SKATER members organized the Workshop on Adaptive Natural Language Processing

in conjunction with IJCAI 2015

in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 25-27 2015

Motivation and Aims

Natural Language Processing is becoming more and more ubiquitous as technologies become omnipresent in our daily life. This involves a huge effort to develop language-based interfaces, text analytics, search engines, writing assitants among other systems and their related tools and resources. Adaptation has been key to facilitate rapid development of language-based systems, with reuse of existing resources as alternatives to creating tools and resources from scratch. These approaches have benefited from the recent surge of complex Machine Learning approaches as applied to NLP tasks. This is the case for Semi-supervised and Unsupervised Learning, Active Learning, Domain Adaptation, and even Representation Learning and Deep Learning, which have had a very positive impact on NLP tasks and applications.

This workshop aims to provide a meeting point for researchers working on the portability of language resources and methodologies across languages and domains, with a special focus on exploiting available knowledge as a base to facilitate and enhance new developments. We understand that there is a common factor between tasks like porting a parser between related languages, adapting a dialogue system for a different domain, using rules inferred from an annotated corpus together with an unannotated corpus to port an information extraction system to another domain, or simplifying texts for different kinds of readers, among others. We believe that sharing insights on such approaches will be enriching and will contribute to a better understanding of the problems and solutions.

We expect that themes like Representation Learning, Deep Learning and Active Learning, and their successful applications to various areas of NLP, will raise interesting, intellectually challenging discussions.

Workshop Topics

Contributions may present results from completed as well as ongoing research, with an emphasis on novel approaches, methods, ideas, and perspectives.

The topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

Semi-supervised learning, Deep Learning, Active learning and Representation learning for domain adaptation, language portability and task portability
Adaptation and reuse of tools and resources for closely related languages
Adaptation of highly valuable resources, like treebanks, to languages not closely related
Linguistic issues in language portability: false friends, asymmetric discretization of semantic continuum
Learning from multiple domains
Development of multi-domain datasets
Evaluation paradigms for complex learning
Domain adaptation for specific applications: parsing, machine translation, information extraction, document classification, sentiment analysis and author attribution and profiling

Format of submissions

Submissions are invited for papers presenting high quality, previously unpublished research. Selection criteria include originality of ideas, correctness, clarity and significance of results and quality of presentation.

We welcome two types of contributions:

Long papers (10 pages), presenting substantial, original and completed research work. Accepted long papers will be presented orally.
Short papers (6 pages), with a small, focused contribution, work in progress, a negative result or an opinion piece. Accepted short papers will be presented either orally or as a poster.

Short papers can be combined with a system demonstration.

The only accepted format for submitting papers is Adobe PDF. Papers should follow IJCAI-15 formatting Guidelines.

As the review process will be double-blind, your submission must not include the author(s) name(s) and affiliation(s). Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Pérez, 2003) ...", must be avoided. Instead, citations such as "Pérez (2003) previously showed ...", must be used.

Submissions will be electronic, the submission site will be made available soon.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: April 27 2015
Acceptance/rejection notification: May 20 2015
Camera-ready deadline: May 30, 2015
Workshop: July 25-27 2015 at IJCAI 2015

Programme Committee

Luciana Benotti (UNC, Argentina)
Xavier Carreras (XEROX-XRCE, France)
Helena Caseli (UFSCar, Brazil)
José Castaño (UBA, Argentina)
Carlos Iván Chesñevar (UNS, Argentina)
Martín Domínguez (UNC, Argentina)
Pablo Duboue (Les Laboratoires Foulab, Canada)
Marcelo Errecalde (UNSL, Argentina)
Hugo Jair Escalante (INAOE, Mexico)
Paula Estrella (UNC, Argentina)
Mikel Forcada (UA, Spain)
Maria Fuentes Fort (UPC, Spain)
Xavier Gómez Guinovart (UVigo, Spain)
Agustín Gravano (UBA, Argentina)
Franco Luque (UNC, Argentina)
Rada Mihalcea (UNT, USA)
Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes (USP, Brazil)
Lluís Padró (UPC, Spain)
Muntsa Padró (Nuance, Canada)
Martí Quixal (UTübingen, Germany)
Thiago Pardo (USP, Brazil)
Ted Pedersen (UMN, USA)
German Rigau (UPV, Spain)
Aiala Rosá (UdelaR, Uruguay)
Paolo Rosso (UV, Spain)
Horacio Saggion (UPF, Spain)
Thamar Solorio (UH, USA)
Juan-Manuel Torres-Moreno (LIA/UAPV, France)
Cristina Vertan (UH, Germany)
Dina Wonsever (UdelaR, Uruguay)

Organizing Committee

Laura Alonso i Alemany (UNC, Argentina)
Núria Bel (UPF, Spain)
Irene Castellón (UB, Spain)
Manuel Montes y Gómez (INAOE, Mexico)