An important subfield of computational linguistics and natural
language processing is research on the formal machinery for describing
language. This covers a wide range of interdisciplinary work in the
cognitive science of language, including the mathematical and
algorithmic properties of this machinery, the grammatical description
of natural language, and the mechanisms of parsing and human language
use. This research is also applied to empirical areas leading to
novel algorithms and models for machine learning.

Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) is a prominent formalism in the study
of natural language because of its attractive formal properties and
its extended domain of locality. TAG has been studied extensively
in the last three decades with respect to mathematical properties
and computational applications, as well as its role in constructing
grammatical theories, new models of language processing and
applications.

This workshop, the latest in a series that has been running
successfully since 1990, aims at bringing together researchers
interested in various aspects of the TAG formalism including relations
to other grammar formalisms -- this is the reason for the "+" in
the workshop's name. In the past, interaction between such formalisms
has been productive, leading for example to the shared development
of broad-coverage grammars, transfer of parsing and machine learning
algorithms from one formalism to another and to new insights into
properties of different formalisms. Such related formalisms would
include minimalist syntax, categorial grammar, dependency grammars,
HPSG, LFG, and others which share with TAG general properties such
as lexicalization of syntactic structure, a simple notion of local
grammatical dependency, and a formal system strictly more powerful
than context-free but not fully context-sensitive.


Invited speakers:

* Uwe Moennich, University of Tuebingen
* Stuart Shieber, Harvard University

Topics:

We invite submissions on all aspects of TAG and related systems including
the following topics:

* syntactic and semantic theory;
* mathematical properties;
* computational and algorithmic studies of parsing, interpretation and generation;
* machine learning models for TAG;
* corpus-based research and grammar development using TAG;
* psycholinguistic modeling; and
* applications to natural language processing or biological sequence modeling.

Anonymous abstracts may be submitted for two sorts of presentations at
the workshop: spoken presentations and poster presentations. Poster
presentations are particularly appropriate for brief descriptions of
specialized implementations, resources under development and work in
progress. Regardless of the type of submission, abstracts may not exceed
two pages in length (not including data, figures and references).


Contact Information:

The workshop website is at http://tagplus9.cs.sfu.ca/
The electronic submission website is at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tag9
Email contact: tagplus@sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de


Important dates:

* Deadline for submission of abstracts: March 3, 2008.
* Notification to authors of decision: April 10, 2008.
* Deadline for camera-ready submission: April 28, 2008.
* Workshop dates: June 7 to 8, 2008.

Proceedings including full papers for accepted abstracts (including
both oral presentations and poster presentations) will be available
on-line and at the workshop. In addition, we will explore possibilities
for subsequent publication of workshop articles, for example through
a special issue of a journal.


Organization:

Local Arrangements Chair
* Laura Kallmeyer, University of Tuebingen

Program Committee
* Claire Gardent, CNRS/LORIA Nancy, (France). Program Co-Chair
* Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University, (Canada). Program Co-Chair
* Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Research (USA)
* Tilman Becker, DKI Saarbruecken (Germany)
* Pierre Boullier, INRIA Rocquencourt, Paris (France)
* John Chen, Columbia University (USA)
* Joan Chen-Main, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
* David Chiang, USC Information Sciences Institute (USA)
* Eric de la Clergerie, INRIA (France)
* Robert Frank, Johns Hopkins University (USA)
* Chung-Hye Han, Simon Fraser University (Canada)
* Karin Harbusch, University of Koblenz (Germany)
* Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
* Aravind Joshi, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
* Laura Kallmeyer, University of Tuebingen (Germany)
* Marco Kuhlmann, University of the Saarland (Germany)
* Alessandro Mazzei, University of Torino (Italy)
* David McDonald, BBN Technologies (USA)
* Martha Palmer, University of Colorado (USA)
* Owen Rambow, Columbia University (USA)
* Frank Richter, University of Tuebingen (Germany)
* James Rogers, Earlham College (USA)
* Maribel Romero, University of Konstanz (Germany)
* Tatjana Scheffler, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
* Sylvain Schmitz, INRIA Nancy Grand Est (France)
* Vijay K. Shanker, University of Delaware (USA)
* Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh (UK)
* Matthew Stone, Rutgers University (USA)
* Naoki Yoshinaga, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Japan)
* Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh (UK)


Previous TAG+ meetings have been held at:

* Dagstuhl (1990)
* Philadelphia (1992)
* Paris (1994)
* Philadelphia (1998)
* Paris (2000)
* Venice (2002)
* Vancouver (2004)
* Sydney (2006)