16.3245, Calls: Computational Ling/USA;General Ling/Tunisia

Thu Nov 10 18:55:13 UTC 2005

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3245. Thu Nov 10 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3245, Calls: Computational Ling/USA;General Ling/Tunisia

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1)
Date: 09-Nov-2005
From: Simon Dobnik < simon.dobnik at clg.ox.ac.uk >
Subject: Natural Language and Knowledge Representation 

2)
Date: 09-Nov-2005
From: marzouga nsiri < marzougansiri at yahoo.fr >
Subject: les Réalisations Discursives de l'Anaphore: Approche Contrastive 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:53:24
From: Simon Dobnik < simon.dobnik at clg.ox.ac.uk >
Subject: Natural Language and Knowledge Representation 

Full Title: Natural Language and Knowledge Representation 
Short Title: NL-KR 

Date: 11-May-2006 - 13-May-2006
Location: Melbourne Beach, Florida, USA 
Contact Person: Jana Sukkarieh
Meeting Email: jana.sukkarieh at clg.ox.ac.uk
Web Site: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady0641/Flairs06_NL_KR/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 21-Nov-2005 

Meeting Description:

This track is an attempt to provide a forum for discussion on Natural Language, Knowledge Representation/Reasoning and bridge a gap between Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation. 

NATURAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION (NL-KR)

Special Track at FLAIRS 2006

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

Holiday Inn Melbourne Oceanfront,  Melbourne Beach, FLORIDA, USA

MAIN CONFERENCE: 11-12-13 MAY 2006

Special track web page: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady0641/Flairs06_NL_KR
Main conference web page: http://www.indiana.edu/~flairs06

PURPOSE OF THE NL-KR TRACK

We believe the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Knowledge Representation (KR) communities have common goals. They are both concerned with representing knowledge and with reasoning, since the best test for the semantic capability of an NLP system is performing reasoning tasks. Having these two essential common grounds, the two communities ought to have been collaborating, to provide a well-suited representation language that covers these grounds. However, the two communities also have difficult-to-meet concerns. Mainly, the semantic representation (SR) should be expressive enough and should take the information in context into account, while the KR should be equipped with a fast reasoning process.

The main objection against an SR or a KR is that they need experts to be understood. Non-experts communicate (usually) via a natural language (NL), and more or less they understand each other while performing a lot of reasoning. An essential practical value of  representations is their attempt to be transparent.  This will particularly be useful when/if the system provides a justification for a user or a knowledge engineer on its line of reasoning using the underlying KR (i.e. without generating back to NL).

We all seem to believe that, compared to Natural Language, the existing Knowledge Representation and reasoning systems are poor. Nevertheless, for a long time, the KR community dismissed the idea that NL can be a KR. That's because NL can be very ambiguous and there are syntactic and semantic processing complexities associated with it. However, researchers in both communities have started looking at this issue again. Possibly, it has to do with the NLP community making some progress in terms of processing and handling ambiguity, the KR community realising that a lot of knowledge is already 'coded' in NL and that one should reconsider the way they handle expressivity and ambiguity.

This track is an attempt to provide a forum for discussion on this front and to bridge a gap between NLP and KR.  A KR in this track has a well-defined syntax, semantics and a proof theory. It should be clear what authors mean by NL-like, based on NL or benefiting from NL (if they are using one). It does not have to be a novel representation.

NL-KR TRACK TOPICS

For this track, we will invite submissions including, but not limited to:

  a. A novel NL-like KR or building on an existing one
  b. Reasoning systems that benefit from properties of NL to reason with NL
  c. Semantic representation used as a KR : compromise between expressivity and efficiency?
  d. More Expressive KR for NL understanding (Any compromise?)
  e.  Any work exploring how existing representations fall short of addressing some problems involved in modelling, manipulating or reasoning (whether reasoning as used to get an interpretation for a certain utterance, exchange of utterances or what utterances follow from other utterances) with NL documents
  f. Representations that show how classical logics are not as efficient, transparent, expressive or where a one-step application of an inference rule require more (complex) steps in a classical environment and vice-versa; i.e. how classical logics are more powerful, etc
  g. Building a reasoning test collection for natural language understanding systems: any kind of reasoning (deductive, abductive, etc); for a deductive test suite see for e.g. deliverable 16 of the FraCas project (http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~fracas/). Also, look at textual entailment challenges 1 and 2 <http://www.pascal-network.org/Challenges/RTE>
  h. Comparative results (on a common test suite or a common task) of different representations or systems that reason with NL (again any kind of reasoning). The comparison could be either for efficiency, transparency or expressivity
  i. Knowledge acquisition systems or techniques that benefit from properties of NL to acquire knowledge already 'coded' in NL
  j. Automated Reasoning, Theorem Proving and KR communities views on all this

NL-KR TRACK PROGRAM COMMITTEE

James ALLEN, University of Rochester, USA
Patrick BLACKBURN, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique, France
Johan BOS, University of Edinburgh, UK
Richard CROUCH, Palo Alto Research Centre, USA
Maarten DE RIJKE, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Anette FRANK, DFKI, Germany
Fernando GOMEZ, University of Central Florida, USA
Sanda HARABAGIU, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
John HARRISON, Intel, USA
Jerry HOBBS, Information Sciences Institute, USA
Chung Hee HWANG, Raytheon Co., USA
Michael KOHLHASE, International University Bremen, Germany
Shalom LAPPIN, King's College, UK
Carsten LUTZ, Dresden University of Technology, Germany
Dan MOLDOVAN,  University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Jeff PELLETIER, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Stephen PULMAN, University of Oxford, UK
Lenhart SCHUBERT, University of Rochester, USA
John SOWA, VivoMind Intelligence, Inc., USA
Jana SUKKARIEH, University of Oxford, UK (Chair)
Geoff SUTCLIFFE, Miami University, USA
Timothy WILLIAMSON, University of Oxford, UK

NL-KR TRACK INVITED SPEAKER

John SOWA, VivoMind Intelligence, Inc., US

FLAIRS 2006 INVITED SPEAKERS

Alan BUNDY, University of Edinburg, Scotland
Bob MORRIS,  Nasa Ames Research Center, USA
Mehran SAHAMI, Standford University and Google, USA
Barry SMYTH, University College Dublin, Ireland

NL-KR TRACK PROPOSED BY

Jana Sukkarieh, University of Oxford, UK
email: J.Sukkarieh.94 at cantab.net

WEB and TECH SUPPORT

Simon Dobnik, University of Oxford, UK
email: Simon.Dobnik at clg.ox.ac.uk

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Submissions must arrive no later than 21 November 2005. Only electronic submissions will be considered. Details about submission can be found on: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady0641/Flairs06_NL_KR/submission_details.html Selected papers will be considered for publication in a special journal issue of ''The journal of Logic and Computation'' in the 2nd half of 2006.

PROCEEDINGS

Printed Proceedings will be published only on demand. Proceedings on CD
will be provided to all.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Submission of papers:  21 November,  2005
- Notification of acceptance: 20 January, 2006
- Final version of the paper is due : 13 February, 2006
- Main Conference: 11-13 May 2006
- Track: max 1 day during the main conference

Those interested  in running a demo please contact Jana Sukkarieh <J.Sukkarieh.94 at cantab.net> or Simon Dobnik <Simon.Dobnik at clg.ox.ac.uk>.

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:53:29
From: marzouga nsiri < marzougansiri at yahoo.fr >
Subject: les Réalisations Discursives de l'Anaphore: Approche Contrastive 

Full Title: les Réalisations Discursives de l'Anaphore: Approche Contrastive 

Date: 09-Feb-2006 - 10-Feb-2006
Location: Tunis, Tunisia 
Contact Person: marzouga nsiri
Meeting Email: marzougansiri at yahoo.fr

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Subject Language(s): French (fra)

Call Deadline: 30-Nov-2005 

Meeting Description:

Les réalisations discursives de l'anaphore: approche contrastive. Il s'agit d'une comparaison interlanguale et intralanguale. 

APPEL A COMMUNICATION
COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL
Les réalisations discursives de l'anaphore : approche contrastive

DATE : Les 09 et 10 février 2006
LIEU : Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis
CALENDRIER : 
- 2ème appel à communication : 09 novembre 2005 
- Date limite de soumission : 30 novembre 2005
- Notification des acceptations : 15 décembre 2005 
- Programme préliminaire : 15 janvier 2006
- Journées : 09 et 10 février 2006

THEMATIQUE :
L'objectif de ce colloque est d'aborder la question de l'anaphore dans un cadre contrastif. Les réalisations discursives de l'anaphore changent d'un système linguistique à un autre et ce, selon plusieurs paramètres qui sont tributaires des moyens morphologiques et syntaxiques, des valeurs sémantiques et des inférences pragmatiques. Un même système linguistique peut, par ailleurs, présenter des formes à différentes valeurs anaphoriques. L'expression anaphorique semble, à première vue, le produit de la macrostructure, le domaine textuel, ou  le produit de la microstructure, le domaine phrastique. Dans certains cas, le problème de l'interprétation anaphorique ne peut se résoudre à travers ces deux domaines, le contexte et le co-texte ayant leur part d'incidence dans l'identification de la valeur anaphorique. 

Le colloque traitera, entre autres, les thèmes suivants :
-	La comparaison interlanguale  des moyens linguistiques à valeur anaphorique,
-	La comparaison intralanguale des théories, des concepts ou des formes anaphoriques au sein d'un même système linguistique,
-	L'anaphore et l'actualisation discursive,
-	La coréférence globale ou partielle,
-	L'anaphore et la localisation temporelle,
-	Les pronoms et les déterminants anaphoriques, etc.

LANGUE DE TRAVAIL :
La communication doit être présentée en français. Le travail contrastif concernera d'une part le français et d'autre part une (ou plusieurs autres) langue(s) ou état(s) de langue.

MODALITES DE SOUMISSION :
Un résumé rédigé en français ne dépassant pas deux pages. Le résumé devra indiquer clairement le sujet traité, la méthode suivie et les conclusions de votre contribution.

Les résumés seront envoyés par courrier électronique à l'une des deux coordinatrices :
houdabenhamadi at yahoo.co.in ou marzougansiri at yahoo.fr 

COMITE D'ORGANISATION :
M. Ahmed BRAHIM, M. Bourguiba BEN REJEB, Mme Houda BEN HAMADI, Mme Marzouga N'SIRI, M. Yacoub GHRISSI, Mme Nabila MAMI, Mme Samira CHOUBANA, Mme Faten SOMAI.
COMITE SCIENTIFIQUE :
M. Ahmed BRAHIM, M. Bourguiba BEN REJEB, M. Slaheddine CHERIF, M. Georges KLEIBER, M. Martin RIEGEL, M. Mounir TRIKI.

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