Workshop on ``Syntactic Annotation of Electronic Corpora''

The following is the text of a letter sent out to various individuals and research groups in Europe who are active in the field of syntactic annotation and electronic corpora.

Dear Colleague,

The topic of syntactic annotation of electronic corpora has been a central research issue with exciting new developments in recent years. There are a number of ongoing activities in Tuebingen concerned with this topic, such as the "Representation and Automatic Acquisition of Linguistic Data" project in the SFB 441, the German Reference Corpus (DEREKO) project, the "Learning Computational Grammars" (TMR-LCG), and the tree-bank development as part of the VERBMOBIL project.

We think it is timely to present this ongoing research and to engage in an intensive discussion with other researchers working in the area. We are therefore planning a workshop on the topic of syntactic annotation of electronic corpora from 13.-15. June in the castle of Tübingen. The idea of this workshop is to discuss results and work in progress bearing on the following questions:

What linguistic units (chunks, trees, topol. fields, etc.) have or can be annotated?
What are the data structures used in annotation?
Which tools and algorithms can be used to perform or support automatic, semi-automatic, or manual annotation?
What aims (applications, linguistic research) require which kind of annotation?

We feel that you would make a very valuable contribution to a discussion of these topics and would therefore like to ask, whether you are interested in participating in this event and whether you and your colleagues would be willing to contribute one or more presentations to the program of the workshop. Please let us know before Friday, April 15 whether you will be able to join us. For those of you who would like to participate with a talk, we will also need a title and an abstract by the above mentioned date.

If there is substantial interest, we intend to publish the results of this workshop in the form of an edited volume.

The workshop is part of a cooperation between the University of Tuebingen and the University of Essex as part of the CLAIRE project, which unfortunately does not provide funds to cover the expenses of outside speakers. However, participation in the workshop is free and we will be happy to assist you with reserving accommodation in a local hotel.

We very much hope that you will be able to participate and look forward to hearing from you,

Valia Kordoni,

On behalf of the Tuebingen organizing committee:

Erhard Hinrichs,
Valia Kordoni,
Detmar Meurers,
Tylman Ule,
Andreas Wagner