LINGUIST List 15.258

Fri Jan 23 2004

Calls: Computational Ling; Computational Ling/Portugal

Editor for this issue: Andrea Berez <andrealinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. andrea.schalley, International Language and Cognition Conference
2. Alessandro Oltramari, Ontologies and Lexical Resources in Distributed Environments

International Language and Cognition Conference 
Short Title: ILCC 2004 

Date: 10-Sep-2004 - 12-Sep-2004
Location: Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia
Contact: Andrea Schalley
Contact Email: ilccune.edu.au 
Meeting URL: http://www.ilcc.une.edu.au 

Linguistic Sub-field: Computational Linguistics ,General Linguistics
,Philosophy of Language ,Psycholinguistics ,Neurolinguistics
,Cognitive Science ,Anthropological Linguistics
Call Deadline: 01-May-2004 


Meeting Description:

The interdisciplinary conference aims at bringing together researchers
from the fields of linguistics, philosophy, psychology,
palaeoanthropology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and related
areas who work on the interface of language and cognition. We are
particularly interested in the three themes categorisation,
characterisation of mental states, and the development of language and
cognition. Although submissions (including poster submissions) in a
broad range of issues in Language & Cognition research are welcomed,
we are particularly interested in the three themes (cf. below). Each
of these three issues is subject to extensive intra- and
interdisciplinary discussions. In this vein, we hope to stimulate
exchange between the disciplines.

Issues of Particular Interest:

1) Categorisation

Does the human mind work on the basis of categories? And if so, what
are they?
What do mental representations look like?
Does categorisation work in the same way across the domains of human
language and behaviour?
Do categories constrain linguistic variability, and if so how?
Do ontologies have categories as one of their primary components?
How do we acquire or construct categories?
To what extent are categories natural? Do they have a basis in
physics, perception, neuro-physiology, or human social organisation?
Can humans be distinguished from primates and artificial life forms in
terms of categorisation?

2) Characterisation of Mental States

How are mental or cognitive states to be characterised?
How much cross-linguistic variability is there in the encoding of
mental states?
To what extent do mental state predicates reflect neuro-physiological
and psychological evidence?
What is the relationship between propositional attitudes in philosophy
and mental state predicates in natural languages?
Are there any universal mental states?
Are mental states to be attributed to advanced, self-learning
artificial systems?

3) Development

Could one say that cognitive structure has developmental priority over
language or vice versa?
In what way are thinking and speaking related in speech planning and
production?
Is language acquisition accompanied by a corresponding cognitive
development? Or, is appropriate cognitive development a pre-condition
for language acquisition?
What parameters play a role in the development of language and
cognition?
Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogenesis?
Is there a nativism in respect of either cognitive or language
development?
What can studies of primates and other non-humans tell us about
cognition?


**** Invited speakers ****

Stephen Crain, University of Maryland, United States
Pete Mandik, William Paterson University, United States
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Roger Wales, University of La Trobe, Australia
Anna Wierzbicka, Australian National University, Australia


**** Submissions ****

We invite submissions, particularly on the conference themes, for
25-minute presentations and for a poster session. Anyone may submit at
most one contribution as a single author and another one as a
co-author. Submissions must be anonymous.

Please submit an abstract and a summary of your paper or poster. The
abstract should not exceed 200 words. The summary should not comprise
more than 2 pages (including references, diagrams, and examples) with
2,5cm margins on all four sides, and it should be written in 12pt font
(only pdf, ps, rtf, and txt files are accepted).

Please submit electronically at
http://www.ilcc.une.edu.au/submissions.php .

DEADLINE: 1 MAY 2004


**** Important dates ****

01 May 			Deadline for Submissions (Papers & Posters)
01 June			Notification of Acceptance
15 June			Program Announcement
01 July			Early Bird Registration Deadline
01 August			Regular Registration Deadline
10-12 September 	CONFERENCE	


**** Organizer ****

The conference is organised by the Language and Cognition Research
Cluster (cf. http://www.une.edu.au/arts/LangCog/ ) of the University
of New England, Australia.

SECOND AND FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

OntoLex 2004:
Ontologies and Lexical Resources in Distributed Environments

http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontolex2004.html

Centro Cultural de Belem
LISBON, Portugal

29-May-2004

In Association with 4th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES
AND EVALUATION (LREC2004)
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php
Main conference 26-27-28 May 2004

Motivations and aim
The use of ontological knowledge in language technology applications
goes a long way back. Recently, however, the project of turning the
World Wide Web into a machine understandable resource to access
digital information (the so-called Semantic Web) has stimulated a
renewed interest in ontologies. In several recent workshops and
conferences, researchers have investigated their nature and
application potential for knowledge management, information retrieval
and extraction, information exchange in agent-based systems as well as
dialogue systems. Attention is being drawn to new aspects of ontology
research such as ontology coordination and mapping - aspects that are
particularly relevant for distributed environments such as Knowledge
Grid and Semantic web. In fact the annotation of web resources in
agreement with concepts and relations as defined in ontologies, is
useful for establishing a conceptual support for knowledge
communication.

>From this perspective, lexicographers, lexical semanticists and
ontologists are joining forces to build innovative systems for
integrating ontological knowledge with lexical and semantic resources.
Important examples of this interaction are the recent works on the
conceptual analysis of WordNet (one of the first lexical knowledge
bases), and the wide use of upper ontologies in innovative
binternational projects like EuroWordNet, SIMPLE, Balkanet, DWDSnet.
WordNet was designed and built entirely by psychologists, linguists,
and lexicographers. Nevertheless, there are obvious parallels with
ontologies, especially in the kinds of structuring relations used
(taxonomical links, meronymy or part-of, etc.), and indeed WordNet has
for years attracted the attention of philosophers and ontologists. In
this context, the distinction between conceptual (possibly axiomatic)
ontologies and lexical ontologies (which contain both linguistic and
ontological information) has become more and more central in the
field.

In this workshop we want to discuss ontologies as resources per se, as
well as for what concerns the relation between ontological knowledge
and language. This relation can be investigated from a number of
different angles, for example what differences and similarities there
are between ontologies and more traditional lexical resources such as
dictionaries and wordnets; how ontologies can be extracted from
language corpora; what role language plays in the definition and
mapping of ontologies; and finally, how ontologies can be used to
treat language in language technology applications - in particular
applications for distributed environments.

Topics to be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited
to:
*Design principles and methodologies for upper-level ontologies and
semantic lexical resources
*Evaluation, comparison, mapping and integration of ontologies and
lexical resources
*Applications of ontologies and semantic lexical resources in LT
applications (e.g. QA, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction,
Machine Translation)
*Role of semantic lexical resources in ontology learning
*Methods to derive ontological knowledge from text
*Methods to annotate text with reference to an ontology
*Ontology-based query expansion techniques
*Ontologies and multi-lingual lexical resources
*Ontologies and ontology mapping in multi-lingual applications
*Ontologies and lexical resources for meaning negotiation

Two discussions will be organised around the following topics: 
*Filling the gap between axiomatic and linguistic ontologies
*The role of lexical resources in the Semantic Web and the Knowledge
Grid

Reasons of interest:
A new scientific community is growing around this largely
interdisciplinary area: following the spirit of the previous two
OntoLex workshops, this workshop aims at being an important meeting
point for researchers involved in the fields of lexical resources and
ontologies, favouring the exchange of scientific experiences and
proposing new directions of inquiry. This year, the workshop
particularly welcomes contributions from researchers that are
investigating the application of ontologies and lexical resources in
distributed environments such as Knowledge Grid and Semantic Web.

Important dates:

4th December 2003: Call for papers and demonstrations
30 January 2004: Deadline for paper submission
5 March 2004: Acceptance notifications and preliminary program
29 March 2004: Deadline final version of accepted
29 May 2004: Workshop

Participants are invited to submit an extended abstract of max 3000
words related to one or more of the topics of interest. Papers can
describe research results as well as work in progress. Each accepted
paper will receive a slot of 30 minutes for presentation (20 minutes
talk and 10 minutes for discussion). Demonstrations of ontology
applications are encouraged as well (a demonstration outline of 2
pages can be submitted). Each submission should show: title;
author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, postal
address, telephone and fax numbers. Submissions must be sent
electronically in PDF to Alessandro Oltramari (oltramariloa-cnr.it)

As soon as possible, authors are encouraged to send a brief email
indicating their intention to participate, including their contact
information and the topic they intend to address in their submissions.
Proceedings of the workshop will be printed by the LREC Local
Organising Committee.

Time schedule and registration fee:
The workshop will consist of a morning session and an afternoon
session, and include scientific paper presentations from workshop
participants as well as general discussions.

For this full-day workshop, the registration fee is 100 EURO for LREC
conference participants and 170 EURO for other participants. These
fees will include a coffee break and the Proceedings of the Workshop.

Organising Committee
Alessandro Oltramari (Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR;
Department of Cognition and Education Sciences, Trento University)
Patrizia Paggio (Center for Sprogteknologi, University of Copenhagen)
Aldo Gangemi (Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR Rome) 
Maria Teresa Pazienza (Roma Tor Vergata University) 
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR)
Bolette Sandford Pedersen (Center for Sprogteknologi, University of
Copenhagen)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) 

Programme Committee
Roberto Basili (Roma Tor Vergata University)
Werner Ceusters (Language & Computing) 
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR)
Aldo Gangemi (Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Rome) 
Eric Gaussier (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble Laboratory) 
Maria Toporowska Gronostaj (Sprakdata, University of Gothenburg) 
Nicola Guarino (Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento) 
Arne Jensson (Linkping Universitet) 
Dimitrios Kokkinakis (Sprarkdata, University of Gothenburg) 
Alessandro Lenci (Universita di Pisa) 
Claude de Loupy (Sinequa and University of Paris 10) 
Bernardo Magnini (ITC-IRST, Trento) 
Jurgen Fischer Nilsson (Technical University of Denmark)
Alessandro Oltramari, (Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR,
Trento) 
Patrizia Paggio (Center for Sprogteknologi) 
Maria Teresa Pazienza (Roma Tor Vergata University) 
Bolette Sandford Pedersen (Center for Sprogteknologi) 
Guus Schreiber (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) 
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) 
Atanas Kiryakov (Ontotext Lab, Sirma AI)
Paola Velardi (Universita "La Sapienza", Rome)