[Corpora-List] [CfP] IWCS 2013 Workshop: Towards a formal distributional semantics

[BOLEDA TORRENT, GEMMA]

    IWCS 2013 Workshop: Towards a formal distributional semantics

		   March 19, 2013, Potsdam, Germany

			FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Over the last 50 years, model-theoretic semantics has made great
progress in formalising various phenomena of human language,
especially those related to the compositionality of meaning. It has
also left some aspects largely unexamined: in particular, those
concerned with the meaning of content words, which have been the
concern of lexical semantics. Distributional or vector-space models of
meaning, in turn, successfully model many lexical semantic phenomena,
but, despite recent efforts, still do not account for compositionality
or the role of function words.

This workshop aims to foster the integration of formal and
distributional semantics, building on their complementary strengths to
produce better models of meaning in natural language. Its focus is on
giving formal semantics a better handle on lexical semantics, while
still preserving the aspects that have made it useful: for instance,
the tight syntax-semantics interface for phenomena such as
quantification, scope, modification and semantic roles, the notions of
truth and extension, and the modeling of inference, at the level of
both lexical items and propositions. Beyond the goal of better
embedding lexical information in formal semantic representations, we
encourage the investigation of the probabilistic aspects of
distributional models in order to handle cases where truth theory
falters (e.g., truth of generic statements).  More generally, the
workshop is open to new ideas about aspects of meaning beyond the
level of truth values, and on how distributional semantics may
contribute to the notion of intension.


			  TOPICS OF INTEREST

Contributions can take the form of theoretical proposals, descriptions
of a particular phenomenon, or experimental investigations. We
specifically welcome collaborations between researchers in formal
semantics and computational linguistics. We look for contributions on
the following topics (list not exhaustive), always from the
perspective of integrating formal and distributional semantics:

* Inferential properties of language both at the propositional and
lexical level (e.g., how to account for entailment as licensed by
different types of adjectives?).

* Truth theory, reference, and extension (e.g., to what extent is
there a relation between distributional representations built from
corpora and models, which exhaustively enumerate individuals in a
particular set? How could this be used to tie distributional
representations of words with specific objects in real or virtual
scenarios?).

* Intension (e.g., can distributional models provide an alternative or
complementary account to the definition of intension in terms of
possible world semantics?).

* Syntax-semantics interface (e.g., composition with different types
of verbal arguments).

* Morphology-semantics interface (e.g., exploring the possibility to
build distributional models of derivational and inflectional
morphology, for instance to capture the semantic difference between
singular and plural forms of nouns).

* Representation and mechanics of logical operators (e.g., how to
account for negation, not only in propositions but also with regard to
its effects on the lexicon; how to deal with coordination at the
various levels at which it applies; how to deal with nominal and VP
quantifiers?).

* Semantic representation at the lexical and constituent / sentential
level (e.g., what kind of representations do we need to retain lexical
information at the level of the sentence?).


			   INVITED SPEAKERS

TBA


			 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicholas Asher (Université Paul Sabatier / The University of Texas at Austin)
Marco Baroni (University of Trento)
David Beaver (The University of Texas at Austin)
Raffaella Bernardi (University of Trento)
Stephen Clark (University of Cambridge)
Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge)
Katrin Erk (The University of Texas at Austin)
Mohan Ganesalingam (University of Cambridge)
Ed Grefenstette (University of Oxford)
Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha (University of Cambridge)
Sebastian Pado (Universitaet Heidelberg)
Manfred Pinkal (Saarland University)
Stephen Pulman (University of Oxford)
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (University of Oxford)
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh)
Stefan Thater (Saarland University)
Jason Utt (University of Stuttgart)
Eva Maria Vecchi (University of Trento)


			 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Aurelie Herbelot, Universitaet Potsdam
Roberto Zamparelli, University of Trento
Gemma Boleda, University of Texas at Austin


			      SUBMISSION

Papers should describe original research and must not exceed 10 pages.
Authors are requested to follow the style guidelines of the IWCS main
conference (available at
http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/iwcs2013/author_information.html).

Papers should be electronically submitted in PDF format via the START
system at https://www.softconf.com/iwcs2013/TFDS2012/. Please contact
the organisers if you have problems using START.

Submissions may be accepted either as a full oral presentation or as
poster. All accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings.


                            IMPORTANT DATES

November 30 2012: submission deadline.
January 4 2013: notification of acceptance.
January 25 2013: final version of papers due.


			       CONTACT

For any questions, please write to tfds2013 at gmail.com.

-- 
Gemma Boleda
The University of Texas at Austin
http://gboleda.utcompling.com

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