LINGUIST List 17.1784

Tue Jun 13 2006

Calls: Computational Linguistics

Editor for this issue: Maria Moreno-Rollins <marialinguistlist.org>

Directory         1.    Ron Artstein, Research on Language and Computation
Message 1: Research on Language and Computation
Date: 13-Jun-2006
From: Ron Artstein <ambiguityessex.ac.uk>
Subject: Research on Language and Computation



Full Title: Research on Language and Computation

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

Call Deadline: 15-Oct-2006

Research on Language and ComputationAmbiguity and semantic judgments

Special issue edited by Massimo Poesio and Ron Artstein

Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2006

ScopeWe invite articles for a special issue on ambiguity and semantic judgmentsfrom a computational, theoretical and psychological perspective. Muchresearch in computational linguistics assumes that tasks have a singleanswer: word sense disambiguation looks for an unambiguous sense incontext, anaphora resolution algorithms look for a unique antecedent,question-answering systems look for the best answer, semantic role labelingidentifies the most appropriate role, and so on. Yet theoretical andpsychological evidence show that ambiguity is abundant, and semanticannotation tasks often display disagreements between coders which are theresult of genuine ambiguity rather than annotation error.

We are interested in ambiguity, broadly defined. On the one hand, there arecases where ambiguities constitute clearly distinct interpretations,preserved despite the context. On the other hand, there are instances ofunderspecification which may or may not be construed as ambiguous given acontext. And in between there may be cases where different modes ofprocessing give rise to differences of emphasis which may or may notwarrant classifying as ambiguities. All these shades of variation, and thedisputes they give rise to, call for more empirical study of matters ofambiguity, especially as they pertain to semantic judgments used in corpusannotation and computational implementation.

For this special issue we are looking for high-quality, original,full-length journal articles on any aspect pertaining to ambiguity andsemantic judgment. We especially welcome articles on the following topics:

- Computational implementations which take ambiguity into account- Empirical research on ambiguity and annotator agreement- Psychologically motivated research on semantic ambiguity

Submission instructionsDeadline for submissions: 15 October 2006Late submissions will only be considered if time and space allow. It wouldbe helpful if authors who intend to submit an article could let us know by1 August 2006, or as soon as possible thereafter, by sending an email toambiguityessex.ac.uk. Include contact information in thebody of the email.Further information: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/ambiguity/