[Corpora-List] Call for papers, special issue of TAL "Processing of temporal and spatial information in language."

[philippe muller]

Processing of temporal and spatial information in language
2012 Volume 53 Number 2.
http://www.atala.org/Processing-of-temporal-and-spatial


Direction : Inderjeet Mani & Philippe Muller.
Deadline: March 15th, 2012


THEMES

Information in natural language is almost always located in time and/or 
space. The coherence of a document also results from a coherent temporal 
perspective, and in certain cases from the coherence of the spatial frame.

Beyond specific applications where this information is obviously central 
(navigation systems, scene visualization, geo-localization, chronology 
extraction, etc), time and space also play an important part in other 
related tasks, such as information extraction where they constrain the 
validity of most facts, or in summarization and question-answering where 
temporal coherence is important. From a more fundamental perspective, 
temporal and spatial modifications have a pervasive influence in 
semantic and pragmatic representations. It is natural that they motivate 
a growing number of projects, specific annotated corpora, which in turn 
lead to specification and normalization efforts, such as the ISO-TimeML 
and ISO-Space standards.

All this have helped to move from essentially theoretical models in the 
1990s, to arrive at a body of work with better empirically justified 
foundations. This can be shown with recent evaluation campaigns for some 
sub-tasks (Tempeval) within the Semeval campaigns.

Expressions of time and space also have some specific aspects that set 
them apart from other semantic tasks in natural language processing. A 
notable aspect is the importance of the underlying semantics of temporal 
and spatial predicates, as is noted in several studies that take their 
inferential properties into account, especially when considered at the 
level of a document. Evaluation of the resulting representations is then 
not a trivial matter.

The objective of this special issue is to present new developments in 
the processing of temporal and spatial information in language, from 
theoretical, practical and methodological point of views. Spatial 
processing has been of increasing interest lately, and raises specific 
issues, and we encourage work that focus on this aspect, in isolation or 
in relation with temporal information. Presentation of the importance of 
such information in applications is also encouraged.

We encourage submission on any aspect related to the processing of 
temporal and spatial information in natural language, especially on the 
following issues and tasks:

-  temporal information extraction : date and event extraction, event 
anchoring, relating events within a text or a text collection
-  spatial information extraction: spatial entity recognition, 
geolocalisation, relating spatial entities
-  temporal/spatial question-answering
-  joint processing of temporal and spatial information, motion 
description, route description
-  representation and reasoning issues, in particular interoperability 
of temporal/spatial representations
-  generation of scene and image description
-  information extraction and monitoring in specific domains, such as 
the medical domain
-  joint processing of time and modality
-  annotation scheme for time and space
-  creation and use of resources for temporal and spatial processing
-  specificities of evaluation procedures for temporal/spatial 
annotation schemes, resources and processes

REVIEWING COMMITTEE

-  Nicholas Asher
-  Jason Baldridge
-  John Bateman
-  Delphine Battistelli
-  Nate Blaylock
-  Robert J. Bobrow
-  Harry Bunt
-  Pascal Denis
-  Christy Doran
-  Patrice Enjalbert
-  Michel Gagnon
-  Mauro Gaio
-  Robert Gaizauskas
-  Laurent Gosselin
-  Caroline Hagège
-  Oliver Lemon
-  Gérard Ligozat
-  Laurent Prévot
-  James Pustejovsky
-  Xavier Tannier
-  Marc Verhagen
-  Annie Zaenen


IMPORTANT DATES

-  Deadline for submission: March 15th, 2012
-  List of papers selected: July 2012
-  Deadline for camera ready papers: September 2012
-  Publication on line: end of 2012


THE JOURNAL

TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues / Natural Language Processing) 
is a forty year old international journal published by ATALA (French 
Association for Natural Language Processing) with the support of CNRS 
(National Centre for Scientific Research). It has moved to an electronic 
mode of publication, with printing on demand. This affects in no way its 
reviewing and selection process.


PRACTICAL ISSUES

Authors intending to submit a paper are encouraged to contact the guest 
editors of the issue: Inderjeet Mani (inderjeet.mani at gmail.com) and 
Philippe Muller (philippe.muller at irit.fr)

Contributions (around 25 pages, PDF format) must be uploaded at 
http://tal_53_2.sciencesconf.org/

Style sheets are available for download on the Web site of the journal : 
http://www.atala.org/English-style-files

The journal only publishes original contributions in French or in English.

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