[Corpora-List] Australia: OLP2 - 2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population - Bridging the Gap between Text and Knowledge, at Coling-ACL 2006 --- CFP

[Timothy Baldwin]

First Call for Papers

OLP2 - 2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population -- Bridging
the Gap between Text and Knowledge

Workshop at COLING/ACL 2006

July 22nd, 2006
Sydney, Australia


Supported By SmartWeb (http://www.smartweb-projekt.de/)


Topic and Motivation

An ontology is an explicit and formal specification of a shared
conceptualization of a domain of interest. Ontologies formalize the
intensional aspects of a domain, whereas the extensional part is
provided by a knowledge base that contains assertions about instances
of concepts and relations as defined by the ontology. The process of
defining and instantiating a knowledge base is referred to as
knowledge markup or ontology population, whereas (semi-)automatic
support in ontology development is usually referred to as ontology
learning.

Ontologies have been broadly used in knowledge management
applications, including Semantic Web applications and research. In
recent years, ontologies have regained interest also within the NLP
community, specifically in such applications as information
extraction, text mining and question answering. However, as ontology
development is a tedious and costly process there has been an equally
growing interest in the automatic learning of ontologies. Much of this
work has been focused on textual data as human language is a primary
mode of knowledge transfer. In this way, textual data provide both a
resource for the ontology learning process as well as an application
medium for developed ontologies.

Automatic methods for text-based ontology learning and population have
developed over recent years, but it is difficult to compare approaches
and results. In the 1st Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population
(at ECAI 2004, Spain) we addressed this issue through an emphasis on
the evaluation aspects of the reported work. In the context of the 2nd
workshop we intend to continue this emphasis by providing a common
data set for participants to work with, consisting of an ontology and
document collection in the football (soccer) domain and a
corresponding automatically extracted knowledge base. Participants
will be free to use this or other data, but are encouraged to use the
common data set for their experiments in order to better compare
results with other participants. Please notify the organizers your
interest in this.
    An additional topic we intend to address at this workshop is the
    relation between NLP and ontology development, the communities of
    which are working on similar topics but using different
    terminology. As this leads to a confound communication, the
    potential for interdisciplinary work becomes much less
    pronounced. We therefore intend the workshop to contribute to an
    enhanced interdisciplinary understanding of tasks, methods and
    evaluations.


Areas of Interest

To provide a clear focus we request novel work on:

- Concept formation on the basis of text
- Learning concept hierarchies / non-taxonomic relations / rules /
- axioms from text
- Named-Entity Recognition with respect to an ontology
- Ontology-based information extraction
- Ontology learning for IE, IR, MT, QA
- Gold standard and task-based evaluation of ontology learning,
- e.g. in IE, IR, MT, QA


Important Dates

April 17th      Submission Deadline
May 17th      Notification
June 2nd       Camera-ready Version
July 22nd      Workshop


Submission

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and
should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. Submission
will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted papers is
Adobe PDF. The papers must be submitted no later than April 17,
2006. Papers submitted after that time will not be reviewed.


Organizing Committee

Paul Buitelaar - DFKI, Germany
Philipp Cimiano - AIFB, Univ. of Karlsruhe, Germany
Berenike Loos - European Media Lab, Germany


Program Committee

Eneko Agirre - Basque Country University, Spain
Enrique Alfonseca - Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles - IRIT- CNRS Toulouse, France
Timothy Baldwin - University of Melbourne, Australia
Roberto Basili - Universita di Roma "Tor Vergata", Italy
Johan Bos - Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
Christopher Brewster - University of Sheffield, UK
Nigel Collier - National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Ido Dagan - Bar Ilan University, Israel
Eric Gausier - XEROX XRCE, France
Asuncion Gomez-Perez - Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Marko Grobelnik - Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Andreas Hotho - University of Kassel, Germany
Eduard Hovy - USC, Information Sciences Institute, USA
Vipul Kashyap - Partners HealthCare System, USA
Bernardo Magnini - ITC-IRST, Italy
Diana Maynard - University of Sheffield, UK
Adeline Nazarenko - LIPN - Universite Paris-Nord, France
Claire Nedellec - MIG, INRA, France
George Paliouras - NCSR "Demokritos", Greece
Robert Porzel - European Media Lab, Germany
Marie-Laure Reinberger - Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
Marta Sabou - Knowledge Media Institute, UK
Michael Sintek - DFKI, Germany
Peter Spyns - Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Steffen Staab - University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Vojtech Svatek - University of Economics, Prague, Czech Rep.
Paola Velardi - Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
Dominic Widdows - MAYA Design, USA

Workshop Registration
All workshop participants must register for COLING/ACL 2006