[Mlnet] CFP: ACL 2005 Workshop on Feature Engineering for Machine Learning in NLP

From: Eric Ringger <ringger@microsoft.com> · Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 08:20:09 -0800

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                           CALL FOR PAPERS

               Feature Engineering for Machine Learning
                    in Natural Language Processing

                  Workshop at the Annual Meeting of
       the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005)

 http://research.microsoft.com/~ringger/FeatureEngineeringWorkshop/

              ** Submission Deadline: April 20, 2005 **

                         Ann Arbor, Michigan
                            June 29, 2005

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As experience with machine learning for solving natural language
processing tasks accumulates in the field, practitioners are finding
that feature engineering is as critical as the choice of machine
learning algorithm, if not more so.  Feature design, feature selection,
and feature impact (through ablation studies and the like) significantly
affect the performance of systems and deserve greater attention.  In the
wake of the shift away from knowledge engineering and of the successes
of data-driven and statistical methods, researchers in the field are
likely to make further progress by incorporating additional, sometimes
familiar, sources of knowledge as features.  Although some experience in
the area of feature engineering is to be found in the theoretical
machine learning community, the particular demands of natural language
processing leave much to be discovered.

This workshop aims to bring together practitioners of NLP, machine
learning, information extraction, speech processing, and related fields
with the intention of sharing experimental evidence for successful
approaches to feature engineering, including feature design and feature
selection.  We welcome papers that address these goals.
We also seek to distill best practices and to discover new sources of
knowledge and features previously untapped.

The workshop will include an invited talk by Andrew McCallum of the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

SUBMISSION

Submitted papers should be prepared in PDF format (all fonts included)
or Microsoft Word .doc format and not longer than 8 pages following the
ACL style.  More detailed information about the format of submissions
can be found here:

  http://www.aclweb.org/acl2005/index.php?stylefiles

The language of the workshop is English.  Submissions should be sent as
an attachment to the following email address: ringger AT microsoft DOT
com .  All accepted papers will be presented in oral sessions of the
workshop and collected in the printed proceedings.

Submissions are invited on all aspects of feature engineering for
machine learning in NLP.  Topics may include, but are not necessarily
limited to:

- Novel methods for discovering or inducing features, such as mining
  the web for closed classes, useful for indicator features.

- Comparative studies of different feature selection algorithms for
  NLP tasks.

- Interactive tools that help researchers to identify ambiguous cases
  that could be disambiguated by the addition of features.

- Error analysis of various aspects of feature induction, selection,
  representation.

- Issues with representation, e.g., strategies for handling
  hierarchical representations, including decomposing to atomic
  features or by employing statistical relational learning.

- Techniques used in fields outside NLP that prove useful in NLP.

- The impact of feature selection and feature design on such practical
  considerations as training time, experimental design, domain
  independence, and evaluation.

- Analysis of feature engineering and its interaction with specific
  machine learning methods commonly used in NLP.

- Combining classifiers that employ diverse types of features.

- Studies of methods for defining a feature set, for example by
  iteratively expanding a base feature set.

- Issues with representing and combining real-valued and categorical
  features for NLP tasks.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Paper submission deadline:        April 20, 2005; Noon, PST (GMT-8)

- Notification of acceptance:       May 10, 2005

- Submission of camera-ready copy:  May 17, 2005

- Workshop:                         June 29, 2005

ORGANIZATION

Chair and contact person:

      Eric Ringger
      Microsoft Research
      One Microsoft Way
      Redmond, WA 98052  USA 
      ringger AT microsoft DOT com

Program Committee:

- Simon Corston-Oliver, Microsoft Research, USA
- Kevin Duh, University of Washington, USA
- Matthew Richardson, Microsoft Research, USA
- Oren Etzioni, University of Washington, USA
- Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA
- Dan Bikel, IBM Research, USA
- Olac Fuentes, INAOE, Mexico
- Chris Manning, Stanford University, USA
- Kristina Toutanova, Stanford University, USA
- Hideki Isozaki, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan
- Caroline Sporleder, University of Edinburgh, UK