Corpora: FINAL CFP: ACL-2001 Workshop on Temporal & Spatial Information Processing

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

                              FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

                                WORKSHOP ON
                           TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL
                           INFORMATION PROCESSING

          http://epsilon3.georgetown.edu/~discours/spacetime.html

                            ACL-2001 Conference
                             Toulouse, France
                                July 7, 2001

Temporal and spatial information is ubiquitous in natural language, yet
many challenging computational issues are relatively unexplored. This
workshop will bring together researchers working on a variety of tasks
that depend on representing spatial and temporal information in natural
language.

We invite papers on any topic dealing with automatic processing of
spatial or temporal information in natural language. We welcome papers
describing theoretical or practical work addressing issues in this area.

As a special theme of this workshop, we would also like to encourage the
discussion of common issues across spatial and temporal domains. For
example, systems that process temporal or spatial information need to
deal with *absolute* references ("November 18, 1999", "Toulouse"), as well as
relative references ("now", "here", "two weeks ago", "thirty miles north
of Paris"), and vague references  ("some time in June", "a town in
Provence", "nearly a year ago", "near Dusseldorf", "Tuesday morning", "southern
England"). There are also many parallels between the way events are
characterized in time and objects are characterized in space. For
example, events can be described relative to some point or interval in time
(e.g., "I met John yesterday", "he was crossing the street") while objects in
space can be described in relation to some place, object, or in terms of
movement (e.g., "the cup was on top of that", "it fell off").

Topics

The topics covered will include corpus-based, knowledge-based, and
hybrid approaches to:

   * resolution of temporal and spatial references, especially
     discourse-dependent ones
   * standards for encoding the values of temporal and spatial
     expressions in natural language
   * temporal and spatial  characterization of events
   * establishing coreference, ordering and inclusion relations in spatial
     or temporal information
   * computational analysis of tense and aspect
   * semantics of indeterminate or vague temporal and spatial references
   * semantics and pragmatics of spatial and temporal prepositions
   * leveraging of ontologies for spatial and temporal information
   * reasoning about modals, i.e., possible events, necessary events,
     counterfactual events, etc.
   * application of logics for spatial and temporal reasoning
   * analysis of temporal and spatial aspects of narrative structure
   * generation of temporal and spatial references
   * linguistic and graphical representations

Application areas include:

   * machine translation (e.g., translating temporal and spatial
     references)
   * question answering (e.g., answering "when" or "where" questions)
   * information extraction (e.g., normalizing time values for entry into
     databases, disambiguating place names using a gazetteer)
   * summarization (e.g., producing temporally coherent summaries of
     multiple documents, or generating route plans)
   * information retrieval (e.g., indexing broadcast news by event time)
   * information visualization (e.g., constructing event chronologies,
     geospatial visualization)
   * multimodal interfaces (e.g., interfaces to simulations, gesture and
     speech input graphical applications, navigation systems)
   * interfaces to spatial and temporal databases (e.g., normalizing
     temporal and spatial references)
   * planning and problem solving
   * multimedia presentations (e.g., generating textual descriptions or
     captions, scene and route descriptions, generation of spatio-temporal
     maps)

ORGANIZERS

Lisa Harper, MITRE, USA
Inderjeet Mani, MITRE and Georgetown University, USA
Beth Sundheim, SPAWAR Systems Center, USA

SPONSORS

MITRE
ACL SIGMEDIA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Elisabeth Andre, DFKI, Germany
Myriam Bras, IRIT, France
Rob Gaizauskas, Sheffield, UK
Udo Hahn, Freiburg University, Germany
Eduard Hovy, USC-ISI, USA
Gerard Ligozat, LIMSI-CNSRS, France
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Marc Moens, University of Edinburgh, UK
Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan, USA
Ellen Riloff, University of Utah, USA
Laure Vieu, IRIT, France
Michael White, Cogentex, USA
Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, USA
George Wilson, MITRE, USA
Cornelia Zelinsky-Wibbelt, Hannover, Germany

INVITED SPEAKERS

Fabio Pianesi, ITC-IRST, Italy
Barbara Tversky, Stanford University, USA

SCHEDULE

 Submissions                 April  8, 2001
 Notification of Acceptance  April 30, 2001
 Deadline for camera-ready   May 13, 2001
 versions
 Workshop                    July 7, 2001

SUBMISSION FORMAT AND INSTRUCTIONS

Submissions must be in English, no more than 8 pages long, and in the
two-column format prescribed by ACL’2001. Please see
http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/ for the detailed guidelines. However,
please put the authors’ names, rather than a paper id, since reviewing
will not be blind.

Submissions should be sent electronically in either Word, pdf, or
postscript format (only) no later than April 8, 2001 to:

 Beth Sundheim
 sundheim at spawar.navy.mil