LINGUIST List 14.495

Wed Feb 19 2003

Calls: Text Meaning / Language Research

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. sergei, Workshop on Text Meaning, Canada
2. karimi, Language Research Forum, AZ USA

Workshop on Text Meaning

Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 
Date: 31-May-2003 - 31-May-2003 
Call Deadline: 10-Mar-2003

Contact Person: Sergei Nirenburg
Meeting Email: sergeiumbc.edu
Linguistic Subfield(s): Computational Linguistics 

This is a session of the following conference:
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational
Linguistics & Human Language Technology

Meeting Description: 

Workshop on Text Meaning (at HLT/NAACL-03)

Organizers

Sergei Nirenburg 
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
sergeiumbc.edu 
Graeme Hirst 
University of Toronto 
ghcs.toronto.edu


Workshop Goal

The main goal of the Workshop on Text Meaning is to re-establish the
research community of knowledge-based meaning processing and to help
to explicate the currently implicit treatments of meaning in
knowledge-lean approaches and how the advances in the latter and in
formal semantics should influence the task.

Overview

Most, if not all, high-end NLP applications '' from the earliest, MT,
to the latest, question answering and text summarization '' stand to
benefit from being able to use text meaning in their processing. But
the bulk of work in the field has not, over the years, pertained to
treatment of meaning. The main reason given is the complexity of the
task of comprehensive meaning analysis.

Our field, of course, has never been entirely uninterested in
meaning. The tradition of formal semantics has been continuously
maintained for many years. Knowledge representation inside AI has come
up with a large number of proposals concerning the metalanguages that
could be used to formally represent text meaning. A variety of general
and special (e.g., space- or time-related) logical and common-sense
reasoning systems have been developed that facilitate inference making
on the basis of the representation of 'literal' meaning obtained from
text. Much work has been devoted to building practical, increasingly
broad-coverage meaning-oriented analysis and synthesis
systems. Lexical semantics has made significant progress in theories,
description, and processing. Formal aspects of ontology work have
also been studied. The Semantic Web has further popularized the need
for automatic extraction, representation, and manipulation of text
meaning: for the Semantic Web to really succeed, capability of
automatically marking text for content is essential, and this cannot
be attained reliably using only knowledge-lean, semantics-poor
methods.

Recently, there has been a flurry of specialized meetings devoted to
formal semantics, lexical semantics, semantic web, formal ontology and
others. But the number of meetings devoted to knowledge-based text
meaning processing '' content rather than formalism'' has been much
smaller. This workshop will begin to remedy that.


Suggested Topics

The workshop invites papers that relate to (but are not necessarily
limited to) the following topics:
	
- Broad-coverage semantic analysis
- Knowledge-based text synthesis
- The nature of text meaning required for various practical
broad-coverage applications
- Pragmatics and discourse issues as parts of text meaning extraction
and manipulation
- Ontologies supporting automatic processing of text meaning
- Semantic lexicons
- Language- and world-related microtheories designed to support text
meaning extraction and manipulation: aspect, modality, reference, etc.
- Text meaning representations in semantic analysis
- Reasoning to support semantic analysis and synthesis
- Multilingual aspects of meaning representation and manipulation
- Integrating semantic analysis and non-semantic language processing
- The benefits (if any) to semantic analysis and synthesis systems
from knowledge-lean stochastic corpus-oriented methods.

We encourage discussion of theoretical issues that are relevant to
computational applications, including descriptions of processors and
static knowledge resources. We specifically prefer discussions of
meaning content over discussions of formalisms for its encoding and
discussions of decision heuristics in processing over discussions of
generic processing architectures and theorem proving mechanisms.

This workshop will be not only a forum for presenting complete work
with tangible results (even though this will be encouraged) but also
an opportunity to:

1. take stock of the developments in the field;
2. assess the nature of the most pressing extant problems and reasons
for current lack of satisfactory solutions;
3. re-assess the potential contributions from developments outside the
field (e.g., work on formal ontologies or corpus-based methods); and
4. coordinate and plan future work. 

Submission Procedure

Submit papers (not to exceed 8 pages in the HLT/NAACL two-column
format) electronically, PDF strongly preferred, to sergeiumbc.edu.

Deadlines 

Paper submission		March 17, 2003
Notification of acceptance	March 31, 2003
Camera-ready version due	April 10, 2003
Workshop date		May 31, 2003

Questions

Direct inquiries to either of the organizers, sergeiumbc.edu and
ghcs.toronto.edu.

Program Committee

Stephen Beale		University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Lynn Carlson		US Department of Defense
Sanda Harabagiu		University of Texas at Dallas
Jerry Hobbs		USC Information Sciences Institute
Nancy Ide		Vassar College
Richard Kittredge	University of Montreal
Tanya Korelsky		CoGenTex, Inc.
Marjorie McShane	University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Dan Moldovan		University of Texas at Dallas
Martha Palmer		University of Pennsylvania
James Pustejovsky	Brandeis University
Victor Raskin		Purdue University
Yorick Wilks		Sheffield University

The Second Language Research Forum

Short Title: SLRF2003
Location: Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Date: 16-Oct-2003 - 19-Oct-2003 
Call Deadline: 03-Mar-2003

Web Site: http://www.coh.arizona.edu/slrf2003/
Contact Person: Estela Ene
Meeting Email: slrf2003u.arizona.edu
Linguistic Subfield(s): Language Acquisition 

Meeting Description: 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Abstracts for papers and posters regarding theory and research in
second language acquisition, especially interdisciplinary approaches
to second language acquisition are invited.

Please choose one submission format:
- Paper Presentations: 30 minutes long with a 10-minute discussion
period.
- Poster Presentations: to be displayed for a 2-hour block of time.

Send submission to: slrf2003u.arizona.edu

Please refer to our submission guidelines and our abstract criteria on
the SLRF 2003 website http://www.coh.arizona.edu/slrf2003/

Deadline for Abstracts: March 3rd, 2003

Estela Ene and Senta Goetler
Program Co-Chairs SLRF 2003
Second Language Acquisition and Teaching
Transitional Office Building, Room 208
1731 E. 2nd Street
P.O. Box 210014
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721-0014