LINGUIST List 9.237

Tue Feb 17 1998

Calls: Computational Treatment,WordNet,Multilinguality

Editor for this issue: Anita Huang <anitalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Priscilla Rasmussen, Coling-ACL'98 Workshops CFPs
2. Lynne Cahill, Multilinguality Workshop: CFP

Below are two Coling-ACL'98 Workshop Calls for Papers:

-	The Computational Treatment of Nominals
-	Usage of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems

They are seperated by:


 Call for papers

 Coling-ACL '98 workshop

 "The Computational Treatment of Nominals"

 August 16, 1998
 Universite de Montreal
 Montreal/Canada

http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~federica/workshops/coling/call.html

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers who are interested in
the study of the computational properties of nominals and noun phrases. The
focus is on representational questions as they relate directly to NLP
requirements and applications.

Understanding the properties of the nominal system is extremely important
since nouns and nominalizations are used extensively by both people and
systems: searching and communicating with either a telegraphic or a more
expressive language involves heavy use of nominal forms. A number of NLP
applications, ranging from "intelligent" key-word search to text
summarization and information extraction, among others, not only require
some way of recognizing nominal forms, but also require at least a shallow
understanding of the semantic information that nouns carry. It is therefore
of great interest to consider what impact representing semantic knowledge at
a finer level of granularity would have towards enhancing a system's
performance.

Submissions are invited on one or more of the following topics:

 * Representation of nominals:
 o design of noun ontologies for use in lexical semantics and machine
 translation
 o ambiguity, polysemy, vagueness, and underspecification in the
 semantics of nominals
 o identifying the minimal requirements for lexical representations
 * Representational issues in the acquisition of knowledge:
 o from corpora
 o from MRDs
 o syntactic and morphological bootstrapping
 o semantic boostrapping (role of prepositions, arguments, etc.)
 * Role of representations for the interpretation of nominals:
 o techniques for recovering implicit information in nominals
 o interpretation and generation of nominals in descriptions of
 events and abstract objects in discourse
 o recovering implicit semantic relations in nominal compounds
 o defining implicit semantic relations between nominalizations and
 the forms they are derived from

Organizing Committee

Federica Busa (Brandeis University)
Inderjeet Mani (The MITRE Corporation)
Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, Universite Paul Sabatier)

Submission Information

 * Papers are invited that address any of the topics listed above.
 * Maximum length is 8 pages (single-spaced) including figures and
 references.
 * Please use A4 or US letter format and set margins so that the text lies
 within a rectangle of 6.5 x 9 inches (16.5 x 23 cm).
 * Use classical fonts such as Times Roman or Computer Modern, 11 to 12
 points for text, 14 to 16 points for headings and title.
 * LaTeX users are encouraged to use the style file provided by
 COLING-ACL'98: http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/colaclsub.sty
 * Authors should send 5 copies in either electronic (PostScript or Latex)
 or hard-copy format to:

 Federica Busa
 Computer Science Department
 Volen Center for Complex Systems
 Brandeis University
 Waltham, Massachusetts 02254
 U.S.A.
 federicacs.brandeis.edu

Criteria for selection will include clarity, originality, relevance, and
significance of results.

Important Deadlines

 * Deadline for submission: March 15th, 1998
 * Notification of authors: May 1st, 1998
 * Final versions due: June 1, 1998

Program Committee

 * Federica Busa (Brandeis University)
 * Jean Mark Gawron (SRI International)
 * Bob Ingria (Psyche Systems Corporation)
 * Beth Levin (Northwestern University)
 * Inderjeet Mani (The MITRE Corporation)
 * Paul Portner (Georgetown University)
 * James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University)
 * Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, Universit=C8 Paul Sabatier)
 * Antonio Sanfilippo (SHARP Laboratories of Europe)
 * Evelyne Viegas (CRL, New Mexico State University)
 * Piek Vossen (University of Amsterdam)

- ----------------------
Dr. Inderjeet Mani 			Phone: 703-883-6149
Principal Scientist			Fax: 703-883-1379
The MITRE Corporation, W640, 11493 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, Virginia 22090

*****************************************************************************

....................................................................
Due to some construction problems one of the large machines here had to be
shut down, therefore I had to change the URL of the workshop to:

http://www.ai.sri.com/~harabagi/coling-acl98/acl_work/acl_work.html

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Sanda Harabagiu

			CALL FOR PAPERS 
		 ===Coling-ACL '98 Workshop ==
	"Usage of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems"

			August 16, 1998
			Universite de Montreal
			Montreal, Canada

Lexicons are indispensable resources for almost every natural language
project. To date, WordNet 1.5 represents the largest publicly
available on-line lexical resource, already used in various
applications of the human language technology. Systems performing word
sense disambiguation, information extraction or retrieval,
prepositional attachment, interpretation of nominalizations, textual
summarization, coreference resolution, abductive reasoning
conversational implicature, recognition of textual cohesion and
coherence, intelligent Internet searches and some of the digital
libraries projects use WordNet.

This workshop intends to bring together researchers that use WordNet
in different systems and to focus on two particular issues: (a) how to
customize the knowledge derived from WordNet for various NLP
applications and (b) how to derive methods that infer semantic
information using WordNet. The contributions might address one or more
of the following questions:
	
* What are the NLP applications for which WordNet is a valuable
resource and how much effort was involved to integrate it in your systems?

* Is WordNet used to build ad-hoc ontologies? What are the
applications that use WordNet-derived ontologies?

* How can WordNet be used to develop a word sense disambiguation
algorithm of high performance?

* How to extend WordNet for identifying thematic roles and resolving verb 
polysemy? 

* What minimal customization should be implemented to use WordNet for
a large-scale abductive reasoning system? 

* Is WordNet a lexical knowledge base that can be easily used to
adjust Information Extraction systems across domains? 

* Are the lexico-semantic relations from WordNet a valid base for
developing an extended coreference task for information extraction,
and what are the possible methodologies?

* How can WordNet be mined to find textual implied information and
what is the degree of plausibility of the returned information? 

* What are the approaches of using the extensive linguistic knowledge
of WordNet to derive the discourse structure of a text; can it be the
only knowledge source and if not, what additional knowledge may be
used?

* What is the current performance boost provided by WordNet in the
systems using it? Could your systems perform without WordNet? 

* What are the desirable features of WordNet for your system, and what
would be the predicted performance increase when having them?

_____________________________________________________________________

Organizing committee 

The workshop is organized by 

 Sanda Harabagiu (SRI International)
 Joyce Yue Chai (Duke University)
_____________________________________________________________________
HOME PAGE:
http://www.ai.sri.com/~harabagi/link_paper/chpt/acl_work.html
_____________________________________________________________________

Requirements for submission

 Papers are invited that address any of the topics listed above. 
 Maximum length is 8 pages including figures and references. 
 Please use A4 or US letter format and set margins so that the text 
	lies within a rectangle of 6.5 x 9 inches (16.5 x 23 cm). 
 Use classical fonts such as Times Roman or Computer Modern, 11 to 
	12 points for text, 14 to 16 points for headings and title. 
 LaTeX users are encouraged to use the style file provided by ACL:
 http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/colaclsub.sty 
 Papers can be submitted either electronically in PostScript format, or 
	as hardcopies. 

Submissions should be sent to: 

Sanda Harabagiu
SRI International 
333 Ravenswood Ave 
Menlo Park, CA 94025 
U.S.A. 
(Ph) (650) 859-3852 
harabagiai.sri.com
_____________________________________________________________________

Timetable

Deadline for electronic submissions: March 10, 1998 
Deadline for hardcopy submissions: March 13 (arrival date) 
Notification of acceptance: May 1, 1998 
Final manuscripts due: June 12, 1998 
_____________________________________________________________________
Program committee

 Alan Biermann (Duke University) 
 Joyce Chai (Duke University) 
 Martin Chodorow (New York University) 
 Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University) 
 Fernando Gomez (University of Central Florida) 
 Ken Haase (MIT) 
 Sanda Harabagiu (SRI International) 
 Marti Hearst (University of California, Berkeley) 
 Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto) 
 Claudia Leacock (Educational Testing Service) 
 Mitch Marcus (University of Pennsylvania) 
 George A. Miller (Princeton University) 
 Dan Moldovan (Southern Methodist University) 
 Hwee Tou Ng (DSO National Laboratories, Singapore) 
 Philip Resnik (University of Maryland) 
 Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield) 

 ECAI98

 Second Multilinguality in the Lexicon Workshop

 August 25th 1998

 A workshop held as part of the
 13th biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-98)
 August 23rd - 28th, 1998, Brighton, UK

Organising Committee:

Lynne Cahill (University of Sussex)
Susan Armstrong (ISSCO)
Pierette Bouillon (ISSCO)
Roger Evans (ITRI, University of Brighton)

Web site: http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ecai98/tw/W13.html

The 1st Multilinguality in the Lexicon Workshop took place in April 1996 as
part of the AISB workshop series at Sussex, and brought together researchers
with a wide range of experiences in multilingual lexicon development. In this
second MLL workshop, we invite papers illustrating progress made since the
first meeting, as well as papers on new approaches and applications. As
before, the workshop will provide an opportunity for people working on all
aspects of multilingual lexicons, both theoretical and practical, to focus on
the particular problems and questions associated with multilingual lexical
representation.

Papers are invited on any aspects of multilinguality in the lexicon
including but not limited to: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology,
phonology, orthography; machine translation, generation, understanding;
bilingual and multilingual issues; related and unrelated languages;
issues of representation and access.

The workshop will run for one day as part of ECAI-98 in Brighton, UK. To
ensure a workshop rather than mini-conference format, presented papers will be
interspersed with substantial discussion sessions. In order to maximise
participation, attendees not presenting papers (and perhaps some who are) may
be asked to lead the discussion sessions.

SUBMISSION FORMAT:
Extended abstracts of not more than 6 pages (A4) are invited. Submissions
should be either hard copy or (preferebly) electronic in self-contained LaTeX
or Postscript files. Submissions should include authors' name, affiliation,
email and full postal address and should be sent to:

 Lynne Cahill
 School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
 University of Sussex,
 Falmer,
 Brighton BN1 9QH,
 UK

 Email: Lynne.Cahillcogs.susx.ac.uk

IMPORTANT DATES:
 1 Apr Submission deadline
 1 May Notification of acceptance
 1 Jun Deadline for final papers
 25 Aug Workshop

FURTHER INFORMATION:
To obtain further information about ECAI-98 and the workshop please visit the
ECAI-98 web site at http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ecai98/