Workshop on NLP and Linguistics: finding the common ground

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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 Natural Language Processing (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. The goal of this NSF-sponsored workshop is to carefully examine the relationship between linguistics and NLP and determine how incorporating linguistic knowledge into NLP systems can advance the state of the art of NLP and how NLP can assist linguistic studies through automatic collection and analysis of linguistic data. The workshop will bring together researchers from linguistics and NLP with diverse interests in and across both disciplines. The workshop is held in conjunction with ACL on July 16, 2010 in Sweden. This award provides financial support that allows the workshop to attract top researchers in the US to attend the workshop in Sweden, and the support is crucial especially for linguists who normally do not attend ACL. This workshop is intended to begin collaboration between linguists and NLP researchers that will continue long after the workshop has finished. The ultimate goals of the workshop and follow-up events are to accelerate work in NLP by bringing in important knowledge and information from linguistics, and to open the eyes of NLP researchers to the challenges within the field of linguistics that could benefit from cutting-edge, state-of-the-art NLP.The cross pollination between the disciplines can only push both forward and in directions that otherwise would come much later or not at all.