CALL FOR PAPERS
              SPECIAL ISSUE of COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
                            Web as Corpus


Guest editors
Adam Kilgarriff,      ITRI, University of Brighton and 
                      Oxford University Press
Gregory Grefenstette, Clairvoyance Corporation 


The Web is an immense, multilingual, freely available corpus. As with
other large new corpora, computational linguists have been stimulated
by its presence.  Web research includes many of the most talked about
papers of recent ACL and other meetings (eg Resnik, ACL '99; Brill,
"Does the web change everything?", ACL SIGNLL '01).

In comparison with most corpora studied to date, the web is
heterogeneous and noisy. Methods for handling the noise, and
extracting and exploiting subcorpora meeting particular criteria, are
being developed by a widening population ranging from students who
realise that it is an obvious place to obtain their corpus for free,
to companies who seek to use HLT techniques on datasets other than the
ones HLT researchers usually use.

NLP can both give to, and take from, the web (distinction due to
Dragomir Radev). It can give to the web technologies such as
summarisation, MT and question-answering. But the giving side of the
equation looks only at short-to-medium term goals. For the longer
term, for 'giving' as well as for other purposes, a deeper
understanding of the linguistic nature of the web and its potential
for CL/NLP is required. For that, we must take the web itself, in
whatever limited way, as an object of study, and uncover what it has
to tell us about the nature of language. The Special Issue will focus
on how we can use the web, rather than how we can help web users.

The issues which we will expect Special Issue papers to cover include: 

      Lexical data derived from the Web 
      Classifying Web language; the range of text types on the Web 
      Mapping Web documents onto existing ontologies; 
                          implications for ontologies  
      Clustering in an open corpus 
      The multilingual Web as a resource for translation 
      CL/HLT engagement with the Semantic Web 

SCHEDULE

Papers due: 30 April 2002 

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Initial submissions should be sent to: 
1. Guest Editors 
      adam.kilgarriff@itri.brighton.ac.uk, grefen@clairvoyancecorp.com 
2. Publishing Editor 
      Julia Hirschberg (julia@research.att.com) 

For initial submissions only, authors should send electronic copies
(postscript, pdf, rtf, or doc) to both the Guest Editors and the
Publishing Editor. Please indicate that the submission is for the
Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Web as Corpus.

Questions about submissions should be directed to the two Guest
Editors, rather than the Journal or Publishing Editors.