LINGUIST List 14.495

Wed Feb 19 2003

Calls: Text Meaning / Language Research

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>



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Directory

  • sergei, Workshop on Text Meaning, Canada
  • karimi, Language Research Forum, AZ USA

    Message 1: Workshop on Text Meaning, Canada

     Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 09:35:26 +0000
    From: sergei <sergeiumbc.edu>
    Subject: Workshop on Text Meaning, Canada


    Workshop on Text Meaning

    Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Date: 31-May-2003 - 31-May-2003 Call Deadline: 10-Mar-2003

    Contact Person: Sergei Nirenburg Meeting Email: sergeiumbc.edu Linguistic Subfield(s): Computational Linguistics

    This is a session of the following conference: North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics & Human Language Technology

    Meeting Description:

    Workshop on Text Meaning (at HLT/NAACL-03)

    Organizers

    Sergei Nirenburg University of Maryland, Baltimore County sergeiumbc.edu Graeme Hirst University of Toronto ghcs.toronto.edu

    Workshop Goal

    The main goal of the Workshop on Text Meaning is to re-establish the research community of knowledge-based meaning processing and to help to explicate the currently implicit treatments of meaning in knowledge-lean approaches and how the advances in the latter and in formal semantics should influence the task.

    Overview

    Most, if not all, high-end NLP applications '' from the earliest, MT, to the latest, question answering and text summarization '' stand to benefit from being able to use text meaning in their processing. But the bulk of work in the field has not, over the years, pertained to treatment of meaning. The main reason given is the complexity of the task of comprehensive meaning analysis.

    Our field, of course, has never been entirely uninterested in meaning. The tradition of formal semantics has been continuously maintained for many years. Knowledge representation inside AI has come up with a large number of proposals concerning the metalanguages that could be used to formally represent text meaning. A variety of general and special (e.g., space- or time-related) logical and common-sense reasoning systems have been developed that facilitate inference making on the basis of the representation of 'literal' meaning obtained from text. Much work has been devoted to building practical, increasingly broad-coverage meaning-oriented analysis and synthesis systems. Lexical semantics has made significant progress in theories, description, and processing. Formal aspects of ontology work have also been studied. The Semantic Web has further popularized the need for automatic extraction, representation, and manipulation of text meaning: for the Semantic Web to really succeed, capability of automatically marking text for content is essential, and this cannot be attained reliably using only knowledge-lean, semantics-poor methods.

    Recently, there has been a flurry of specialized meetings devoted to formal semantics, lexical semantics, semantic web, formal ontology and others. But the number of meetings devoted to knowledge-based text meaning processing '' content rather than formalism'' has been much smaller. This workshop will begin to remedy that.

    Suggested Topics

    The workshop invites papers that relate to (but are not necessarily limited to) the following topics: - Broad-coverage semantic analysis - Knowledge-based text synthesis - The nature of text meaning required for various practical broad-coverage applications - Pragmatics and discourse issues as parts of text meaning extraction and manipulation - Ontologies supporting automatic processing of text meaning - Semantic lexicons - Language- and world-related microtheories designed to support text meaning extraction and manipulation: aspect, modality, reference, etc. - Text meaning representations in semantic analysis - Reasoning to support semantic analysis and synthesis - Multilingual aspects of meaning representation and manipulation - Integrating semantic analysis and non-semantic language processing - The benefits (if any) to semantic analysis and synthesis systems from knowledge-lean stochastic corpus-oriented methods.

    We encourage discussion of theoretical issues that are relevant to computational applications, including descriptions of processors and static knowledge resources. We specifically prefer discussions of meaning content over discussions of formalisms for its encoding and discussions of decision heuristics in processing over discussions of generic processing architectures and theorem proving mechanisms.

    This workshop will be not only a forum for presenting complete work with tangible results (even though this will be encouraged) but also an opportunity to:

    1. take stock of the developments in the field; 2. assess the nature of the most pressing extant problems and reasons for current lack of satisfactory solutions; 3. re-assess the potential contributions from developments outside the field (e.g., work on formal ontologies or corpus-based methods); and 4. coordinate and plan future work.

    Submission Procedure

    Submit papers (not to exceed 8 pages in the HLT/NAACL two-column format) electronically, PDF strongly preferred, to sergeiumbc.edu.

    Deadlines

    Paper submission March 17, 2003 Notification of acceptance March 31, 2003 Camera-ready version due April 10, 2003 Workshop date May 31, 2003

    Questions

    Direct inquiries to either of the organizers, sergeiumbc.edu and ghcs.toronto.edu.

    Program Committee

    Stephen Beale University of Maryland, Baltimore County Lynn Carlson US Department of Defense Sanda Harabagiu University of Texas at Dallas Jerry Hobbs USC Information Sciences Institute Nancy Ide Vassar College Richard Kittredge University of Montreal Tanya Korelsky CoGenTex, Inc. Marjorie McShane University of Maryland, Baltimore County Dan Moldovan University of Texas at Dallas Martha Palmer University of Pennsylvania James Pustejovsky Brandeis University Victor Raskin Purdue University Yorick Wilks Sheffield University

    Message 2: Language Research Forum, AZ USA

     Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 19:45:00 +0000
    From: karimi <karimiu.arizona.edu>
    Subject: Language Research Forum, AZ USA


    The Second Language Research Forum

    Short Title: SLRF2003 Location: Tucson, Arizona, United States of America Date: 16-Oct-2003 - 19-Oct-2003 Call Deadline: 03-Mar-2003

    Web Site: http://www.coh.arizona.edu/slrf2003/ Contact Person: Estela Ene Meeting Email: slrf2003u.arizona.edu Linguistic Subfield(s): Language Acquisition

    Meeting Description:

    CALL FOR PAPERS

    Abstracts for papers and posters regarding theory and research in second language acquisition, especially interdisciplinary approaches to second language acquisition are invited.

    Please choose one submission format: - Paper Presentations: 30 minutes long with a 10-minute discussion period. - Poster Presentations: to be displayed for a 2-hour block of time.

    Send submission to: slrf2003u.arizona.edu

    Please refer to our submission guidelines and our abstract criteria on the SLRF 2003 website http://www.coh.arizona.edu/slrf2003/

    Deadline for Abstracts: March 3rd, 2003

    Estela Ene and Senta Goetler Program Co-Chairs SLRF 2003 Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Transitional Office Building, Room 208 1731 E. 2nd Street P.O. Box 210014 The University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721-0014