[Corpora] [Corpora-List] CfP: Special Issue of the Computational Linguistics journal on Formal Distributional Semantics

Fri Oct 31 10:49:31 UTC 2014

Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Formal Distributional Semantics
1st Call for Papers

* Submission deadline: April 1st 2015 *

Call for Papers
---------------

The semantics of natural language consists of complex phenomena
encompassing functional aspects such as quantification (e.g. "the cat" vs.
"a cat") and conceptual aspects related to word meaning (e.g. "cat" vs.
"animal"; "visit Boston" vs. "visit a friend"). No existing theory of
meaning accounts for both aspects, and existing approaches are typically
biased towards one or the other. For instance, formal semantics focuses on
functional aspects, providing a systematic treatment of compositionality
through a clear syntax-semantics interface -- at the expense of lexical
semantics. Distributional, or vector-space, semantics (Turney & Pantel,
2010), on the other hand, excels at lexical semantics phenomena ranging
from word similarity to categorization, and it has recently made progress
towards the formalisation of certain aspects of composition (Baroni 2013);
however, functional aspects remain mostly unaccounted for.

Because of the complementary strengths of the two approaches, the
computational linguistics community has started investigating proposals for
an overarching architecture, combining formal and distributional semantics
(e.g. Coecke et al., 2011; Erk, 2013; Lewis and Steedman 2013; Baroni et
al., 2014). This effort holds the promise of significantly advancing the
state of the art, as it is developing a model of semantics that accounts
for both functional and conceptual aspects of meaning. However, given the
fundamentally different nature of formal and distributional semantics, the
enterprise poses great challenges from both a theoretical and an
engineering point of view. The aim of this special issue is to explore the
boundaries of a formal distributional semantics, by proposing relevant
computational accounts of meaning and applying the corresponding frameworks
to specific linguistic phenomena.

Topics
------

For this special issue, we solicit full-length article submissions
describing original research on any aspect of formal distributional
semantics integrating a computational perspective. Possible topics include,
but are not limited to:

- Theoretical questions: What is meaning in formal distributional
semantics, and how well do computational models simulate the relevant
theories? How can distributional representations be related to the
traditional components of a semantics for natural languages, especially
reference and truth? Is similarity (the chief notion in distributional
semantics) at odds with inference (one of the testbeds of formal
semantics), or can it support it?

- Framework issues: Should a framework be developed that encompasses both
formal and distributional semantics in a single formalism (Baroni et al.,
2014), or should the two approaches be kept separated and linked via
systematic interactions (Lewis and Steedman 2013; Garrette et al., 2014)?
How do different frameworks fare in standard computational semantics
benchmarks (RTE, STS, etc.)? What further tasks and datasets can guide the
development of comprehensive computational semantic frameworks?

- Linguistic phenomena: Can formal distributional semantics account for
known phenomena? Can it shed new light on old puzzles? Can it handle newly
observed phenomena? How does that impact Computational Linguistics /
Natural Language Processing as a field?

Submission Date
---------------

Submission of full articles: April 1st 2015

Submission Instructions
-----------------------

Articles submitted to this special issue must adhere to the Computational
Linguistics Style Guidelines. The submission guidelines can be found on the
CL web site (http://cljournal.org/submissions.html). As in regular
submissions to the journal, paper submissions should be made through the CL
electronic submission system.

Guest Editors
-------------

Gemma Boleda

    Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
    gemma.boleda AT upf.edu

Aurelie Herbelot

    University of Cambridge, UK
    aurelie.herbelot AT cantab.net

References
----------

Baroni, M. (2013). Composition in distributional semantics. Language and
Linguistics Compass, 7:511–522.

Baroni, M., Bernardi, R., and Zamparelli, R. (2014). Frege in space: A
program for compositional distributional semantics. Linguistic Issues in
Language Technology, 9.

Coecke, B., Sadrzadeh, M., and Clark, S. (2011). Mathematical foundations
for a compositional distributional model of meaning. Linguistic Analysis: A
Festschrift for Joachim Lambek, 36(1–4):345–384.

Erk, K. (2013). Towards a semantics for distributional representations. In
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Computational
Semantics (IWCS2013).

Garrette, D., Erk, K., and Mooney, R. (2014). A formal approach to linking
logical form and vector-space lexical semantics. In Bunt, H., Bos, J., and
Pulman, S., editors. Text, Speech and Language Technology: Computing
Meaning, 47:27-48. Springer.

Lewis, M. and Steedman, M. (2013). Combined Distributional and Logical
Semantics. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
1:179–192.

Turney, P. D. and Pantel, P. (2010). From frequency to meaning: Vector
space models of semantics. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research,
37:141–188.

-- 
Gemma Boleda
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
http://gboleda.utcompling.com
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