Workshop overview

This workshop aims at examining the relationship between linguistics and NLP and determining

1. the new methods in incorporating linguistic knowledge into statistical systems to advance the state of the art of NLP, and
2. the feasibility of using NLP techniques to acquire linguistic knowledge for a large number of languages and to assist linguistic studies.

Since early 1990s, with the advancement of machine learning methods and the availability of data resources such as treebanks and parallel corpora, data-driven approaches to NLP have made significant progress. The success of such data-driven approaches has cast doubt on the relevance of linguistics to NLP. Conversely, NLP techniques are rarely used to help linguistics studies. We believe that there is room to expand the involvement of linguistics in NLP, and likewise, NLP in linguistics, and believe that the cross-pollination of ideas between the disciplines can greatly benefit both fields.

One common approach to take advantage of linguistic knowledge is to train a statistical system on linguistically annotated data such as treebanks. Another approach is to represent linguistic knowledge as rules in a rule-based approach. This workshop is interested in research that goes BEYOND these common approaches and explores new methods in incorporating linguistic knowledge into statistical systems or using statistical systems for linguistic knowledge discovery.

The workshop will consist of one invited talk, 2-3 panels, group discussion, and paper/poster sessions.