Corpora: Workshop call for papers: Using Semantics for Information Retrieval and Filtering

Wed Feb 20 16:43:19 UTC 2002

Apologies for multiple posts.

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                   Last call for papers
           Deadline extension : March 6th, 2002

  Using Semantics for Information Retrieval and Filtering

            State of the Art and Future Research

             Las Palmas, Canary Islands - Spain
                      2nd of June 2002

               Held in conjunction with the

Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

                       (LREC 2002)

The goal of this full day workshop is to bring together researchers
in the domain of information retrieval, and in particular, researchers
concerned by the utility of enhancing queries with semantic information
gleaned from languages resources and processes.

Workshop scope and aims
-----------------------

Several experiments have been carried out in the last 15 years
investigating the use of various resources and techniques (e.g.,
thesauri, synonyms, word sense disambiguation, etc.) to help refine or
enhance queries. However, the conclusions drawn on the basis of these
experiments vary widely. Results of some studies have led to the
conclusion that semantic information serves no purpose and even
degrades results, while others have concluded that the use of semantic
information drawn from external resources significantly increases the
performance of retrieval software. At this point, several question
arise:

  - Why do these conclusions vary so widely?
  - Is the divergence a result of differences in methodology?
  - Is the divergence a result of a difference in resources? What
    are the most suitable resources? Do results using manually
    constructed resources differ in significant ways from results
    using automatically extracted information?
  - What is the contribution of specialized resources?
  - Are present frameworks for evaluation (e.g., TREC) appropriate
    for evaluation of results?.

These questions are fundamental not only to research in document retrieval,
but also for information searching, question answering, filtering, etc.
Their importance is even more acute for multilingual applications, where,
for instance, the question of whether to disambiguate before translating
is fundamental.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in the domain
of document retrieval, and in particular, researchers on both sides of the
question of the utility of enhancing queries with semantic information
gleaned from languages resources and processes.

The workshop will provide a forum for presentation of the different points
of view, followed by a roundtable in which the participants will assess the
state of the art, consider the results of past and on-going work and the
possible reasons for the considerable differences in their conclusions.
Ultimately, they will attempt to identify future directions for research.

In view of the relevance of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to information
retrieval, a part of the workshop will be dedicated to a panel on Senseval
and WSD evaluation (http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/events/senseval/).
The purpose of the panel is to open the discussion on the objectives and
principles of Senseval-3, the next evaluation exercise for WSD systems.

The panel will summarize the methodology and results of Senseval-2 and
consider the current state of WSD. Panelists will speak about the following
topics: Is the Senseval-2 method of evaluation adequate? Are we building
the right kind of lexical resources for real sense disambiguation systems?
Should we (and is it possible to) start an application-specific evaluation
track?

Important dates
---------------

  - Paper submission deadline: March, 6th 2002
  - Notification of acceptance/rejection: March 27th, 2002
  - Camera ready papers due: April 8th, 2002
  - Workshop: June 2nd, 2002

Topics
------

Papers are requested that deal with one or more of the following topics
(this is not an exhaustive list), and which make use of semantics applied
to automatic information management:

  - Query enrichment
  - Semantic disambiguation
  - Thematic clustering
  - Performance comparison according to the resources or techniques
    used
  - Automatic construction of resources from corpora
  - Comparisons of manually and automatically created resources
  - Methodology and resources for evaluation
  - Interlingual document retrieval
  - Structure and quality control of resources
  - Comparison of general resources and specialized resources
  - Use of document structure (XML, RDF, etc.)

Submission Details
------------------

Papers should not exceed 7 pages.

Submission must be sent by ELECTRONIC mail to loupy at sinequa.com. Please
write "LREC2002 workshop paper
submission" in the subject line.

Accepted formats: Postscript (strongly preferred), PDF or RTF. No
information about author(s) should appear in the submission paper.

Please send the following information in a separate file: the title
to be printed in the programme of the Workshop; names and affiliations
of the authors; the full address of the first author (or a contact person),
including phone, fax, email, URL.

Formatting guidelines are provided at http://www.langnat.com/usirf. The
format described here may be modified for the final version.

Submissions must be received no later than February 15th 2002.

Registration
------------

The registration fee for the workshop is

     90 Euro if you are attending LREC
     140 Euro if you are NOT attending LREC

The fee includes two coffee breaks and the workshop proceedings.

Participation in the workshop is limited by the venue. Requests for
participation will be processed on a first come first served basis.
Registration is handled by the LREC Secretariat.

Venue
-----

The workshop will take place at the Palacio de Congreso de Canarias,
where the main LREC Conference will be held. For more information, please
refer to the LREC website : http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2002/index.html

Conference Information
----------------------

General information on LREC: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2002/index.html
Information on travel, accommodation and general information on Las Palmas
and the Canary Islands can be obtained from:

     Octavio Grondonna Morales
     Viajes El Corte Inglés
     Avda. Juan XXIII, 9
     35004 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
     Tel: +34 928 292402
     Fax: +34 928 291876
     E-mail: commercial_lpa at viajeseci.es

Program Committee
-----------------

  - Marc El-Bèze, Université d'Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse, France
  - Christian Fluhr, CEA, France
  - Julio Gonzalo, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain
  - Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
  - Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
  - Adam Kilgarriff, University of Brighton, United Kingdom
  - Claude de Loupy, Sinequa, France
  - Christian Marest, Mediapps, France
  - Patrick Paroubek, LIMSI, France
  - Piek Vossen, Irion Technologies, The Netherlands
  - Phil Edmonds, Sharp Laboratories of Europe LTD, United Kingdom

Contact Person
--------------

  Claude de Loupy
   Sinequa
  51-59 rue Ledru-Rollin
  94200 Ivry-sur-Seine, France
  Tel: +33 1 49 87 06 00 / Fax: +33 1 49 87 06 01
  email: loupy at sinequa.com