International Conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL-2015)

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The bi-annual meeting of the German Society for Computational Linguistics
and Language Technology (GSCL) in 2015 will take place from September 30
to October 2 at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

The main conference theme is “Deep vs. shallow?”.

Currently, computational linguistics as a field seems to split in two
camps: Those interested in ‘deep’, explanatory, potentially even
cognitively motivated models and those interested in harnessing the power
of emerging big data collections to solve practical problems efficiently.
While the first camp often fights with a lack of coverage of the intended
phenomena, the second camp is occasionally criticized as naively counting
the contents of bags of words.

Of course, the conference theme is designed to provoke contradiction:
Isn’t the goal ultimately a synthesis of both approaches that allows
linguistic theory to use ‘big data’ efficiently and allows broad coverage
technologies to be theoretically well-founded? The conference aims to
discuss the divergence of ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ analysis, but especially
also how to achieve to a synthesis constructively.

Contributions to any topic related to Computational Linguistics and
Language Technology are invited, but we especially encourage submissions
that are related to the main theme, i.e., connecting broad coverage
technologies with linguistic and cognitive theory, e.g.

learning deep grammars from corpora
hybrid machine translation systems
making use of ‘big data’ collections, e.g. for
distributional semantics, or
analysis of non-standard orthography texts or learner corpora