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Depling 2021 will be held at the SyntaxFest in Sofia, during the week of March 21–March 25, 2022. The event will be held online. The proceedings will be published preemptively, in December 2021 (more on the proceedings below).

Depling is a bi-annual conference dedicated to dependency-based approaches in linguistics and natural language processing. Dependencies, directed labeled graph structures representing hierarchical relations between morphemes, words or semantic units, have now become the standard representation of syntactic resources and NLP technologies. Depling has become the central event for people discussing the linguistic significance of these structures, their theoretical and formal foundations, their processing, and their use in NLP tools.

A short introduction to dependency can be found here.

Depling 2021 is the sixth conference in the Depling series (the previous five conferences being held in Barcelona in 2011, Prague in 2013, Uppsala in 2015, Pisa in 2017, Paris in 2019).

Important dates

  1. Announcement of conference modality: 06 17 Sep. 2021
  2. Submission deadlines: 27 Sep. 11 Oct. 2021 for long and short papers
  3. Long and short papers reviews due: 01 Nov. 2021
  4. Acceptance notification: 10 Nov. 2021 (delayed)
  5. Camera-ready version: 30 Nov. 2021
  6. Conference: two days during the week of 21st–25th March 2022

Attendants are encouraged but not obliged to participate in the whole SyntaxFest.

Selected topics of interest

For this edition, we would like to put a special emphasis on two topics of interest:

  • the epistemological and historical foundations of dependency linguistics (how dependency is defined, how it emerged, how it was formalized, etc.);
  • relations between theoretical dependency linguistics and NLP tasks (how, e.g., syntactic models are framed to achieve specific tasks, how the results of such computational tasks modify our conceptions about linguistic modeling, etc.).

Other topics are of course welcome. Topics include but are not limited to:

Invited speaker

Richard Futrell (UC Irvine): An Information-Theoretic Perspective on Dependency Trees

Abstract: I give an overview of some recent work taking a corpus-based, information-theoretic view on problems of dependency grammar. First, I argue for a connection between syntactic dependencies and the information-theoretic notion of mutual information, a measure of how strongly two words constrain each other, which allows us to quantify the “strength” of the link between a dependent and its head. Next, I present theoretical motivations and empirical evidence for information locality: a generalization of dependency length minimization which holds that words are under a pressure to be close to each other in word order in proportion to their mutual information. Finally I present evidence that crosslinguistic word orders reflect optimization for recoverability of dependency relations from strings of words.

Website: http://socsci.uci.edu/~rfutrell/.

Program

Talks

Depling talks will take place on Tue. 22 March 2022 from 4:00 PM CET to 7:30 PM CET.

Posters

Two separate time windows are dedicated to the poster session:

Paper submission information

Papers should describe original work related to dependency-based linguistics. They should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest to the attendees.

Submission page

Papers must be submitted in PDF format exclusively through the SyntaxFest joint submission page (available soon). All submissions will be done on the Easychair website (click this link). Submission link is closed.

On the submission page, authors submit their paper only once for the whole SyntaxFest, composed of 4 conferences, but they can uncheck conferences they do not wish their paper to be considered for. If the paper is deemed appropriate for more than one of the selected conferences, the SyntaxFest joint organization committee decides on the final placement of the paper, which implies the day of the presentation and the proceedings the paper will appear in.

Paper length

We invite two types of submissions: long papers and short papers.

Style guidelines

All submissions should follow the common SyntaxFest 2021 stylesheet (based on the one-column COLING 2020 style guidelines). Stylesheets are provided as LaTeX style file and Microsoft Word templates (templates might be subject to slight modifications for compatibility reasons). The files are downloadable here.

Double-blind reviews

Reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Zeng, 2018) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Zeng (2018) previously showed ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Proceedings

For the authors’s convenience, despite the conference being held in March 2022, the Proceedings of Depling 2021 have been in December 2021 in the ACL Anthology.

The proceedings are freely accessible: https://aclanthology.org/events/depling-2021/.

Conference modality and venue

Conference modality

The conference will be held online.

Online venue

TBA

Registration

Registration is closed.

Registration will be done in two steps:

  1. After the evaluation process, all participants will have to register for the online event (reduced registration costs).
  2. Approximately one month before the conference, participants will be offered to decide whether they want to come to Sofia or not, if the health situation allows it. Additional costs will be charged in accordance.

Organization

Depling 2021 Conference chairs

Syntaxfest 2021 Local organizing committee

SyntaxFest 2021 Program committee

This list may receive updates.

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