[Corpora-List] EUROLAN 2003 FIRST CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

[Nancy Ide]

EUROLAN-2003

Summer School on

The Semantic Web and Language Technology - Its Potential and 
Practicalities

28 July - 8 August 2003
Bucharest - Romania
http://www.infoiasi.ro/~eurolan/eurolan2003

First Call For Participation

The Eurolan series of summer schools was established in 1993 and has 
been held every other year, with the goal of stimulating young 
researchers from all over the world to pursue high-level research in 
natural language processing and language technology.

Theme

The fifth EUROLAN in the series will have as topic all aspects of the 
developing Semantic Web technology and consider its potential and the 
practicalities of applying it to enhance language processing 
applications.

The promise of the Semantic Web has evoked enormous interest within the 
community developing language technologies. On the one hand, it offers 
the potential to exploit ontological descriptions of language data in 
order to enable inferencing capabilities, which may not only 
drastically enhance semantic processing, but also alter our conceptions 
of the ways in which knowledge is represented and exploited in language 
processing applications. On the other hand, to take full advantage of 
this evolving technology, researchers and developers will need to 
understand the potential as well as the limitations of the Semantic Web 
and master a range of new technologies that have been designed to 
enable it. Finally, the language technology community must be ready to 
contribute to Semantic Web development in order to ensure that it meets 
the requirements for language processing applications.

The so-called "Semantic Web community" encompasses several research 
communities that have previously worked independently of one another, 
including researchers in knowledge representation, ontology 
development, and "knowledge exploitation"; web developers (including 
developers of standards such as XML, RDF, OWL, etc.); and those who 
directly need to exploit knowledge in applications. Linguistic 
knowledge used in language processing at its various levels 
(morphological, syntactic, lexical, discourse, etc.) includes a 
substantial part of general knowledge and poses a significant challenge 
to Semantic Web developers in order to handle the precision and 
complexity required for language processing applications. Whatever the 
Semantic Web may evolve to be, researchers and developers in language 
technology clearly need to learn what it is and how it can be exploited 
for language processing, and at the same time, work with semantic web 
developers to ensure that the semantic web infrastructure is maximally 
usable for language processing applications.

EUROLAN-2003 will provide two weeks of intensive study of semantic web 
technology and its application to natural language processing. 
Internationally known scholars and researchers involved in leading-edge 
work in relevant areas will serve as professors at the school, 
providing half- and full-day seminars and hands-on labs to provide 
students with in-depth understanding and experience.

Topics to be covered in the school include the following:

* What is the Semantic Web?
* Potential and limitations of the semantic web
* Supporting web technologies (XML, RDF, OWL)
* Ontologies, ontology design and development
* Ontology exploitation via inferencing
* Description logics and other approaches to inferencing
* Lexical semantics and the semantic web
* Use of the semantic web and related technologies in language 
processing applications

Invited professors

* Dan Cristea, "Al. I. Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania
* Thierry Declerck, DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany
* James Hendler, University of Maryland at College Park, USA
* Jerry Hobbs, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, USA
* Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
* Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa, Italy
* Deborah McGuinness, Stanford University, USA (to be confirmed)
* Robert Meersman, Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium
* Srini Narayanan, SRI-International, Menlo Park, SUA
* Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico University, USA
* Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania
* Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI and University of Saarbruecken, Germany
* Wolfgang Wahlster, DFKI and University of Saarbruecken, Germany
* Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, England

Program

Eurolan-2003 will take place between 28 July and 8 August 2003 in 
Bucharest - Romania.

The summer school will be organized to allow for both lectures and 
hands-on experience for each of the areas covered. Morning sessions 
will be devoted to tutorials, followed by afternoon sessions at which 
students will work in collaboration with professors on practical 
applications. The school will also include one workshop as well as 
round tables and work meetings on topics of particular interest related 
to the school’s theme. They will be announced at a later date.

On Sunday, 3 August, a trip to significant Romanian landmarks will be 
organized.

Registration and Fees

Information about registration and fees will be posted at a later date 
on the Eurolan web page.

Program Committee

Dan Cristea
Nancy Ide
Jerry Hobbs
Dan Tufis
Hans Uszkoreit

Information on previous Eurolan events can found at 
http://www.infoiasi.ro/fcs/en/events.html.