[Corpora-List] Final CFP: ECAI-2004 Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population

[Paul Buitelaar]

(With apologies for multiple postings.)


** Deadline: April 15th **


Call for Papers

ECAI-2004 Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population: Towards
Evaluation of Text-based Methods in the Semantic Web and Knowledge
Discovery Life Cycle

16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
August 22nd/23rd 2004
Valencia, Spain

http://olp.dfki.de/ecai04/cfp.htm

With Support From: KnowledgeWeb (http://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org/)



Topic and Motivation
----------------
Ontologies are formal, explicit specifications of shared
conceptualizations, representing concepts and their relations that are
relevant for a given domain of discourse. Currently, ontologies are
mostly developed (including ontology construction, extension, mapping
and merging) as well as used (ontology population through knowledge
markup) by a manual process, which is very ineffective and may cause
major barriers to their large-scale use in such areas as Knowledge
Discovery and Semantic Web. The expected central role of ontologies in
the organization and functioning of the Semantic Web has been well
documented in recent years. Somewhat less traditional is the role of
ontologies in incremental approaches to Knowledge Discovery, in which
ontologies and machine learning methods are used in combination to mine,
interpret and (re-)organize knowledge.

As human language is a primary mode of knowledge transfer, linguistic
analysis of relevant documents for ontology learning and population
seems a viable option. More precisely, automation of these tasks can be
implemented by a combined use of linguistic analysis and machine
learning approaches for text mining. The workshop will therefore be
concerned with reports on the development of such methods, but
specifically also with the quantitative evaluation of these methods.

Automatic methods for text-based ontology learning and population have
developed over recent years (e.g. results from the ECAI-2000,
IJCAI-2001, ECAI-2002 workshops on Ontology Learning and the KCAP-2001,
ECAI-2002, KCAP-2003 workshops on Knowledge Markup / Ontology
Population), but a remaining challenge is to evaluate in a quantitative
manner how useful or accurate the extracted ontology classes, properties
and instances are. In fact, this is a central issue as it is currently
very hard to compare methods and approaches, due to the lack of a shared
understanding of the task at hand. The core theme of the workshop
therefore will be to develop such a shared understanding through the
definition of a clear task (and corresponding sub-tasks), identify
resources needed for the task/sub-tasks and to discuss how best to
develop an open source evaluation platform.

Areas of Interest
------------
Submissions are invited on these topics in Ontology Learning and
Population (OLP):

*  Evaluation Methodologies and Metrics for OLP
    - Including Experience and Best Practice from Related Evaluation
      Efforts in the Context of CLEF, TREC, SENSEVAL, etc.
*  Datasets and Resources for the Evaluation of OLP
*  Definition of Sub-Tasks for OLP
    - Extraction of Taxonomy, Class-hierarchy
    - Extraction of Class-properties, Relations
    - Extraction of Class-instances, Individuals
*  Definition of Related Tasks
    - Ontology Extension, Evolution
    - Ontology Mapping
    - Ontology Merging
*  Text-based Approaches for OLP, for instance (Combinations of):
    - NLP and Linguistic Analysis for OLP
    - (NLP-based) Text-mining for OLP
    - (Ontology-aware) Information Extraction for OLP
*  OLP in the Context of the Semantic Web
*  OLP in the Context of Knowledge Discovery

Workshop Schedule
---------------
This will be a one-day workshop with a proposed schedule of 2 or 3 paper
sessions and a poster session. The workshop will include a round-table
working session on the topic of evaluation of ontology learning and
population. It is expected that the outcome of this discussion will lead
to a written report on guidelines for setting up an evaluation platform
for these tasks.

Organizing Committee
-----------------
Paul Buitelaar  (DFKI) paulb at dfki.de
Siegfried Handschuh (AIFB) sha at aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
Bernardo Magnini (IRST) magnini at itc.it

Program Committee
---------------
AIFB - Siegfried Handschuh, Steffen Staab, York Sure
Bar Ilan University - Ido Dagan
DFKI - Paul Buitelaar, Andreas Eisele, Michael Sintek
IRIT, Toulouse - Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles
IRST - Bernardo Magnini
Josef Stefan Inst. - Marko Grobelnik
KDLabs - Jörg-Uwe Kietz
LOA-CNR - Aldo Gangemi
MIG-INRA  - Claire Nedellec
NCSR Demokritos - Georgios Paliouras
NLM-NIH - Vipul Kashyap
Univ. Antwerpen - Walter Daelemans
Univ. Basque Country - Eneko Agirre
Univ. Paris 13, LIPN - Adeline Nazarenko
Univ. Poly. Madrid - Asuncion Gomez-Perez
Univ. Roma La Sapienza - Paola Velardi
Univ. Roma Tor Vergata - Roberto Basili
Univ. Saarland - Thierry Declerck
Univ. Sheffield - Fabio Ciravegna, Hamish Cunningham, Yorick Wilks
USC/ISI - Eduard Hovy
XRCE - Eric Gaussier

Submissions
---------
Submissions (in PS or PDF format) should be in English and no longer
than 6 pages, following the formatting style for ECAI-2004. Submissions
should be sent by email to the contact person: paulb at dfki.de

April 15th - Paper submission deadline
May 15th  -  Notification of acceptance/rejection
June 15th  -  Camera-ready papers
August 22nd/23rd  -  Workshop

Workshop Attendance and Registration
-----------------------------
All workshop participants must register for ECAI-2004