LINGUIST List 16.83

Thu Jan 13 2005

Calls: Computational Ling/UK; Syntax/Portugal

Editor for this issue: Amy Wronkowicz <amylinguistlist.org>

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Directory

1. Valia Kordoni, 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications
2. António Branco, Workshop on Binding Theory and Invariants in Anaphoric Relations

Message 1: 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications

Date: 13-Jan-2005
From: Valia Kordoni <kordoni

coli.uni-sb.de>
Subject: 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications

Full Title: 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions
and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications
Short Title: Prep05

Date: 19-Apr-2005 - 21-Apr-2005
Location: Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom
Contact Person: Aline Villavicencio
Meeting Email: prep05

essex.ac.uk
Web Site: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~avill/Prep05.html

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Applied Linguistics; Cognitive
Science; Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Historical Linguistics;
Language Acquisition; Language Description; Lexicography; Linguistic Theories;
Neurolinguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics;
Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 20-Jan-2005

Meeting Description:

Please note: Extended Deadline!

Due to several requests, the deadline has been extended to the 20th of
January 2005

Second ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on
The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational
Linguistics Formalisms and Applications.

April 19th-21st, 2005, University of Essex, UK

Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL's Special Interest Group in Computational
Semantics.

In the linguistic and computational linguistic communities, much of the
effort has been devoted to the understanding of the syntax and semantics of
verbs and nouns. On the other hand, prepositions, partly due to their very
polysemic nature and the difficulty of identifying (cross-)linguistic
regularities, have received much less attention.

Recently, however, there has been a growing awareness of the difficulties
posed by prepositions and the importance of providing adequate means of
capturing them, for many different applications. Several projects have now
focused on the understanding of certain aspects of prepositions from
perspectives such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language
Processing (NLP), psycholinguistics and ethnolinguistics. For instance,
some research has concentrated on spatial or temporal aspects of
prepositions, and their cross-linguistic differences. Several
investigations have also been carried out on quite diverse languages,
emphasizing, for example, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts or the
role of prepositions in syntactic alternations.

These observations cover in general a small group of closely related
prepositions. The semantic characterization of prepositions has also
motivated the emergence of a few dedicated logical frameworks and reasoning
procedures.

Languages like English have phrasal verbs, and these combinations of verbs
and prepositions (in prepositional verbs or verb-particle constructions),
have also been the subject of considerable effort, going from techniques
for their automatic extraction from corpora, to methods for the
determination of their semantics. Other languages, like Romance languages
or Hindi, either incorporate the preposition or include it in the
prepositional phrase. All these configurations are semantically as well as
syntactically of much interest. In NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have
attracted a lot of attention, with different machine learning techniques
having been employed with varying degrees of success.

In this context, a successful workshop on prepositions was held in
Toulouse, in September 2003, with papers presenting research in a wide
variety of topics, examining prepositions in languages like French,
English, German and Japanese, some from a more computational approach and
others more linguistic.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on
prepositions from a variety of backgrounds, such as linguistics, NLP, AI
and psycholinguistics, providing a forum for discussing, among others, the
syntax, semantics, description, representation and computational
applications of prepositions, with the ultimate aim to advance the
state-of-the-art, identify challenges, and promote future collaborations
among researchers interested in the different aspects of prepositions.

Submissions

We welcome papers describing original work on prepositions, preferably that
can inform computational applications. We especially encourage submissions
on the following topics:

-Aspects of the syntax and semantics of prepositions: prepositions in
alternations, syntactic and semantic restrictions. General
syntactic-semantic principles. Postpositions or other equivalent markers
(e.g. case). Prepositions in constructions (phrasal verbs, determinerless
PPs, etc)

-Polysemy of prepositions, identification and classification of preposition
senses, contrastive uses, metaphorical uses, semantic and cognitive
foundations for prepositions.

-Descriptions: prepositions in lexical resources (WordNet, Framenet),
productive versus collocations uses, multi-lingual descriptions
(mismatches, incorporation, divergences), prepositions and thematic roles.

-Applications: dealing with prepositions in applications e.g. for Machine
Translation, Information extraction, Language Generation.

-Representation of Prepositions: prepositions in knowledge bases, cognitive
or logic-based formalisms for the description of the semantics of
prepositions (in isolation, and in composition/confrontation with the verb
and the NP), compositional semantics. Implications for AI, KR.

-Prepositions in reasoning procedures: how different kinds of preposition
provide distinct challenges to a reasoning system and how they can be handled.

-Cognitive dimensions of prepositions: how different kinds of prepositions
are acquired/interpreted/represented, in terms of human and/or
computational processing.

Submissions should not exceed 8 pages and they must be in .ps or .pdf
formats. The 12 point Times New Roman font is preferred, leave about 2.5 cm
margins on both sides.

As reviewing will be blind, the body of the paper should not include the
names or affiliations of the authors.

The following identification information should be sent in a separate email
with the subject line ''WORKSHOP ID PAGE'':

Title: title of paper
Authors: list of all authors
Keywords: up to five topic keywords
Contact author: email address of author of record (for correspondence)
Abstract: abstract of paper (not more than 10 lines)

Notification of receipt will be emailed to the contact author.

More precise formatting instructions will be given for final versions,
since a book publication is under preparation.
Papers must be sent in electronic form to: prep05

essex.ac.uk.

Deadlines

Submission deadline:     January 20th, 2005
Notification to authors: Feb 19th, 2005
Final paper due:         March 19th, 2005

Registration:

Registration fees will be kept as low as possible.

Programme Committee:

Anne Abeille (Universit  Paris 7, France)
Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Harry Bunt (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy)
Markus Egg (Saarland University, Germany)
Sonja Eisenbeiss (University of Essex, UK)
Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA)
Anette Frank (DFKI, Germany)
Daniele Godard (Universit  Paris 7, France)
Tracy King (PARC, USA)
Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany)
Paola Merlo (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Anna Papafragou (University of Delaware, USA)
Henk van Riemsdijk (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
Louisa Sadler (University of Essex, UK)
Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, France)
Hidetosi Sirai (Chukyo University, Japan)
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Aline Villavicencio (University of Essex, UK) - Workshop Chair
Clare Voss (Army Research Laboratory, USA)
Tom Wasow (Stanford University, USA)
Emile van der Zee (University of Lincoln, UK)
Joost Zwarts (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

Contacts:

Submissions and inquiries : prep05

essex.ac.uk

Local organizing committee :

Aline Villavicencio (workshop chair)
Louisa Sadler
Valia Kordoni

WEB site: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~avill/Prep05.html

Message 2: Workshop on Binding Theory and Invariants in Anaphoric Relations

Date: 11-Jan-2005
From: António Branco <Antonio.Branco

di.fc.ul.pt>
Subject: Workshop on Binding Theory and Invariants in Anaphoric Relations

Full Title: Workshop on Binding Theory and Invariants in Anaphoric Relations
Short Title: Lisbon Binding Workshop

Date: 22-Aug-2005 - 22-Aug-2005
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Contact Person: António Branco
Meeting Email: Antonio.Branco

di.fc.ul.pt
Web Site: http://bindingwksp.di.fc.ul.pt

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Discourse
Analysis; General Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Philosophy of
Language; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Text/Corpus
Linguistics; Typology

Call Deadline: 15-Feb-2005

Meeting Description:

Workshop on
Binding Theory and Invariants in Anaphoric Relations

Lisbon, Portugal
August 22, 2005
http://bindingwksp.di.fc.ul.pt

Hosted by HPSG 2005, the 12th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase
Structure Grammar

Motivation:

Anaphoric binding principles, which capture constraints on the relative
positioning of anaphors and their antecedents in grammatical geometry, have been
a central topic in the research on the grammar of natural languages:
Their modular nature is evidenced by the non trivial  symmetries holding among
them, and their empirical plausibility is supported by the repeated observation
of their occurrence across languages.

While these constraints have been instrumental in the research of other linguistic
phenomena and constructions as one of the most reliable diagnoses for
grammatical structure and relations, the interest around binding theory itself
has continuously expanded, to a considerable extent also due to recent results
from psycholinguistics and from new research methodologies such as
neuro-imaging. This has led to a vast array of exciting results and research
issues, of which the following are just some examples:
-What clarification can be obtained when binding constraints are put into
perspective with respect to discourse structure?
-What is their proper locus (syntax, semantics, ...) in the architecture of grammar?
-What is intrinsic to binding constraints and what should be factored out as
(sub-)regularities possibly due to other grammatical modules and phenomena?
- What is the best definition of auxiliary notions (command, domain, ...) in
view of increased empirical adequacy?
- Are there languages of the world whose anaphors comply with yet to uncover
binding principles?
-What cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e., invariants, hold in anaphoric binding?
- How to accommodate binding theory in current formal grammatical frameworks and
how this may contribute to determine their appropriate shape?
- How to enforce the satisfaction of binding constraints by grammatical
representations and what is the most efficient algorithm to do this?
- What is the root of the intriguing symmetries across binding principles and of
their prominent modular nature?
- What are their cognitive underpinnings and how do these relate to anaphora
processing and resolution?

The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with a forum where their
research on binding benefits from insightful discussion and from the exchange of
leading edge results on issues closely related to their work.  We thus invite
the submission of papers contributing innovative approaches, solutions, data or
results on all aspects of binding theory.

Submission Details:

We invite E-MAIL submissions of abstracts for 30 minute presentations (followed
by 10 minutes of discussion) which should consist of two parts:

1. A separate information page in plain text format, containing
     - author name(s)
     - affiliation(s)
     - e-mail and postal address(es)
     - title of paper

2. An extended abstract of not more than 5 (five) pages, including all figures
and references. Abstracts should be in PDF format. All abstracts should be sent
to Manfred Sailer (manfred.sailer

phil.uni-goettingen.de).

Abstracts for the workshop should mention 'binding-05' in the subject line. All
abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by at least two reviewers. Authors are
asked to avoid self-references in the abstracts.

Important Dates:

Abstract submission deadline: February 15, 2005
Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2005
Workshop: August 22, 2005

Publication:

The proceedings of the workshop will be published on-line by CSLI publications
together with those of the hosting conference. A call for papers for
contributions to the on-line proceedings will be issued after the event.

Program Committee:

Pilar Barbosa (Univ of Minho)
António Branco (Univ of Lisbon, chair)
Réjean Canac-Marquis (Simon Fraser Univ)
Mary Dalrymple (Oxford Univ)
Martin Evearert (OTS)
Volker Gast (Free Univ of Berlin)
Lars Hellan (Norwegian Univ of Science and Technology)
Ehrard Hinrichs (Univ of Tuebingen)
Yan Huang (Univ of Reading)
Frank Keller (Univ of Edinburgh)
Tibor Kiss (Ruhr Univ Bochum)
Valia Kordoni (Univ of Saarland)
Maria Piñango (Yale Univ)
Carl Pollard (Ohio State Univ)
Janina Radó (Univ of Tuebingen)
Eric Reuland (OTS)
Jeffrey Runner (Univ of Rochester)
Ivan Sag (Stanford Univ)
Roland Stuckardt (J.W.Goethe Univ)

Further Information:

workshop web site: http://bindingwksp.di.fc.ul.pt

information about HPSG 2005: http://hpsg2005.di.fc.ul.pt
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