[Corpora-List] Extension to ARTE ACL/COLING Workshop Deadline; now April 14, 2006

[Corina Forascu]

[Apologies for multiple copies]


---Submission Deadline Extended to April 14, 2006---

***Annotating and Reasoning about Time and Events (ARTE)***

     ACL-COLING Workshop
     July 23, 2006

   Chairs:
Branimir Boguraev, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA; bran at us.ibm.com
Rafael Munoz, University of Alicante, Spain; rafael at dlsi.ua.es
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA; jamesp at cs.brandeis.edu


1. Workshop Description

The computational analysis of time is a challenging and very topical
problem, as the needs of applications based on information extraction
techniques expand to include varying degrees of time stamping and
temporal ordering of events and/or relations within a narrative. The
challenges derive from the combined requirements of a mapping process
(text to a rich representation of temporal entities), representational
framework (ontologically-grounded temporal graph), and reasoning
capability (combining common-sense inference with temporal axioms).

Usually contextualized in question-answering applications (with obvious
dependencies of answers on time), temporal awareness directly impacts
numerous areas of NLP and AI: text summarization over events and their
participants; making inferences from events in a text; overlaying
timelines on document collections; commonsense reasoning in narrative
and story understanding.

Interest in temporal analysis and event-based reasoning has spawned a
number of important meetings, particularly as applied to IE and QA tasks
(cf. at COLING 2000; ACL 2001; LREC 2002; TERQAS 2002; TANGO 2003,
Dagstuhl 2005). Significant progress has been made in these meetings,
leading to developing a standard for a specification language for events
and temporal expressions and their orderings (TimeML).  While recent
research in the broader community (as indicated, for instance, in the
most recent symposium on Annotating and Reasoning about Time and Events)
highlights TimeML's status as an interchange format, this workshop,
however, is not intended to focus on TimeML exclusively.  Likewise,
while the ultimate goal of temporal analysis is to facilitate reasoning
about time and events, the formal aspects of this problem are being
addressed by other meetings (see, for instance, the TIME 2006
Symposium).  Instead, the workshop will explore largely the linguistic
implications for temporal-analytical frameworks.

The goal of the meeting, therefore, is to address issues already raised,
but not fully explored---including but not limited to the following:

= infrastructure questions: temporal annotation methodology, tools;
reliable measures of inter-annotator agreement; community resources.

= analytical frameworks: temporal information extraction; approaches to
temporal expression normalization; relationship between named entity
recognition and temporal entities analysis; dependency (or not) upon
syntactic and discourse structure.

= mapping to time ontology(ies): completeness of the representation
framework; formalization of the process; additional temporal reasoning
capabilities required.

= reasoning over time: in particular, (robust) reasoning within
representational schemes demonstrably derivable with current
IE/analytical frameworks.

= applications of temporal analytics and reasoning: in addition to NL
tasks, of particular interest are studies of temporal information as it
manifests in, and impacts, different domains: beyond news, time is
intrinsically essential in eg. legal, health-care, intelligence,
financial contexts.

= national language: relationship between language characteristics and
representational frameworks; generalizations of temporal analytics
across multiple languages; multi-/cross-lingual resource development.


2. Target Audience and Participants

This workshop will be of interest to those creating or exploiting
temporally annotated corpora; those developing information extraction,
question answering, and summarization systems relying on temporal and
event ordering information; researchers involved in creating chronicles
and timelines from textual data (legal, health-care, intelligence);
semantic web designers and developers wanting to link web ontologies and
standards to temporal markup from natural language; researchers
interested in temporal properties of discourse and narrative structure;
and those interested in annotation environments and development tools.


3. Important Dates and Other Information

Papers due: April 14, 2006 (at 11:59pm North American EST (GMT -5))
Acceptance/rejection notification: May 6, 2006.
Final version due: May 26, 2006.
Conference: July 23, 2006.

For more details, refer to http://www.acl2006time.org .


4. Program Committee

David Ahn, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Nicholas Asher, University of Texas, Austin, TX USA
Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, Saarbruecken, Germany
Harry Bunt, Faculty of Arts, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Corina Forascu, University of Iasi, Romania
Robert Gaizauskas, University of Sheffield, England
Jerry Hobbs, ISI/USC, Marina del Ray, CA USA
Graham Katz, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
Bernardo Magnini, ITC-IRST Trento, Italy
Inderjeet Mani, MITRE, Bedford, MA USA
Patricio Martinez-Barco, University of Alicante, Spain
Matteo Negri, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
Frank Schilder, Thomson Legal and Regulatory Co., Eagan, MN USA
Andrea Setzer, University of Sheffield, England
Marc Verhagen, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA USA


----------------------------

James Pustejovsky, Professor
Department of Computer Science
258 Volen Center for Complex Systems
415 South Street
Waltham, MA 02454 USA


ph: 1-781-736-2709
fx: 1-781-736-2741
em: jamesp at cs.brandeis.edu
url: www.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesp