19.2809, Calls: Computational Ling/Greece; Computational Ling/Italy

Mon Sep 15 15:49:41 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-2809. Mon Sep 15 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.2809, Calls: Computational Ling/Greece; Computational Ling/Italy

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1)
Date: 15-Sep-2008
From: Albert Gatt < a.gatt at abdn.ac.uk >
Subject: Generation of References in Context (GREC) Tasks 2009 

2)
Date: 14-Sep-2008
From: Norbert E. Fuchs < fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch >
Subject: Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:42:54
From: Albert Gatt [a.gatt at abdn.ac.uk]
Subject: Generation of References in Context (GREC) Tasks 2009

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Full Title: Generation of References in Context (GREC) Tasks 2009 

Date: 30-Mar-2009 - 31-Mar-2009
Location: TBA, Greece 
Contact Person: Albert Gatt
Web Site: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/grec 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Jan-2009 

Meeting Description:

The GREC tasks are aimed at researchers in the fields of text summarization and
Natural Language Generation. The objective is the development of methods for
generating chains of referential expressions for discourse entities in the
context of a written discourse, as is useful for postprocessing extractive
summaries and repeatedly edited texts (such as Wikipedia articles). 

Call for Papers

Part of Generation Challenges 2009, in conjunction with ENLG 2009.

Generation Challenges 2009 is being organized to provide a common forum for a
number of different NLG Shared Tasks (see
http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/).

As part of Generation Challenges 2009, we are organizing two GREC Shared Task
Competitions.  The first is the GREC-MSR (Main Subject References) Task which
uses the GREC-2.0 Corpus of 2,000 Wikipedia introduction sections where
references to the main subject of the Wikipedia article have been annotated, and
the task is to develop a system that can select (from a given list) an MSR that
is appropriate in the context.  The second is the GREC-NEG (Named Entity
Generation) Task which uses the new GREC-People Corpus of 1,000 Wikipedia
introduction sections about people in which single and plural references to all
people mentioned in the text have been annotated. The task in GREC-NEG is to
select appropriate referential expressions for all mentions (singular and
plural) of people.

Submissions to both tasks will be evaluated using a range of intrinsic and
extrinsic measures, some assessed automatically, some manually.
Submitted systems and evaluation results will be presented in a special session
at ENLG'09, and published in the ENLG'09 proceedings.

Background
There has been increasing interest recently among text summarization researchers
in postprocessing techniques to improve the referential clarity and coherence of
extractive summaries, and among language generation researchers in generating
referential expressions in context.  The GREC tasks are aimed at researchers in
both of these groups, and the objective is the development of methods for
generating chains of referential expressions for discourse entities in the
context of a written discourse, as is useful for postprocessing extractive
summaries and repeatedly edited texts (such as Wikipedia articles).

Data
The GREC data resources consist of introduction sections collected from
Wikipedia articles in which three broad syntactic categories of overt reference
to named entities have been annotated: subject NPs, object NPs and genitive
subject-determiners (such as "Faraday's" in "Faraday's law of induction"). The
annotations include features encoding basic syntactic and semantic information.

The GREC-2.0 corpus consists of 2,000 texts in five different domains (cities,
countries, rivers, people and mountains).  In this corpus, only references to
the single entity that is the main subject of a Wikipedia article (e.g. "Michael
Faraday") have been annotated.

The new GREC-People corpus consists of 1,000 texts in just one domain, people.
Here, all references to all people mentioned in a text have been annotated. 
GREC-People therefore includes explicit coreference annotation for one or more
coreference chains (whereas in GREC-2.0 texts there is always just one annotated
coreference chain).

For GREC-2.0 and GREC-People we have test sets of 200 and 100 texts,
respectively, where referential expressions have been selected by participants
in an elicitation experiment. In these test sets, there are three versions for
each corpus text, in each of which the referential expressions have been
manually selected by a single participant in the experiment.

The GREC'09 Tasks
The GREC-MSR Task has the same task definition as the GREC shared task at
REG'08.  Participating systems need to select the referential expression (RE)
from a given set of alternatives that is most appropriate in the given context,
which may involve e.g. ensuring that pronouns can be resolved.  Systems will be
evaluated both against the REs in the corpus and against human-selected topline
solutions for this task.  Results and descriptions of participating systems from the
REG'08 run of this task can be found here:
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/#1100

The new GREC-NEG Task is an extension of GREC-MSR in that it requires
participating systems to select appropriate referential expressions for all
discourse entities of the same type (people in this round) as the main subject
of the article.

Evaluation
For both tasks, the data will be randomly divided into training, development and
test data.  Participants will compute evaluation scores on the development set
(using code provided by the organizers), and the organizers will perform
evaluations on the test data set.

We will use a range of different evaluation methods, including intrinsic and
extrinsic, automatically assessed and human-evaluated.
The intrinsic methods will include string-accuracy, feature-accuracy and
string-similarity measures, as well as human-produced quality assessments.  The
extrinsic methods will include a reading/comprehension experiment and measuring
coreference resolver success (for details about the previous edition, see
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W08/W08-1127.pdf).

Full details of the evaluation methods for GREC'09 will be given in the
Participants' Pack that will be distributed to registered participants.

Participation
Registration is now open at the GREC'09 homepage
(http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/grec).  Once registered,
participants in the GREC-MSR Task will receive the complete training and
development set, evaluation software and detailed documentation (collectively
known as the Participants' Pack) for this task.  Participants in GREC-NEG will
first receive a sample of the training and development data, to enable them to
start building systems; they will receive the complete Participants' Pack for
GREC-NEG by the end of September 2008.

Proceedings and Presentations
The Generation Challenges 2009 meeting will be held as a special session at ENLG
2009. The session will include overviews of all the shared tasks, including the
GREC'09 Tasks. The participating systems will additionally be presented as
papers in the ENLG'09 proceedings, and as posters during the ENLG'09 poster session.

GREC'09 papers will not undergo a selection procedure with multiple reviews, but
the organisers reserve the right to reject material which is not appropriate
given the participation guidelines.

Important Dates
Sep 05, 2008: First Call for Participation in GREC'09 Tasks; GREC'09 sample data
sets available 
Jan 01-31, 09:  GREC'09 test data submission, involving (a) submit system
report; (b) download test data; (c) submit outputs within 48h.
Jan 31, 2009: Final deadline for submission of GREC'09 test data outputs
Feb 01-28, 09: GREC'09 Evaluation period 
Mar 30-31, 09: Generation Challenges 2009 meeting at ENLG'09 (date to be       
confirmed)

Organisation
Albert Gatt, Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, UK 
Anja Belz, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK 
Eric Kow, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK
Jette Viethen, Macquarie University, Australia

GREC'09 homepage: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/grec
Generation Challenges homepage: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09
Generation Challenges email: nlg-stec at itri.brighton.ac.uk

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:42:59
From: Norbert E. Fuchs [fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch]
Subject: Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages

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Full Title: Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages 
Short Title: CNL 2009 

Date: 08-Jun-2009 - 10-Jun-2009
Location: Marettimo Island (Sicily), Italy 
Contact Person: Norbert E. Fuchs
Meeting Email: fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch
Web Site: http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/cnl2009/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 14-Nov-2008 

Meeting Description:

CNL 2009 Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages
http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/cnl2009/
Marettimo Island, Sicily (Italy) 
8-10 June 2009

The workshop CNL 2009 is dedicated to discussing the similarities and
differences of existing controlled natural languages, possible improvements to
these languages, relations to other knowledge representation languages, tool
support, existing and future applications, and further topics of interest. 

Call for Papers

Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are subsets of natural languages, obtained
by restricting the grammar and vocabulary in order to reduce or eliminate
ambiguity and complexity. Traditionally, controlled languages fall into two
major types: those that improve readability for human readers, and those that
enable reliable automatic semantic analysis of the language. [...] The second
type of languages has a formal logical basis, i.e. they have a formal syntax and
semantics,
and can be mapped to an existing formal language, such as first-order logic.
Thus, those languages can be used as knowledge representation languages, and
writing of those languages is supported by fully automatic consistency and
redundancy checks, query answering, etc.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_natural_language)

Various controlled natural languages of the second type have been developed by a
number of organizations, and have been used in many different application
domains, most recently within the semantic web.

Topics
CNL 2009 will address the following aspects of controlled natural
languages (CNLs):

- design of CNLs
- parsing of CNLs
- CNLs for knowledge representation
- CNLs for specifications
- CNLs and the semantic web
- CNLs as user interface
- CNLs for interaction and communication
- tool support for CNLs
- reasoning in CNLs
- comparisons of CNLs
- applications of CNLs
- business rules
- user studies
- theoretical results
- etc.

The workshop will be informal with lots of time for presentations and
discussions in the fashion of the seminars organized at Dagstuhl in Germany
(http://www.dagstuhl.de/programm/dagstuhl-seminare). To ensure the informal
atmosphere the number of participants will be limited.

Submission Details
We invite researchers to submit extended abstracts of exactly 4 pages (inclusive
references). These extended abstracts will be intensively reviewed by several
members of the programme committee. Authors of accepted extended abstracts will
be invited to present their research at the workshop. Revised versions of the
accepted abstracts will be published before the workshop as a technical report
of the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich. During the workshop
authors will have one full hour to present their work and to have it discussed
by the participants. All authors are then invited to submit a full paper of up
to 20 pages (inclusive references) that takes the discussions during the
workshop into account.  Full papers will again be reviewed by the programme
committee. Revised versions of the full papers will be published by Springer in
their LNCS/LNAI series.

Extended abstracts and full papers should use the Springer LNCS format. Extended
abstracts must be submitted electronically in PDF format. For submissions we use
EasyChair
(http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cnl2009).

Important Dates
Deadline for submissions of extended abstracts: 14 November 2008
Notification of acceptance of extended abstracts: 9 January 2009
Participants contact Marettimo Residence concerning accommodation: end
of January 2009
Revised versions of extended abstracts: 13 March 2009
Workshop: 8-10 June 2009
Deadline of submission of full papers: 4 August 2009
Feedback on full papers: 2 October 2009
Revised versions of full papers: 6 November 2009

Program Committee
Piero Bonatti (University of Naples, Italy)
Johan Bos (University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy)
Peter E. Clark (Boeing, Seattle, USA)
Hamish Cunningham (University of Sheffield, UK)
Enrico Franconi (University of Bolzano, Italy)
Norbert E. Fuchs (University of Zurich, Switzerland) (chair)
Glen Hart (Ordnance Survey, Southampton, UK)
Jerry R. Hobbs (USC/ISI, USA)
Kaarel Kaljurand (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Peter Koepke (University of Bonn, Germany)
Tobias Kuhn (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Ian Pratt-Hartmann (University of Manchester, UK)
Stephen Pulman (University of Oxford, UK)
Mike Rosner (University of Malta, Malta)
Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University, Australia)
John Sowa (VivoMind, USA)
Silvie Spreeuwenberg (LibRT, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Uta Schwertel (imc, Germany)
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)

Further Information
http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/cnl2009/

Organisation
Norbert E. Fuchs (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch

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