[Corpora-List] ESSLLI 2010 Workshop - Compositionality and Distributional Semantic Models

Thu Jan 7 19:39:31 UTC 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS

Compositionality and Distributional Semantic Models

http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/roberto/ESSLLI10-dsm-workshop/

Workshop organized as part of the European Summer School on Logic,
Language and Information ESSLLI 2010 (http://esslli2010cph.info/),
August 16-20 2010 (ESSLLI second week), Copenhagen

Workshop Organizers:
Alessandro Lenci (alessandro.lenci at ling.unipi.it)
Roberto Zamparelli (roberto.zamparelli at unitn.it)

Workshop Purpose:

In the last ten years distributional semantic models (DSMs), such as
LSA, HAL, etc. have been quite successful at addressing semantic
similarity, lexical ambiguity, lexical entailment, verb selectional
restrictions and other word level relations. In this class of models
the meaning of a content word is represented in terms of a distributed
vector recording its pattern of cooccurrences (sometimes, in specific
syntactic relations) with other content words within a
corpus. Different types of semantic tasks and phenomena are then
modeled in terms of linear algebra operations on distributional
vectors.

A central question about DSMs is whether and how distributional
vectors can also be used in the compositional construction of meaning
for constituents larger than words, and ultimately for sentences or
discourses -- the traditional domains of denotation-based formal
semantics. Being able to model key aspects of semantic composition
represents a crucial condition for DSMs to provide a more general
model of meaning. Conversely, distributional representations might
help to model those aspects of meaning that notoriously challenge
semantic compositionality, such as semantic context-sensitivity,
polysemy, predicate coercion, etc.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers in formal
and computational semantics to chart this largely unexplored
territory.

Workshop Topics

The following is a non-exhaustive list of issues that submissions to
the workshop might address:

- Is it possible, and useful, to use Distributional Semantic Models to
  assign a semantic representation to constituents (e.g. phrases,
  propositions, etc.)?

- How can the notion of predication be interpreted in Distributional
  Semantic Models?

- Can Distributional Semantic Models provide an alternative way to
  solve puzzles concerning predicate-argument composition
  (e.g. type-mismatch, coercion, etc.)?

- Can we use distributional models to capture argument structure and
  its alternations, or the Aktionsart of a complex predicates?

- Can Distributional Semantic Models apply below the word level,
  characterizing the notions of  morpheme productivity and morpheme
  composition? (e.g. can we capture distributionally the decreasingly
  compositional meanings of "inter+breed", "inter+act", "inter+view"?)

- Can Distributional Semantic Models be used to model word meaning
  interactions in modificational contexts, such as figurative
  interpretations, context-sensitive sense shifts (e.g. "fast car"
  vs. "fast guitarist"), etc.?

- How can polysemy and ambiguity be modelled in Distributional
  Semantic Models? Which types of ambiguity could be resolved in a
  DSM-based compositional process? Can this help the task of
  resolving lexical and textual entailments?

- What is the right relation between the interpretation functions of
  formal semantics and the distributional semantic representation
  these models provide?

- What should be the most insightful relation between distributional
  semantic representations of content words and the meaning of the
  function words that combine with them?

- Can DSMs provide distributional correlates of constructions and
  lexical classes that are known to be relevant in formal semantics?
  (e.g. distributional models of bare plurals, the count vs. mass
  distinction, generic vs. episodic predicates, etc.).

- Similarly, can these models capture different types of reference
  (e.g. nouns or noun phrases that refer to objects, to kinds, to
  events, to facts or propositions, etc.).

Submission Details

Authors are invited to submit an EXTENDED ABSTRACT for a 20-minute
presentation (followed by a 10 minute discussion).

Submissions should:

* not exceed 3 pages, including all figures and references.
* be in pdf
* be submitted using the Easychair interface at the URL:
  http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=distcomp2010
* be anonymous and, therefore, accompanied by information containing:
author name(s), affiliation(s), e-mail and postal address(es), and the
title of the paper (these can be filled in at the Easychair site)

The submissions will be reviewed anonymously by the workshop's
programme committee. Details will be specified on the workshop
homepage (http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/roberto/ESSLLI10-dsm-workshop/)

The abstracts accepted for presentation will appear in the
ESSLLI web site. We are inquiring about the possibility to publish the
final workshop papers, either as part of the ESSLLI proceedings or in
a separate form.

Program Committee

Marco Baroni   	(University of Trento)
Gemma Boleda   	(Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
Katrin Erk	(University of Texas)
Stefan Evert 	(University of Osnabrueck)
Graham Katz     (Georgetown University)
Alessandro Lenci(University of Pisa) (co-organizer)
Louise McNally 	(Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University)
Sebastian Pado 	(IMS, Stuttgart)
Magnus Sahlgren (Swedish Institute of Computer Science)
Gabriel Sandu  	(University of Helsinki)
Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart)
Peter Turney 	 (National Research Council Canada)
Roberto Zamparelli (University of Trento) (co-organizer)

Local Arrangements:

All workshop participants, including the authors, are required to
register for ESSLLI.

Important Dates:

Apr 12, 2010: Deadline for submission
May 24, 2010: Notification
Jun  1, 2010: Deadline for early registration to ESSLLI
June 30, 2010: Final programme
August 16-20, 2010: Workshop

-- 
Alessandro Lenci

Dipartimento di Linguistica "T. Bolelli"
Università di Pisa
Via Santa Maria 36
56126 PISA

tel. +39-050-2215638; +39-0503152837
WWW: http://www.humnet.unipi.it/linguistica/Docenti/Lenci/index.htm

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