Corpora: CfP, LREC2002 workshop on "Annotation Standards for TemporalInformation in Natural Language"

[Roberta Catizone]

                            Workshop on

    "Annotation Standards for Temporal Information in Natural Language"

                             LREC 2002

          27th May 2002, Las Palmas, Canary Islands - Spain


Workshop scope and aims:
------------------------
The ability to identify and analyse temporal information is important
for a
variety of natural language applications, such as information
extraction,
question answering, and multi-document summarisation. Nevertheless, this
area of
research has been relatively unexplored. It became evident during an ACL
2001
workshop on temporal and spatial information processing that that some
research
institutions have started to work on different aspects of temporal
information,
but no consensus has been achieved yet on what and how temporal
information
should be identified in text.

This workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to present their
work in
this field and to discuss future developments such as building shared
resources,
e.g. temporally annotated corpora. It is timely to coordinate the effort
being
undertaken in the community at this stage of research into temporal
information
in text.

Topics of interest include:
---------------------------
The workshop organisers invite papers focussing on:

- How are times referred to in text?
- How are events temporally positioned?
- How are events related to each other?
- What is the relative role of tense/aspect vs. explicit time
references?
- What is the chronological structure of different types of text? (for
example
  scientific reports vs. fiction vs. newswire texts)
- resolution of deictic/partial/vague/relative time expressions
- graphical representations of the temporal order of events
- ontologies for temporal information, e.g. times and events
- reasoning with/about temporal information
- proposals for annotating temporal information and identifying
appropriate
  corpora
- evaluation of metrics for temporal annotation and evaluation of
temporal
  annotation schemes
- tools for annotation

application areas include:
- information extraction
- question answering
- planning
- multi-document summarisation

Authors whose work is directed at annotation schemes are encouraged to
address
(in their full paper) the example texts provided at
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~andrea/lrec2002/ - this is not obligatory.

Workshop agenda:
----------------
The half-day workshop will consist of paper presentations, a panel
session,
and an open discussion session.

We hope to arrange a follow-up meeting outside the workshop format to
discuss
future development and plans for possible collaborations.

Organisers:
-----------
Bill Black, UMIST, UK
Rob Gaizauskas, University of Sheffield, UK
Graham Katz, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
Andrea Setzer, University of Sheffield, UK
George Wilson, the MITRE Corporation, USA

Program committee (provisional):
--------------------------------
Bill Black, UMIST, UK
Rob Gaizauskas, University of Sheffield, UK
Graham Katz, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
Inderjeet Mani, the MITRE Corporation, USA
Allan Ramsay, UMIST, UK
Andrea Setzer, University of Sheffield, UK
Beth Sundheim, SPAWAR Systems Center, USA
Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, UK
George Wilson, the MITRE Corporation, USA

Important dates:
----------------
Deadline for submission of abstracts:    18/02/2002
Notification of acceptance:              11/03/2002
Camera-ready final copy for proceedings: 15/04/2002
Workshop:                                27/05/2002

Submission:
-----------
Abstracts for workshop contributions should not exceed two A4 pages
(excluding
references).  An additional title page should state: the title;
author(s);
affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, as well as postal
address,
telephone and fax numbers.

Submission is to be sent by email, preferably in Postscript or PDF
format, to
Andrea Setzer (andrea at dcs.shef.ac.uk) by the 18th February 2002.

Formatting instructions for the final full version of papers will be
sent to
authors after notification of acceptance.

Workshop Registration Fees:
----------------------------
The registration fees for the workshop are:

    If you are not attending LREC: 140 EURO
    If you are attending LREC:      90 Euro

Registration will be handled by the LREC Secretariat. All attendees will
receive
a copy of the workshop proceedings.