[Corpora-List] CFP: Current Issues in Distributional Semantics (SemDis 2013)

[Nabil Hathout]

Call for Papers

SemDis 2013: Current Issues in Distributional Semantics

Workshop associated with the 20th TALN conference

June 21th, 2013
Sables d'Olonne, France

In the course of the last two decades, significant progress has been
made with regard to the automatic extraction of semantic knowledge
from large-scale text corpora. Most work relies on Harris'
distributional hypothesis of meaning, which states that words that
appear within the same contexts tend to be semantically related. This
principle has inspired a substantial amount of research - mainly for
English but also for other languages - and several survey articles
have recently helped to consolidate the concepts and procedures used
for distributional computations (Sahlgren, 2006; Turney and Pantel,
2010; Baroni and Lenci, 2010). In recent years, the distributional
semantic approach has benefited from the availability of massive
amounts of textual data and increased computational power, allowing
for the application of these methods on a large scale. Still, a number
of research topics remain open, with regard to the construction, the
evaluation and the application of the semantic information that is
induced by these methods.

Regarding the construction of distributional semantic resources, the
nature of the corpus is a key issue, and its impact on the results
requires further investigation. Today's trend is to use massive
corpora, moving away from Harris' initial hypothesis which was based
on the analysis of small, well-defined, and specialized corpora. A
second important issue relates to the modeling of semantic
compositionality within a distributional framework, such that not only
individual words but also larger phrases can be taken into account
(Mitchell et Lapata, 2008; Baroni & Zamparelli, 2010; Grefenstette &
Sadrzadeh, 2011).

Relations between words tend to be very diverse. Regarding the
evaluation of distributional models, we need a better understanding of
the nature of semantic relations (synonymous, associative,
analogous, ...) induced by these models, and the impact of the
distributional parameters on the induced relations (Sahlgren, 2006;
Peirsman & Geeraerts, 2009). Secondly, large corpora generate
resources so large that they are very difficult to explore and
grasp. The manipulation of graphs within visualization systems
suitable for their exploration can improve our knowledge on their
content and structure.

Finally, distributional resources are useful for a large number
applications, such as information retrieval, summarization, text
segmentation, etc. Distributional features have been incorporated into
a wide range of NLP tasks, such as named entity classification and
paraphrasing (Kotlerman et al. 2010; Jonnalagadda et
al. 2012). Linguists could equally benefit from these distributional
approaches, as they provide a means to conduct large-scale studies of
the semantic relations that may be discovered from large corpora.

We welcome papers that focus on any of the aforementioned topics, and
in particular:

- the construction of distributional semantic resources
- the nature of corpora within distributional semantics
- compositionality within a distributional framework
- the use of distributional resources for linguistic analysis
- the induction of specific semantic relations
- the use of distributional methods within NLP tasks
- optimization techniques for distributional computations
- visualization techniques for word spaces

Important dates

- Paper submission: March 29th, 2013
- Acceptance notification: April 19th, 2013
- Final version:  May 2nd, 2013

Papers should be submitted in PDF format through Easychair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semdis2013

Papers should be written in French or English, should count between 12
and 14 pages, and need to conform to the TALN style sheet, which is
available on the conference web site 
(http://www.taln2013.org/soumettre/). The selection criteria are those
defined for the main conference.

Organizing Committee

Cécile Fabre		CLLE, Toulouse, France
Nabil Hathout		CLLE, Toulouse, France
Philippe Muller		IRIT, Toulouse, France
Tim Van de Cruys	IRIT, Toulouse, France

Program Committee

Stergos Afantenos	IRIT, Toulouse, France
Yves Bestgen 		UCL/CECL, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium
Marie Candito		ALPAGE, Paris, France
Eric de la Clergerie	ALPAGE, Paris, France
Cécile Fabre		CLLE, Toulouse, France
Olivier Ferret		CEA-LIST, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France
Nabil Hathout		CLLE, Toulouse, France
Philippe Muller		IRIT, Toulouse, France
Adeline Nazarenko	LIPN, Paris, France
Pascale Sébillot	IRISA, Rennes, France
Ludovic Tanguy		CLLE, Toulouse, France
Agnès Tutin		LIDILEM, Grenoble, France
Tim Van de Cruys	IRIT, Toulouse, France
Virginie Zampa		LIDILEM, Grenoble, France

Contact: Cécile Fabre (cecile.fabre at univ-tlse2.fr) and Tim Van de Cruys 
(tim.vandecruys at irit.fr)

-- 
Nabil Hathout
CLLE-ERSS (UMR 5263) CNRS & Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail
Maison de la Recherche.  F-31058 Toulouse cedex 9
Tél. (+33) 561-503-603   Fax (+33) 561-504-677

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