[Corpora-List] 1st CFP: Models of Scientific Discourse Annotation (MSDA2011)

Wed Dec 22 16:09:09 UTC 2010

Call for Papers:

Models of Scientific Discourse Annotation (MSDA2011)
Portland, Oregon, June 25, 2011 (following ACL/HLT 2011)
http://msda2011.wordpress.com/

Motivation:

The detection of discourse structure of scientific documents is 
important for a number of tasks, including biocuration efforts, text 
summarisation, and the creation of improved formats for scientific 
publishing. Currently, many parallel efforts exist to detect a range of 
discourse elements at different levels of granularity, and for different 
purposes. Discourse elements detected include facts, problems, 
hypotheses, experimental results, and analyses of results; the 
differentiation between new and existing work, and the difference 
between the author’s own contribution and that of cited sources. A 
plethora of feature classes is used to identify these elements, 
including verb tense/mood/voice, semantic verb class, speculative 
language or negation, and various classes of stance markers, as well as 
text-structural components and the location of references. The 
linguistics behind this work involves topics such as the detection of 
subjectivity, opinion, entailment, and inference; detecting author 
stance and author disagreement, and inferring differences between the 
given text and the state of knowledge in a particular field.

Several workshops have been focused on the detection of some of these 
features in scientific text, such as speculation and negation in the 
2010 workshop on Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing 
and hedging in the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task Learning to detect hedges and 
their scope in natural language text. There have also been several 
efforts to produce large-scale corpora, such as BioScope, where negation 
and speculation information were annotated, and the GENIA Event corpus.

To perform this analysis, a wide range of annotation schemes have been 
produced, that vary along a number of different axes, including:
• Annotation viewpoint (e.g. argumentative zones, scientific 
investigation structure, type of knowledge conveyed)
• Unit of annotation (e.g. zone, sentence, segment, event, etc)
• Type of text (abstracts or full papers)
• Domain of application
• Granularity of the annotation categories (coarse or fine-grained)
• Whether other types/levels of information are also annotated (e.g. 
certainty level, knowledge source, manner etc.)

Scope:

The goal of the 2011 ACL workshop on “Models of Scientific Discourse 
Annotation” is to compare and contrast the motivation behind these 
different efforts, the techniques and principles applied in the various 
approaches, and discuss ways in which they can complement each other and 
collaborate to form standards for an optimal method of annotating 
appropriate levels of discourse, with enhanced accuracy and usefulness.

The goal of the workshop is to compare, contrast and evaluate different 
scientific discourse annotation schemes and tools, in order to answer 
questions such as:
• What motivates a certain level, method, viewpoint for annotating 
scientific text?
• What is the annotation level for a unit of argumentation: an event, a 
sentence, a segment? What are advantages and disadvantages of all three?
• How easily can different schemes to be applied to texts? Are they 
easily trainable?
• Which schemes are the most portable? Can they be applied to both full 
papers and abstracts? Can they be applied to texts in different domains?
• How granular should annotation schemes be? What are the 
advantages/disadvantages of fine and coarse grained annotation categories?
• Can different schemes complement each other to provide different 
levels of information? Can different schemes be combined to give better 
results?
• How can we compare annotations, how do we decide which features, 
approaches, techniques work best?
• How do we exchange and evaluate each other’s annotations?
• How applicable are these efforts towards improved methods of 
publishing or summarizing science?

We are inviting two types of submissions:
1) Research papers by participants who are currently conducting 
scientific discourse analysis are invited to present their work, 
augmented by a clear motivation for the granularity, discourse elements 
and goal of their annotation procedure
2) Vision papers, by participants who wish to either compare and 
contrast existing efforts, or present a vision of annotation as it 
pertains to specific user goals or a particular view of scientific 
discourse as a textual genre of study.

In inviting both categories, we hope to stimulate a discussion between 
the Computational Linguistics community and linguists, genre specialists 
and sociologists of science, to come to a common understanding regarding 
the needs and possibilities of scientific discourse analysis.

Keynote lecture:

We are proud to announce a keynote lecture by Eduard H. Hovy of ISI/USC, 
tentatively entitled: ‘Towards a systematic approach for annotating 
scientific discourse’

Submission details:

Submission deadline is FEBRUARY 25, 2011.

Two types of papers are solicited:
1) 8-page (+ 2 pp references) research papers reporting to original and 
unpublished research in scientific discourse annotation
2) 4-page (+ 2 pp references) vision papers pertaining to models, 
concepts, critiques or comparisons of systems of annotation of 
scientific discourse.

Accepted papers are expected to be presented at the workshop and will be 
published in the workshop proceedings. A selection of the presented 
papers will be published as a special issue of PLoS One 
(http://www.plosone.org/).

Submissions must be formatted using ACL 2011 style files, available at
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml

Contributions should be submitted via the MSDA2011 submission site:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msda2011

Organising committee:

Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester
Ágnes Sándor, Xerox Research Europe, Grenoble
Hagit Shatkay, University of Delaware
Anita de Waard, Elsevier Labs, University of Toronto

Program Committee:

Gully Burns – ISI/USC
Tim Clark – Harvard/MGH
Kevin Cohen - University of Colorado
Nigel Collier - National Institute of Informatics
Walter Daelemans -University of Antwerp
Kjersti Flottum – Bergen
Roxana Girju - University of Illinois
Sanda Harabagiu - University of Texas Dallas
Lynette Hirschman - MITRE corporation
Halil Kilicoglu - Concordia University
Jin-Dong Kim - DBCLS, University of Tokyo
Anna Korhonen - University of Cambridge
Maria Liakata - Aberystwyth University
Roser Morante - University of Antwerp
Raheel Nawaz - University of Manchester
Drago Radev - University of Michigan
Andrey Rzhetsky - University of Chicago
Caroline Sporleder - Saarland University
Gyorgy Szarvas - Technical University Darmstadt
Paul Thompson - University of Manchester
Junichi Tsujii – University of Tokyo
Antal van den Bosch - Tilburg University
Karin Verspoor - University of Colorado
Theresa Wilson - University of Edinburgh

-- 
Paul Thompson
Research Associate
School of Computer Science
National Centre for Text Mining
Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre
University of Manchester
131 Princess Street
Manchester
M1 7DN
UK
Tel: 0161 306 3091
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Paul.Thompson/

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