LINGUIST List 25.3172
Mon
Aug 04 2014
FYI: II UNL Panel: Call
for Chapters
Editor for this issue:
Uliana Kazagasheva <ulianalinguistlist.org>
Date: 01-Aug-2014
From: Ronaldo Martins
<r.martins
undlfoundation.org>
Subject: II UNL Panel: Call
for Chapters
E-mail this message to a
friend
II UNL Panel: Call for Chapters
www.unlweb.net
The UNDL Foundation invites submissions to the
second volume of the UNL Series, to be
published on January 2015, and which will be
dedicated to the nature and role of relations
and attributes in the UNL framework. The
participation is open and free, and the
chapters must necessarily comply with the
instructions below. Authors of selected papers
will be invited to present their work in the II
UNL Panel, to be held in Geneva, on March 2015.
The UNDL Foundation will pay the travel and
accommodation expenses for the selected
candidates not living in Geneva.
Important Dates:
Deadline for submission: 31 Oct 2014
Notification of acceptance: 30 Nov 2014
Final version: 15 Dec 2014
II UNL Panel: March 2015
Rationale:
The UNL is an artificial language created to
represent and process information across
language barriers. Proposed by the Institute of
Advanced Studies of the United Nations
University, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1996, it has
been enhanced and promoted by the UNDL
Foundation, in Geneva, Switzerland, under a
mandate of the United Nations, since 2000. The
basic assumption of the UNL approach is that
the information conveyed by natural languages
can be formally represented through a semantic
network made of three different types of
discrete semantic units: concepts, relations
and attributes. Concepts are nodes in the UNL
graph, to be interlinked by relations and
specified by attributes.
Originally proposed more than 15 years ago, the
UNL has not incorporated yet several recent
advances in the domain of natural language
processing. Additionally, there has been a
claim for better standardization practices in
the UNL framework, especially after the results
of the large-scale development inside the
www.unlweb.net. In
order to organize this discussion, the UNDL
Foundation set the UNL Panel initiative and
proposes a three-chapter dialogue with the NLP
community. In each chapter, the UNDL Foundation
invites specialists, from inside and outside
the UNL Society, to present their positions and
views about technical issues concerning natural
language processing applied to UNL. The first
meeting was held at COLING 2012 and was
dedicated to the lexical issues of UNL. The
results are available at Martins, R. (ed).
(2013). Lexical Issues of UNL: Universal
Networking Language 2012 Panel. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
The second meeting targets the nature and role
of relations and attributes in semantic
networks. Specialists are requested to explain
their positions in a paper in a question-answer
format, which must necessarily address the five
examples below. The selected papers will be
published in the second volume of the UNL
Series and the authors will be invited to
present their work in the II UNL Panel, to be
held in Geneva, on March 2015. The UNDL
Foundation will pay the travel and
accommodation expenses for the selected
candidates not living in Geneva.
Questions:
Considering the commitments, assumptions and
properties of the UNL (available at
www.unlweb.net/wiki/Introduction_to_UNL),
how would you represent, as a
language-independent semantic graph, the
following English sentences?
1. The disappointment killed Mary.
2. The book is right under the table.
3. Peter is between John and Mary.
4. John took a very long nap.
5. John made Peter go away.
The sentences above illustrate some theoretical
and practical issues concerning relations and
attributes that have been receiving several
different possible answers within the current
UNL framework. The main goal of II UNL Panel is
to discuss which answers would be more
appropriate and feasible, considering the state
of the art of the theory and technology on
natural language processing. We would ask
participants to use them as starting points for
their presentations, but we would expect them
to suggest some general procedures to be
adopted in similar cases. The current answers
as well as further instructions for authors are
available at
www.unlweb.net/wiki/II_UNL_Panel.
Support:
Authors of selected papers will be invited to
present their work in the II UNL Panel, to be
held in Geneva, on March 2015. The UNDL
Foundation will pay the following travel and
accommodation expenses for the selected
candidates not living in Geneva:
- a round-trip plane, bus or train ticket
from/to Geneva;
- 6 (six) nights at a budget hotel in Geneva;
and
- 6 (six) per diem of CHF100.00 (total of
CHF600.00), to cover any other expenses,
including meals and transportation.
UNDL Foundation:
The UNDL Foundation is a non-profit
organization based in Geneva, Switzerland,
which has received, from the United Nations,
the mandate for implementing the Universal
Networking Language (UNL). The UNL is an
artificial language that has been used for
several different tasks in natural language
engineering, such as machine translation,
multilingual document generation,
summarization, information retrieval and
semantic reasoning. It has been, since 1996, a
unique initiative to reduce language barriers
and strengthen cross-cultural communication in
the framework of the UN.
Further Information:
For further information, please contact:
Ronaldo Martins, PhD
Language Resources Manager
UNDL Foundation
r.martins
undlfoundation.org
Linguistic Field(s): Computational
Linguistics
Page Updated: 04-Aug-2014