14.413, Calls: WordNet/Prepositions

Tue Feb 11 18:30:21 UTC 2003

LINGUIST List:  Vol-14-413. Tue Feb 11 2003. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 14.413, Calls: WordNet/Prepositions

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org):
	Simin Karimi, U. of Arizona
	Terence Langendoen, U. of Arizona

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1)
Date:  Mon, 10 Feb 2003 13:04:40 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  Global WordNet Association, Czech Republic

2)
Date:  Mon, 10 Feb 2003 11:55:51 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions, France

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 10 Feb 2003 13:04:40 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  Global WordNet Association, Czech Republic

1st Call for papers

       2nd International Conference of the Global WordNet Association
                        Mazaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

The Global Wordnet Association is pleased to announce the Second
International Conference of the Global WordNet Association (GWA'04).
The conference will be held at Mazaryk University, Brno (Czech
Republic), January, 20 - 23, 2004.

Details about the Association and the full announcement for the
conference can be found on the GWA website:

        http://www.globalwordnet.org

We invite papers addressing the questions listed below.  Proposals for
tutorials on building wordnets and demonstrations of wordnet databases
and wordnet-based software on any issue related to wordnets are
welcome, too.

A.      Linguistics and WordNet:
        a.        In depth analysis of Semantic Relations,
        b.        Theoretical definitions of word meaning,
        c.        Necessity and Completeness issues.

B.      Architecture of WordNet:
        a.        Language independent and language dependent components

C.      Tools and Methods for Wordnet Development:
        a.        User and Data entry interface, organization,
        b.        Extending and enriching wordnets

D.      WordNet as a lexical resource and component of NLP and MT:
        a.        Word sense disambiguation using wordnet,
        b.        Ontologies and WordNet,
        c.        The Lexicon and WordNet

E.      Applications of WordNet:
        a.        Information Extraction and Retrieval,
        b.        Document Structuring and Categorization,
        c.        Automatic Hyperlinking
        d.        Language Teaching,
        e.        Psycholinguistic Applications
F.      Standardization, distribution and availability of wordnets and
wordnet tools.

Presentations will fall into one of the following categories:

- long papers (30 mins)
- short papers (15 mins)
- project reports (10 mins)
- demonstrations (20 mins)

Submissions will have to state the preferred format. Acceptance may be
subject to changes in the format or length of the presentation.
(E.g., a long paper submission may be accepted as a short paper.)

Final papers should be submitted in electronic form (Word or TeX) Long
papers should contain approximately 7,500 words (~ 15 pages); short
papers and demonstrations should be approx. 4,000 words long.  Project
reports will be limited to approx. 1,000 words (2 pages of text).

The conference program will include oral presentations and
poster/demonstration sessions with sufficient time for discussions of
the issues raised.

The deadline for submissions is July 1st, 2003. Decisions regarding
acceptance will be announced to the authors in early September.

The host institution has stated their intent to publish the
Proceedings both in paper and CD format.

Conference Chairs:
        Christiane Fellbaum and Piek Vossen
Local Organizing Chair:
        Karel Pala

Important dates:

Date            Progression
- -----------------------------
02-2003         1st Announcement
05-2003         2nd Announcement
01-09-2003      Deadline for paper submission
01-10-2003      Acceptance of papers
01-11-2003      Final Papers
11-2003         Registration is open
20/23-01-2004   Conference

Please watch the wordnet www sites for further information and
announcements.

WordNet
EuroWordNet
Global Wordnet Association
ACL-SIGLEX

-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 10 Feb 2003 11:55:51 EST
From:  Priscilla Rasmussen <rasmusse at cs.rutgers.edu>
Subject:  Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions, France

ACL-SIGSEM   Workshop on
The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and
their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications.

September 4-6,  2003, Toulouse, France

Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL's Special Interest Group in Computational
Semantics.

A great deal of attention has been devoted in the past ten years in
the linguistic and computational linguistics communities to the syntax
and the semantics of nouns, verbs and also, but to a lesser extent, to
adjectives. Related phenomena such as quantification or tense and
aspect have motivated a number of in-depth studies and projects. In
contrast, prepositions have received less attention. The reasons are
quite clear: prepositions are probably the most polysemic category,
possibly more so than adjectives, and linguistic realizations are
extremely difficult to predict, not to mention the difficulty of
identifying cross-linguistic regularities.

Let us mention, however, several projects devoted to prepositions
expressing space, time and movement in AI and in NLP, and also the
development of formalisms and heuristics to handle PP attachment
ambiguities. Let us also mention the large number of studies in
psycholinguistics and in ethnolinguistics around specific preposition
senses. Finally, prepositions seem to reach a very deep level in the
cognitive-semantic structure of the brain: cognitive grammar
developers often use prepositions in their metalanguage, in order to
express very primitive notions. An important and difficult question to
address, is whether these notions are really primitive or can be
decomposed and lexically analysed

In argument structure, prepositions often play the crucial role of a
mediator between the verb's expectations and the semantics of the
nominal argument. The verb-preposition-noun semantic interactions are
very subtle, but totally crucial for the development of an accurate
semantics of the proposition. Let us note that a number of languages
have postpositions or other markers like case instead of prepositions
that play a quite similar role. Finally, languages like English have
verbal compounds that integrate prepositions (compositionally or as
collocations) while others, like Romance languages or Hindi either
incorporate the preposition or include it in the prepositional
phrase. All these configurations are semantically as well as
syntactically of much interest.

Prepositions turn out to be a very useful category in a number of
applications such as indexing and knowledge extraction since they
convey basic meanings of much interest like instruments, means,
comparisons, amounts, approximations, localizations, etc. They must
necessarily be taken into account---and rendered accurately---for
effective machine translation and lexical choice in language
generation.

Prepositions are also closely related to semantic structures such as
thematic roles, semantic templates or frames. From a linguistic
perspective, several investigations have been carried out on quite
diverse languages, emphasizing e.g., monolingual and cross-linguistic
contrasts or the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations. These
observations cover in general a small group of closely related
prepositions. The semantic characterization of prepositions has also
motivated the emergence of a few dedicated logical frameworks and
reasoning procedures.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together linguists, NLP
researchers and practitioners, and AI people in order to define a
common ground, to advance the state-of-the-art, to identify the
primary issues and bottlenecks, and to promote future
collaborations. If appropriate, the workshop will also establish a
working group and the development of projects and resources.

Paper presentations

Both short research notes (3 pages) and longer conference-style papers
(up to 10 pages) submissions as well as working session proposals (1
page proposal on a precise topic) are welcome. Papers must be in .ps,
.pdf or .doc formats. The 12 point Times new Roman font is preferred,
leave about 2.5 cm margins on both sides. More precise formatting
instructions will be given for final versions, since a book
publication is under preparation.  Paper must be sent in electronic
form to: stdizier at irit.fr

The main topics are:

- The syntax of prepositions: formal or descriptive syntax,
prepositions in alternations, principles in the syntax of PPs,
syntactic and semantic restrictions. General syntactic-semantic
principles. Postpositions or other equivalent markers (e.g. case).

- Polysemy of prepositions, identification and classification of
preposition senses, contrastive uses, metaphorical uses, semantic and
cognitive foundations for prepositions.

- Descriptions: Potential WordNet / EuroWordNet descriptions of
preposition uses, productive uses versus collocations, multi-lingual
descriptions: mismatches, incorporation, divergences.  Prepositions
and thematic roles, prepositions in semantic frameworks
(e.g. Framenet.).

- Cognitive or logic-based formalisms for the description of the
semantics of prepositions, in isolation, and in
composition/confrontation with the verb and the NP. Compositional
semantics. Logical and reasoning aspects.

- The role of prepositions in applications, in particular:
   * in machine translation
   * in information extraction
   * in lexicalization in language generation.

- Corpus-based studies that support or challenge any of the approaches
described above.

- Lexical knowledge bases and prepositions. Prepositions in AI, KR and
in reasoning procedures.

Deadlines

Submission deadline: April 18th, 2003
Notification to authors: May 30th
Final paper due   July 1st  	(a book publication is under preparation)
Registration preferably before July 7th. (to be confirmed)
Registration frees will be kept as low as possible, around 100 Euros
with lunch.

Programme Committee:

Nicholas Asher (Austin)
Pushpak Bhattacharyya (IIT Mumbai)
Harry Bunt (Tilburg)
Nicoletta Calzolari (Pisa)
Bonnie Dorr (Maryland)
Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton)
Claire Gardent (CNRS Nancy)
Betsy Klipple (Upenn)
Alda Mari (ENST Paris)
Palmira Marraffa (Lisboa)
Martha Palmer (Upenn)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis)
Patrick Saint-Dizier (Chair, IRIT, Toulouse)
Gloria Vazquez (Lerida)
Laure Vieu (IRIT, Toulouse)

Contacts :
Submissions and inquiries : stdizier at irit.fr and submissions also to :
 patrick_saintdizier at yahoo.fr
Local organizing committee : Farah Benamara, Patrick Saint-Dizier
WEB site (under preparation): http://www.irit.fr/cgi-bin/voir-congres

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