[Corpora-List] Call for Papers: 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

IMPORTANT DATES

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

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

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.

SCOPE AND TOPICS

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

SUBMISSIONS

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

mail : Cécile Fabre <cecile.fabre[arobas]univ-tlse2.fr>
mail : Tim Van de Cruys <Tim.Van-De-Cruys[arobas]irit.fr>
Web : http://www.taln2013.org/atelier-de-semantique-distributionnelle/

-- 
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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