[Corpora-List] STEP2008 2ndCfP

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Apologies for Multiple Postings
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                   2nd CALL FOR PAPERS: STEP 2008

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              Symposium on Semantics in Text Processing

         http://project.cgm.unive.it/html/STEP2008/index.htm

                        September 22-24, 2008

                    Auditorium Santa Margherita
                          Venice (Italy)

         Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL special interest group
                   on computational semantics


 MOTIVATION
============
Thanks to both statistical approaches and finite state methods,
natural language processing (NLP), particularly in the area of robust,
open-domain text processing, has made considerable progress in the
last couple of decades. It is probably fair to say that NLP tools have
reached satisfactory performance at the level of syntactic processing,
be the output structures chunks, phrase structures, or dependency
graphs.  Therefore, the time seems ripe to extend the state-of-the-art
and consider deep semantic processing as a serious task in
wide-coverage NLP. This is a step that normally requires syntactic
parsing, as well as named entity recognition, anaphora resolution,
thematic role labelling and word sense disambiguation, as well as
other lower levels of processing for which reasonably good methods
have already been developed. Accurate automatic semantic
interpretation of text is expected to benefit newly emerging areas
targetting semantic and pragmatic issues, such as affectivity and
sentiment analysis of texts, textual entailment, and consistency
checking.


 WORKSHOP SCOPE
================
The goal of the STEP workshop is to provide a forum for anyone active
in semantic processing of text to discuss innovative technologies,
representation issues, inference techniques, prototype
implementations, and real applications. The preferred processing
targets are large quantities of texts -- either specialised domains,
or open domains such as newswire text, blogs, and wikipedia-like text.
Implemented rather than theoretical work is emphasised in STEP.
In particular, relevant topics are:

- wide-coverage semantic/logical analysis of text
- computation and use of discourse relations
- use of lexical-conceptual and semantically related resources
- thematic role labelling in semantic representations
- word sense disambiguation in semantic representations
- implementations of specific semantic phenomena
- anaphora or ellipsis resolution in semantic representations
- implementations of sentiment analysis
- automatic detection of subjective and non-literal language
- acquisition of lexical knowledge and paraphrase from raw corpora
- background knowledge acquisition, representation, and selection
- semantic lexicons and ontologies for text interpretation
- learning semantic representations from raw text
- automated reasoning in the service of semantic analysis of text
- creation of gold standard meaning representations
- evaluation of semantic representations
- textual entailment and consistency checking
- systems that extract, represent or manipulate text meaning
- applications of semantic analysis in text processing

Applications inlude, but are not limited to, machine translation, text
understanding, question answering, summarisation, information
extraction, and the semantic web.


 SHARED TASK: COMPARING SEMANTIC REPRESENTATIONS
=================================================
STEP 2008 will also feature a "shared task" to compare semantic
representations as output by state-of-the-art NLP systems.
Participating systems will be given a number of (small) texts, before
the workshop.  The output of these systems will be judged on a number
of aspects by a panel of experts in the field, during the workshop.
Aim of the shared task is to discuss the feasibility of a gold
standard for deep semantic representations. Aim of the panel is to
identify a set of problematic and relevant issues for semantic
evaluation.  The panel will reward the system with the most complete
and accurate semantic representation with a special prize. Preliminary
dates for the Step Shared Task are:

	Shared Task paper submission:     June  6, 2008
        Notification of acceptance:       June 23, 2008
        Release of test data              June 25, 2008
        System's results due              July  4, 2008
        Final version paper due:          July 25, 2008
        Workshop:                      Sept 22-24, 2008

To participate in the shared task, submit a paper containing (1) a
system description, (2) a description of the semantic formalism used
by the system, and (3) an authentic small text and the way it is
analysed by the system.  This text should not exceed five sentences
and 120 tokens. The test data for the shared task will be composed out
of all the texts submitted by the participants.

Shared task submissions should follow the workshop format for regular
papers and submission guidelines (see below), and will be published in
the STEP 2008 proceedings. Please mark shared task paper submissions
by specifying "shared task" as one of the keywords.  The final paper
must include a discussion of the system's performance on the shared
task data.  Please contact Johan Bos (bos at di.uniroma1.it) for further
questions on the shared task.


 SUBMISSIONS
=============
Authors are invited to submit original research papers. Papers should
indicate the state of completion of the reported results. Overlap with
previously published work should be clearly indicated.  Submissions
will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of
presentation, significance, and relevance to the workshop.

Submissions should be in Abobe PDF format, not exceed eight A4-sized
pages, and be typeset in a 11 point font.  Detailed guidelines and a
latex stylefile package are available at the STEP 2008 web page. Paper
submission will be electronic using the EasyChair system.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the
programme committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings. The publication of selected and revised papers is under
consideration for a special issue in a journal.


 INVITED SPEAKER
=================
        Harry Bunt (University of Tilburg)


 IMPORTANT DATES
=================
        Regular Paper submission deadline:  May 9, 2008
	Shared Task paper submission:      June 6, 2008
        Notification of acceptance:       June 23, 2008
        Camera-ready version due:         July 25, 2008
        Workshop:                      Sept 22-24, 2008


 ORGANISING COMMITTEE
======================
        Rodolfo Delmonte (Universita' Ca' Foscari, Venice)
        Johan Bos (Universita' La Sapienza, Rome)


 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
=====================
        Roberto Basili (University Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy)
        Amedeo Cappelli (CELCT, Trento Italy)
        Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge, UK)
        Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
        Sanda Harabagiu (HLT, University of Texas, USA)
        Alexander Koller (University of Edinburgh, UK)
        Leonardo Lesmo (DI, University of Tourin, Italy)
        Katja Markert (University of Leeds, UK)
        Dan Moldovan (HLT, University of Texas, USA)
        Srini Narayanan (ICSI, Berkeley, USA)
        Sergei Nirenburg (University of Maryland, USA)
        Malvina Nissim (University of Bologna, Italy)
        Vincenzo Pallotta (Universitaet Freiburg, Schweiz)
        Emanuele Pianta (ITC, Trento, Italy)
        Massimo Poesio (University of Trento, Italy)
        Stephen Pulman (Oxford University, UK)
        Michael Schiehlen (IMS Stuttgart, Germany)
        Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh, UK)



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