[Corpora-List] 2nd CFP: Models of Scientific Discourse Annotation Workshop (MSDA2011)

[Paul Thompson]

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

Models of Scientific Discourse Annotation (MSDA2011)
Portland, Oregon, June 25, 2011 (following ACL/HLT 2011)
http://msda2011.wordpress.com/

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 25TH FEBRUARY 2011
SUBMISSION SITE: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msda2011

**SELECTED ACCEPTED PAPERS TO BE PUBLISHED IN A SPECIAL ISSUE OF PLoS 
One (http://www.plosone.org/)**


Motivation
--------------

The detection of discourse structure of scientific documents is
important for a number of tasks, including biocuration efforts, text
summarisation, and the creation of improved formats for scientific
publishing. Currently, many parallel efforts exist to detect a range of
discourse elements at different levels of granularity, and for different
purposes. Discourse elements detected include facts, problems,
hypotheses, experimental results, and analyses of results; the
differentiation between new and existing work, and the difference
between the author’s own contribution and that of cited sources. A
plethora of feature classes is used to identify these elements,
including verb tense/mood/voice, semantic verb class, speculative
language or negation, and various classes of stance markers, as well as
text-structural components and the location of references. The
linguistics behind this work involves topics such as the detection of
subjectivity, opinion, entailment, and inference; detecting author
stance and author disagreement, and inferring differences between the
given text and the state of knowledge in a particular field.

Several workshops have been focused on the detection of some of these
features in scientific text, such as speculation and negation in the
2010 workshop on Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing
and hedging in the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task Learning to detect hedges and
their scope in natural language text. There have also been several
efforts to produce large-scale corpora, such as BioScope, where negation
and speculation information were annotated, and the GENIA Event corpus.

To perform this analysis, a wide range of annotation schemes have been
produced, that vary along a number of different axes, including:
• Annotation viewpoint (e.g. argumentative zones, scientific
investigation structure, type of knowledge conveyed)
• Unit of annotation (e.g. zone, sentence, segment, event, etc)
• Type of text (abstracts or full papers)
• Domain of application
• Granularity of the annotation categories (coarse or fine-grained)
• Whether other types/levels of information are also annotated (e.g.
certainty level, knowledge source, manner etc.)

Scope
----------

The goal of the 2011 workshop on "Models of Scientific Discourse
Annotation" is to compare and contrast the motivation behind these
different efforts, the techniques and principles applied in the various
approaches, and discuss ways in which they can complement each other and
collaborate to form standards for an optimal method of annotating
appropriate levels of discourse, with enhanced accuracy and usefulness.

The goal of the workshop is to compare, contrast and evaluate different
scientific discourse annotation schemes and tools, in order to answer
questions such as:
• What motivates a certain level, method, viewpoint for annotating
scientific text?
• What is the annotation level for a unit of argumentation: an event, a
sentence, a segment? What are advantages and disadvantages of all three?
• How easily can different schemes to be applied to texts? Are they
easily trainable?
• Which schemes are the most portable? Can they be applied to both full
papers and abstracts? Can they be applied to texts in different domains?
• How granular should annotation schemes be? What are the
advantages/disadvantages of fine and coarse grained annotation categories?
• Can different schemes complement each other to provide different
levels of information? Can different schemes be combined to give better
results?
• How can we compare annotations, how do we decide which features,
approaches, techniques work best?
• How do we exchange and evaluate each other’s annotations?
• How applicable are these efforts towards improved methods of
publishing or summarizing science?

We are inviting two types of submissions:
1) Research papers by participants who are currently conducting
scientific discourse analysis are invited to present their work,
augmented by a clear motivation for the granularity, discourse elements
and goal of their annotation procedure
2) Vision papers, by participants who wish to either compare and
contrast existing efforts, or present a vision of annotation as it
pertains to specific user goals or a particular view of scientific
discourse as a textual genre of study.

In inviting both categories, we hope to stimulate a discussion between
the Computational Linguistics community and linguists, genre specialists
and sociologists of science, to come to a common understanding regarding
the needs and possibilities of scientific discourse analysis.

Keynote lecture
---------------------

We are proud to announce a keynote lecture by Eduard H. Hovy of ISI/USC,
tentatively entitled: ‘Towards a systematic approach for annotating
scientific discourse’

Submission details
---------------------------

Submission deadline is FEBRUARY 25, 2011.

Two types of papers are solicited:
1) 8-page (+ 2 pp references) research papers reporting to original and
unpublished research in scientific discourse annotation
2) 4-page (+ 2 pp references) vision papers pertaining to models,
concepts, critiques or comparisons of systems of annotation of
scientific discourse.

Accepted papers are expected to be presented at the workshop and will be
published in the workshop proceedings. A selection of the presented
papers will be published as a special issue of PLoS One
(http://www.plosone.org/).

Submissions must be formatted using ACL 2011 style files, available at
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml

Contributions should be submitted via the MSDA2011 submission site:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msda2011

Important dates
----------------------

Feb 25th, 2011 Submission deadline
Apr 1st, 2011 Notification of acceptance
Apr 15th, 2010 Camera ready papers due
Jun 25th, 2010 Workshop


Organising committee:
-------------------------------

Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester
Ágnes Sándor, Xerox Research Europe, Grenoble
Hagit Shatkay, University of Delaware
Anita de Waard, Elsevier Labs, University of Toronto

Program Committee:
-----------------------------

Gully Burns – ISI/USC
Tim Clark – Harvard/MGH
Kevin Cohen - University of Colorado
Nigel Collier - National Institute of Informatics
Walter Daelemans -University of Antwerp
Kjersti Flottum – Bergen
Roxana Girju - University of Illinois
Sanda Harabagiu - University of Texas Dallas
Lynette Hirschman - MITRE corporation
Halil Kilicoglu - Concordia University
Jin-Dong Kim - DBCLS, University of Tokyo
Anna Korhonen - University of Cambridge
Maria Liakata - Aberystwyth University
Roser Morante - University of Antwerp
Raheel Nawaz - University of Manchester
Drago Radev - University of Michigan
Andrey Rzhetsky - University of Chicago
Caroline Sporleder - Saarland University
Gyorgy Szarvas - Technical University Darmstadt
Paul Thompson - University of Manchester
Junichi Tsujii – University of Tokyo
Antal van den Bosch - Tilburg University
Karin Verspoor - University of Colorado
Theresa Wilson - University of Edinburgh

-- 
Paul Thompson
Research Associate
School of Computer Science
National Centre for Text Mining
Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre
University of Manchester
131 Princess Street
Manchester
M1 7DN
UK
Tel: 0161 306 3091
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Paul.Thompson/


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