LINGUIST List 12.383

Tue Feb 13 2001

Calls: Temporal/Spacial Information, Psycholinguistics

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Priscilla Rasmussen, Temporal & Spatial Information Processing: ACL'2001
2. Wijnen, Frank, From Sentence Processing To Discourse Interpretation

CALL FOR PAPERS

WORKSHOP ON TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL INFORMATION PROCESSING
ACL'2001 Conference
Toulouse, France
July 7, 2001

Temporal and spatial information is ubiquitous in natural language, yet
many challenging computational issues are relatively unexplored. This
workshop will bring together researchers working on a variety of tasks
that depend on representing spatial and temporal information in natural
language. 


We invite papers on any topic dealing with automatic processing of
spatial or temporal information in natural language. As a special theme
of this workshop, we would also like to encourage the discussion of
common issues across spatial and temporal domains. For example, systems
that process temporal or spatial information need to deal with
'absolute' references ("November 18, 1999", "Toulouse"), as well as
relative references ("now", "here", two weeks ago", "thirty miles north
of Paris"), and vague references ("some time in June", "a town in
Provence", "nearly a year ago", "near Dusseldorf", "Tuesday morning",
"southern England"). There are also many parallels between the way
events are characterized in time and objects are characterized in space.
For example, events can be described relative to some point or interval
in time (e.g., "I met John yesterday", "he was crossing the street.")
while objects in space can be described in relation to some place,
object, or in terms of movement (e.g, "the cup was on top of that", "it
fell off").

The topics covered will include corpus-based, knowledge-based, and
hybrid approaches to: =

=B7 resolution of temporal and spatial references, especially
discourse-dependent ones =

=B7 standards for encoding the values of temporal and spatial expressions=

in natural language
=B7 temporal and spatial characterization of events
=B7 establishing coreference, ordering and inclusion relations in spatial=

or temporal information
=B7 computational analysis of tense and aspect
=B7 semantics of indeterminate or vague temporal and spatial references =

=B7 semantics and pragmatics of spatial and temporal prepositions
=B7 leveraging of ontologies for spatial and temporal information
=B7 reasoning about modals, i.e., possible events, necessary events,
counterfactual events, etc. =

=B7 application of logics for spatial and temporal reasoning
=B7 analysis of temporal and spatial aspects of narrative structure
=B7 generation of temporal and spatial references
=B7 linguistic and graphical representations

Application areas include:
=B7 machine translation (e.g., translating temporal and spatial
references)
=B7 question answering (e.g, answering "when" or "where" questions)
=B7 information extraction (e.g., normalizing time values for entry into
databases, disambiguating place names using a gazetteer)
=B7 summarization (e.g., producing temporally coherent summaries of
multiple documents, or generating route plans)
=B7 information retrieval (e.g., indexing broadcast news by event time)
=B7 information visualization (e.g., constructing event chronologies,
geospatial visualization)
=B7 multimodal interfaces (e.g., interfaces to simulations, gesture and
speech input graphical applications, navigation systems)
=B7 interfaces to spatial and temporal databases (e.g., normalizing
temporal and spatial references)
=B7 planning and problem solving
=B7 multimedia presentations (e.g., generating textual descriptions or
captions, scene and route descriptions, generation of spatio-temporal
maps)

ORGANIZERS

Lisa Harper, MITRE, USA
Inderjeet Mani, MITRE and Georgetown University, USA
Beth Sundheim, SPAWAR Systems Center, USA

SPONSORS

MITRE =

ACL SIGMEDIA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Elisabeth Andre, DFKI, Germany
Myriam Bras, IRIT, France
Rob Gaizauskas, Sheffield, UK
Udo Hahn, Freiburg University, Germany =

Eduard Hovy, USC-ISI, USA =

G=E9rard Ligozat, LIMSI-CNSRS, France,
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Marc Moens, University of Edinburgh, UK =

Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan, USA
Ellen Riloff, University of Utah, USA
Barbara Tversky, Stanford University, USA
Laure Vieu, IRIT, France
Michael White, Cogentex, USA
Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, USA
George Wilson, MITRE, USA
Cornelia Zelinsky-Wibbelt, Hannover, Germany

SCHEDULE:

 Submissions: April 8, 2001
 Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2001
 Deadline for camera-ready =

 versions of accepted papers May 13, 2001 =

 Workshop Date: July 7, 2001

SUBMISSION FORMAT AND INSTRUCTIONS: =


Submissions must be in English, no more than 8 pages long, and in the
two-column format prescribed by ACL'2001. Please see =

http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/ for the detailed guidelines; however,
please put the authors' names, rather than a paper id, since reviewing
will not be blind. Submissions should be sent electronically in either
Word, pdf, or postscript format (only) no later than April 8, 2001 to:

 Beth Sundheim 

 sundheimspawar.navy.mil

Workshop

FROM SENTENCE PROCESSING TO DISCOURSE INTERPRETATION:
CROSSING THE BORDERS

Utrecht University, Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS
Utrecht (The Netherlands), 2-3 July 2001


CALL FOR PAPERS

The aim of this workshop is to foster the interaction of two areas in
psycholinguistics that have traditionally been pursued quite
independently of one another: sentence and discourse
processing. Discourse processing research has dealt primarily with
issues like relational and y"eferential coherence - i.e. conceptual
issues, whereas sentence processing has traditionally focused on the
analysis of sentence structure. Recently, however, signs are noticed
of a movement towards convergence. In y"entence processing, issues
pertaining to interpretation are gradually assuming � more prominent
position on the research agenda. In the field of �iscourse processing,
the conviction is gaining strength that detailed analyses y"f
linguistic factors, including grammatical properties of sentences as
"processing instructors", are necessary for the development of
adequate models. It would seem then, that the traditional border
between the discourse level and the sentence level is being crossed
increasingly y"ften from both sides. Researchers from the two
traditions are beginning to recognize each other's contribu-tions to
the field at large, as well as their interdependence.

The workshop aims at and intends to stimulate and inspire researchers
from both fields to share and discuss their ideas and empirical
results. Particularly, the focus will be on issues that are at the
interface of sentence and discourse processing. A few examples of the
kinds of topics that would fit in the workshop are: 

�	Are processing operations at the level of discourse and sentence
processing principally different, or does the same computation system
subserve the two domains?
�	Is Logical Form (the interface between syntax and the conceptual
system in the generative framework) a psycholinguistically viable concept?
�	Does discourse context always interfere with sentence parsing, or
are there examples of genuinely autonomous sentence-level processes?
�	How can linguistic characteristics of discourse (grammatical
structure, connectives, anaphora) be further specified as processing
instructions for discourse processing?

Invited Speakers

Jos van Berkum, University of Amsterdam
Lyn Frazier, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Alan Garnham, University of Sussex
Ted Gibson, MIT
Leo Noordman, Tilburg University
Tony Sanford, University of Glasgow
Wietske Vonk, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics


Submission of Papers

The programme of the workshop comprises 10 - 20 slots for oral (25
minutes, including discussion time) and poster presentations, which
will be y"elected on the basis of abstracts submit-ted to the
organizing committee.

Your abstract should clearly summarize the aim of your study, its
theoretical motivation and the principal results. Abstracts should not
exceed one page (A4 or Letter) in length. Set linespacing to 1.5
(minimally), and use a 12-point font. Add your name, address,
affiliation, e-mail address, and telephone number on a separate
page. Send a soft �opy of your abstract by electronic mail to:
mailto:processinglet.uu.nl, and y"tate "submission workshop" in the
subject header.

Deadline for submissions: March 30, 2001
Notification of acceptance: April 20, 2001

Organizing committee
Ted Sanders, Frank Wijnen, Sergey Avrutin, Frank Jansen, Gerben
Mulder, Iris Mulders, Eric Reuland (all UiL OTS)


Utrecht University
Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS
Trans 10
3512 JK UTRECHT, The Netherlands