguing if we might make a start on understanding how
some of the different notions might construed as alternative
realizations of a single abstract notion.

Lebart, L. & M. Rajman (2000)  Computing Similarity.  In R.Dale et al.
  (eds.) Handbook of NLP.  Dekker: Basel.


Web Site

A workshop website will be constructed at
www.let.rug.nl/alfa/ling-dist/

Call for papers

Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research
investigating linguistic distance measures, and their application,
analysis and interpretation.  The submission deadline is below.


Submissions.

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and
should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly
recommend the use of the LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word document
template that will be made available on the conference Web site
(http://www.acl2006.mq.edu.au/).  We reserve the right to reject
submissions that do not conform to these styles, including font size
restrictions.

As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...",
should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to these
requirements will be rejected without review.

Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted
papers is Adobe PDF. The papers must be submitted no later than April
1, 2006. Papers submitted after that time will not be reviewed. For
details of the submission procedure, please consult the submission
webpage reachable via the conference website.

Questions regarding the submission procedure should be directed to the
Program Co-Chairs, John Nerbonne and/or Erhard Hinrichs
(j.nerbonne@rug.nl,eh@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de).

Papers that are being submitted in parallel to other conferences or
workshops must indicate this on the title page, as must papers that
contain significant overlap with previously published work.  Please
use the abstract or the title footnote for noting these complications.

Important Dates

    April 1, 2006  Submission Deadline
    May  10        Notification of Acceptance
    June  1	      Final papers to organizers

Program Committee 

John Nerbonne (Groningen) and Erhard Hinrichs (T|bingen) (chairs),
Harald Baayen (Nijmegen), Walter Daelemans (Antwerp), Ido Dagan
(Technion, Haifa), Wilbert Heeringa (Groningen), Ed Hovy (ISI, Los
Angeles), Grzegorz Kondrak (Alberta), Sandra K|bler (T|bingen), Rada
Mihalcea (North Texas), Ted Pedersen (Minnesota), Dan Roth (Illinois),
Hinrich Sch|tze (Stuttgart), Junichi Tsuji (Tokyo), Menno van Zaanen
(Macquarie, Sydney)

For LaTeX and Word Templates, see http://www.acl2006.mq.edu.au/