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cs.brandeis.edu>ESSLLI-98 Workshop on LEXICAL SEMANTICS IN CONTEXT: CORPUS, INFERENCE AND DISCOURSE August 17 - 21, 1998 A workshop held as part of the 10th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI-98) August 17 - 28, 1998, Saarbruecken, Germany ** LAST CALL FOR PAPERS ** ** EXTENDED DEADLINE : March 2, 1998 ** ORGANIZERS: Johan Bos (Saarbruecken) and Paul Buitelaar (Brandeis University) The workshop aims at bringing together research in two complementary fields of semantic analysis that are still too far apart. In order to achieve both a broad and a deep understanding of any given text document, a system needs both advanced acquisition of corpus specific lexical semantic knowledge and powerful inference mechanisms that utilize that knowledge in discourse analysis. Given the still relatively limited results within both areas there has been little impetus to combine them. Corpus-based extraction of lexical semantic knowledge has only recently become a more feasible task, because of the growing availibility of on-line text documents; robust corpus processing technologies, such as broad coverage part-of-speech tagging and shallow parsing; and readily available statistical methods. The various approaches to discourse analysis, originating in such diverse fields as formal semantics, psychology and AI, are in the process of converging into a unified approach to the analysis and representation of the cohesive structure of natural language documents. The intersection between these two fields lies in the application of lexical semantic knowledge to such problems in discourse analysis as anaphora resolution and discourse segmentation. In fact, the benefit will be mutual, because knowledge of discourse structure is helpful to lexical knowledge extraction as well. In summary, large scale domain specific lexical semantic knowledge acquisition can assist in analyzing discourse structures, which in turn can assist in acquiring even more accurate lexical semantic representations for the relevant terms in the domain. FURTHER INFORMATION: To obtain further information please visit the workshop home page at http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~paulb/esslli98.htmlMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cogsci.ed.ac.uk>(Apologies if you see this twice ...) The Computation of Phonological Constraints =========================================== The 4th Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Phonology (http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~sigphon/98) In conjunction with The COLING-ACL'98 Joint Conference Montreal, Canada, 15th August 1998 The Meeting - --------- Constraint-based theories of phonology have become enormously popular in recent years. Such theories express generalizations by stating how and when a language's phonological forms are constrained, rather than relying on rules that actively modify the forms. Computational ideas have often provided an impetus for these innovations. Koskenniemi's (1983) 2-level morphophonological processor introduced parallel constraining relations as an alternative to an ordered system of rewrite rules. Declarative Phonology (c 1990) focusses on the unity of representations and rules as constraints, drawing on various computational ideas from unification to temporal logic to finite-state calculi. One current constraint-based theories is Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince&Smolensky 1993). This theory found, at least partial, inspiration in computational work by Smolensky on the relation between symbolic and subsymbolic computation. Although this link with connectionism has been left largely unexplored, OT has proved to be a computationally productive theory, giving rise to several theoretical papers on computational issues related to complexity and learnability, as well as inspiring a number of implementations. This workshop is designed to foster the link between computational work and constraint-based phonology in general. To this end, it invites submissions on topics related to the computation of any constraint-based phonological formalism, including but not limited to the three mentioned above. Here are some example topics: * the computational interpretation of phonological theories, * constraint ranking and interaction, eg. as in OT, * implementations of particular analyses, * results in the complexity of constraint application, * algorithms for learning constraints or constraint ranking, * results on the learnability of such constraints, * novel formalisms for constraint-based phonology, * representational issues raised by constraint-based approaches. In short, papers are invited which address computational issues in constraint-based theories of phonology. Submission - -------- What: original research, not published elsewhere a completed study is prefered to proposals and progress reports originality, topicality and clarity will be the assessment criteria How: submissions must be sent by email to sigphon98Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue