LINGUIST List 8.1739

Thu Dec 4 1997

Calls: Lexical Semantics, Rules & Rule-Following

Editor for this issue: Elaine Halleck <elainelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. WLSS98, Workshop on Lexical Semantics Systems
2. Bocz Andras, Colloquium on Rules & Rule-Following

- -----------------------------------------------------------
 WLSS98
 II WORKSHOP ON LEXICAL SEMANTICS SYSTEMS
 Pisa, 19-20 March 1998
 Scuola Normale Superiore
- -----------------------------------------------------------

Organized by CELI, ILC, ITC-IRST and Scuola Normale Superiore
 With the support of University of Pisa and Xerox Research
 Centre Europe
 -----------------------------
 http://celi.sns.it/~wlss98
 ----------------------------
 
 INVITED SPEAKERS
 (provisional list)
 Gennaro Chierchia (University of Milan)
 Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University)
 Ewan Klein (University of Edimburgh)
 Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI, Saarbrucken)
 -----------------------------------------------

 CALL FOR PAPERS

WLSS98 is organized by Centro per l'Elaborazione del
Linguaggio ed Informazione (CELI), Istituto di Linguistica
Computazionale (ILC), Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e
Tecnologia (ITC-IRST) and Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa),
and will take place in Pisa on the 19-20 March 1998.

WLSS workshops aim at bringing together Italian and
international scholars, active in both theoretical and
applicative domains of research in lexical semantics, with
the goals of:

- providing an overview of the state of the art and
exchanging information on ongoing and planned activities;

- bridging the gap and enhance the trade-off between
theoretical models of lexical knowledge and applications in
NLP systems.

These goals are justified:

- by the increasingly central position that lexical
knowledge, and in particular lexical semantics, is assuming
within the general architecture of cognitive systems, both as
a dynamic module which interact with other non-linguistic
sources of knowledge, and as a component playing a major role
in interfacing syntax and semantics;

- by the fact that lexical resources (such as tagged corpora,
computational dictionaries, Machine Readable Dictionaries,
WordNets) are among the most crucial aspects of practical NLP
systems. Issues concerning the structure, the representation,
the development, and the acquisition of lexical knowledge are
thus of the uttermost importance when building NLP systems.
Lexical systems also play a crucial role in the design and
construction of multilingual systems, a key feature at least
for applications designed to operate in a distributed, non-
centralized environment such as the World Wide Web.

This second edition of WLSS will focus on the portability and
reusability of lexical systems, and on the issue of word
sense disambiguation and semantic tagging. We also encourage
the submission of papers concerning more general issues about
linguistic lexical semantics and its interaction with
computational lexicography.

Abstracts are invited for 30-minute talks. Here follows a non-
exhaustive list of topics which could be addressed:

* Lexical resources for semantic tagging and word sense
 disambiguation.
* Use of lexicons and thesauruses to improve information
 retrieval / extraction techniques.
* Automatic acquisition and management of lexical resources.
* Reusability and tuning of existing lexical resources for
 novel tasks.
* Trade offs between generic and domain specific lexical
 resources.
* Multilingual lexical resources.
* Description and evaluation of existing tools and systems.
* Evaluation of different representation formats.
* Issues in computational lexical semantics and
 computational lexicography.
* Issues in the design, construction and use of lexical
 resources.
* Architecture for a cognitive plausible lexicon
* Lexical representation and the interface with syntactic
 processes

 SUBMISSIONS

Only electronic submissions are accepted. Abstracts should
not exceed 2 pages in length, in Postscript or ASCII format,
and should be sent to the following address:

 wlss98celi.sns.it.

Separate information should be sent, including the title of
the talk, author's name, address and affiliation. Submissions
must be limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint
abstract per author. The deadline is December 15.
The Program Committee intends to publish a selection of the
papers presented at the conference.

 IMPORTANT DATES

Submission of abstracts: 15 December 1997
Notification of acceptance: 31 January 1998
Conference: 19-20 March 1998

 PROGRAM COMMITTEE

 Pier Marco Bertinetto (Scuola Normale Superiore)
 Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC)
 Luca Dini(CELI)
 Vittorio Di Tomaso (CELI)
 Alessandro Lenci (Scuola Normale Superiore)
 Bernardo Magnini (IRST)
 Fabio Pianesi (IRST)
 Frederique Segond (XRCE)
 Antonio Zampolli (ILC)

 CONTACT PERSONS

For every further information please contact the conference
secretariat:

Vittorio Di Tomaso
CELI
ditomasosns.it

Alessandro Lenci
Scuola Normale Superiore
lencialphalinguistica.sns.it

Scuola Normale Superiore
Laboratorio di linguistica
Piazza dei Cavalieri 7
56126 PISA (Italy)

Tel. +39 50 509219
Fax: +39 50 563513


More information on the Workshop and a copy of this call for
papers is available on the Web at the following address:

http://celi.sns.it/~wlss98

 FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

We are happy to announce a
conference and workshop on

Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Rules and Rule-Following:
Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology

between April 30-May 1-2, 1998
at Janus Pannonius University
P\233cs, Hungary


Keynote speakers (who have already accepted invitation):

philosophy:
Gy\246rgy Kampis
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest

linguistics:
Pierre-Yves Raccah
Idl-CNRS, Paris

psychology:
Csaba Pl\233h
Dept. of General Pschology
L\243r\225nd E\246tv\246s University, Budapest


Organizing Committee:
L\225szl\243 Tarnay (JPTE, Dep. of Philosophy)
L\225szl\243 I. Koml\243si (ELTE, Dept. of Psychology)
Andr\225s Bocz (JPTE, Dept. of English Studies)
e-mail: tarnaybtk.jpte.hu; 
 komlosibtk.jpte.hu; 
 boczbtk.jpte.hu


Advisory Board:
G\225bor Forrai (Budapest)
Gy\246rgy Kampis (Budapest)
Mike Harnish (Tucson)
Andr\225s Kert\233sz (Debrecen)
Kuno Lorenz (Saarbr\252cken)
Pierre-Yves Raccah (Paris)
J\225nos S. Pet\245fi (Macerata)

Aims and scopes:

The main aim of the conference is to bring together cholars from the 
field of cognitive linguistics, philosophy and psychology to 
investigate the concept of rule and to address various aspects of 
rule-following. Ever since Wittgenstein formulated in Philosophical 
investigations his famous 201 \167 concerning a kind of rule-following 
which is not an interpretation, the concept of rule has become a key 
but elusive idea in almost every discipline and approach. And not 
only in the human sciences. No wonder, since without this idea the 
whole edifice of human (and possibly all other kinds of) rationality 
would surely collapse. With the rise of cognitive science, and 
especially the appearance of connectionist models and networks, 
however, the classical concept of rule is once again seriously 
contested. To put it very generally, there is an ongoing debate 
between the classical conception in which rules appear as a set of 
formulizable initial conditions or constraints on external operations 
linking different successive states of a given system (algorithms) 
and a dynamic conception in which there is nothing that could be 
correlated with a prior idea of internal well-formedness of the 
system's states. The debate centers on the representability of rules: 
either they are conceived of as meta-representations, or they are 
mere faon de parler concerning the development of complex systems. 
Idealizable on the one hand, while token-oriented on the other. 
Something to be implemented on the one hand, while self-controlling, 
backpropagational processing, on the other. There is however a common 
idea that almost all kinds of rule-conceptions address: the problem 
of learning. This idea reverberates from wittgenstenian pragmatics to 
strategic non-verbal and rule-governed speech behavior, from 
perceiving similarities to mental processing. 

Here are some haunting questions:
- How do we acquire knowledge if there are no regularities in the 
world around us? 
- But how can we perceive those regularities? 
- And how do we reason on the basis of that knowledge if there are no 
observable constraints on infererring?
- But if there are, where do they come from and how are they actually 
implemented mentally?
- And finally: how do we come to act rationally, that is, in 
accordance with what we have perceived, processed and inferred?

We are interested in all ways of defining rules and in all aspects of 
rule following, from the definiton of law, rule, regularity, 
similarity and analogy to logical consequence, argumentational and 
other inferences, statistical and linguistic rules, practical and 
strategic reasoning, pragmatic and praxeological activities. We 
expect contribution from the following reseach fields: game-theory, 
action theory, argumentation theory, cognitive science, linguitics, 
philosophy of language, epistemology, pragmatics, psychology and 
semiotics. We would be happy to include some contributions from 
natural sciences such as neuro-biology, physiology or brain sciences.

The conference is organized in three major sections: philosophy, 
psychology and linguistics with three keynote lectures. Then 
contributions of 30 minutes (20 for paper and 10 for discussion) 
follow. We also plan to organize a workshop at the end of each 
section.
 
Abstracts:
Abstracts should be one-page (maximum 23 lines) specifying area of 
contribution and the particular aspect of rule-following to be 
addressed. Abstracts should be sent by e-mail to tarnaybtk.jpte.hu 
or boczbtk.jpte.hu. Hard copies of abstracts may be sent to:
Laszlo Tarnay
Department of Philosphy
Janus Pannonius University
H-7624 Pecs, Hungray.


Important dates:
Deadline for submission: Jan.-15, 1998
Notification of acceptance: Febr.-28, 1998
conference: April 30-May 1-2, 1998
*************************************
Bocz Andr\225s
Department of English
Janus Pannonius University
Ifj\250s\225g u. 6. H-7624 P\233cs, Hungary
Tel/Fax: (36) (72) 314714