[Corpora-List] CFP: Workshop on Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation

[Magnus Sahlgren]

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                         FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS			       								      
     Workshop on Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation      
                              (SCAR 2007)			      
                  http://www.sics.se/~mange/scar2007/
 		   Pre-conference workshop NODALIDA		      
                   Thursday, May 24, Tartu, Estonia		      
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Text (and language in general) has ABOUTNESS; it has meaning, or
semantic content. We as (computational) linguists are highly adept at
dissecting text on a number of different levels: we can perform
grammatical analysis of the words in the text, we can detect animacy
and salience, we can do syntactic analysis and build parse trees of
partial and whole sentences, and we can even identify and track topics
throughout the text. However, we are comparatively inept when it comes
to identifying the semantic content, or meaning, of the text. Or, to
put matters in more concise terms, even though there are theories and
methods that claim to accomplish this, there is a striking lack of
consensus regarding both acquisition, representation, and practical
utility of semantic content.

The aim of this workshop is not only to provide a forum for
researchers to present and discuss theories and methods for semantic
content acquisition and representation. The aim is also to discuss a
common evaluation methodology whereby different approaches can be
adequately compared. As a first step in this direction, participants
will be encouraged to apply their methods, or relate their theories,
to a specific test corpus that will be available in several of the
Nordic languages and English. Participants will be expected to
demonstrate what kind of results their methods can yield. In this
workshop, the relevance of an approach to meaning is judged only by
what it can tell us about real language data. The overall purpose of
this workshop is thus to put theories and models into action.

Questions of interest include:

* Is there a place in linguistic theory for a situation- and
  speaker-independent semantic model beyond syntactic models?

* What are the borders, if any, between morphosyntax, lexicon and
  pragmatics on the one hand and semantic models on the other?

* Are explicit semantic models necessary, useful or desirable? (Or
  should they be incidental to morphosyntactic and lexical analysis on
  the one hand and pragmatic discourse analysis on the other?)

We encourage submissions in the following areas:

* Discussions of foundational theoretical issues concerning meaning
  and representation in general.

* Methods for supervised, unsupervised and weakly supervised
  acquisition (machine learning, statistical, example- or rule-based,
  hybrid etc.) of semantic content.

* Representational schemes for semantic content (wordnets, vectorial,
  logic etc.).

* Evaluation of semantic content acquisition methods, and semantic
  content representations (test collections, evaluation metrics etc.).

* Applications of semantic content representations (information
  retrieval, dialogue systems, tools for language learning etc.).

Submission procedure:

Online submission is now open at http://www.easychair.org/SCAR2007/.
Submissions should not exceed 8 pages, and should use the ACL style
files available at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles/. Since
reviewing will be blind, papers should not include the authors' names
and affiliations, and self-references should be avoided. Proceedings
will be published electronically.

Important dates:

Submission deadline: March 26
Notification of acceptance: April 26
Final papers due: May 7
Workshop: May 24

Location:

NODALIDA 2007, Tartu, Estonia.

Organizers:

Magnus Sahlgren, SICS (mange at sics.se)
Ola Knutsson, KTH (knutsson at csc.kth.se) 

Program Committee:

Peter Bruza, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Gregory Grefenstette, CEA LIST, France
Jussi Karlgren, SICS, Sweden
Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa, Italy
Hinrich Schütze, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Fabrizio Sebastiani, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy
Dominic Widdows, MAYA Design, USA