Deadline Extended - 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions

[Valia Kordoni]

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Please note: Extended Deadline!!!

Due to several requests, the deadline has been extended to the 20th of
January 2005

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Second ACL-SIGSEM  Workshop on
The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and
their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications.

April 19th-21st, 2005, University of Essex, UK

Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL's Special Interest Group in Computational
Semantics.

In the  linguistic  and  computational  linguistic
communities,  much of the effort has been devoted
to the  understanding of  the syntax and semantics
of verbs and nouns. On the other hand, prepositions,
partly due to their very  polysemic  nature and the
difficulty  of identifying (cross-)linguistic
regularities, have received much less attention.

Recently, however, there has been a growing awareness
of the difficulties posed by prepositions and the
importance of providing adequate means of capturing
them, for many different applications. Several projects
have now focused on the understanding of certain aspects
of prepositions from perspectives such as Artificial
Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP),
psycholinguistics and ethnolinguistics. For instance,
some research has concentrated on spatial or temporal
aspects of prepositions, and their cross-linguistic
differences. Several investigations have also been
carried out on quite diverse languages, emphasizing,
for example, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts
or the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations.
These observations cover in general a small group of
closely related prepositions. The semantic characterization
of prepositions has also motivated the emergence of a
few dedicated logical frameworks and reasoning procedures.

Languages like English have phrasal verbs, and these
combinations of verbs and prepositions (in prepositional
verbs or verb-particle constructions), have also been the
subject of considerable effort, going from techniques for
their automatic extraction from corpora, to methods for
the determination of their semantics.  Other languages,
like Romance languages or Hindi, either incorporate the
preposition or include it in the prepositional phrase. All
these configurations are semantically as well as syntactically
of much interest. In NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have
attracted a lot of attention, with different machine learning
techniques having been employed with varying degrees of success.

In this context, a successful workshop on prepositions was
held in Toulouse, in September 2003, with papers presenting
research in a wide variety of topics, examining prepositions
in languages like French, English, German and Japanese, some
from a more computational approach and others more linguistic.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers
working on prepositions from a variety of backgrounds, such
as linguistics, NLP, AI and psycholinguistics, providing a
forum for discussing, among others, the syntax, semantics,
description, representation and computational applications
of prepositions, with the ultimate aim to advance the
state-of-the-art, identify challenges, and promote future
collaborations among researchers interested in the different
aspects of prepositions.

Submissions

We welcome papers describing original work on prepositions,
preferably that can inform computational applications. We
especially encourage submissions on the following topics:

-Aspects of the syntax and semantics of prepositions:
prepositions in alternations, syntactic and semantic
restrictions. General syntactic-semantic principles.
Postpositions or other equivalent markers (e.g. case).
Prepositions in constructions (phrasal verbs,
determinerless PPs, etc)

-Polysemy of prepositions, identification and classification
of preposition senses, contrastive uses, metaphorical uses,
semantic and cognitive foundations for prepositions.

-Descriptions: prepositions in lexical resources (WordNet,
Framenet), productive versus collocations uses, multi-lingual
descriptions (mismatches, incorporation, divergences),
prepositions and thematic roles.

-Applications: dealing with prepositions in applications
e.g. for Machine Translation, Information extraction,
Language Generation.

-Representation of Prepositions: prepositions in knowledge
bases, cognitive or logic-based formalisms for the description
of the semantics of prepositions (in isolation, and
in composition/confrontation with the verb and the NP),
compositional semantics. Implications for AI, KR.

-Prepositions in reasoning procedures: how different
kinds of preposition provide distinct challenges to a
reasoning system and how they can be handled.

-Cognitive dimensions of prepositions: how different kinds
of prepositions are acquired/interpreted/represented, in
terms of human and/or computational processing.

Submissions should not exceed 8 pages and they must be in
.ps or .pdf formats. The 12 point Times New Roman font is
preferred, leave about 2.5 cm margins on both sides. More
precise formatting instructions will be given for final
versions, since a book publication is under preparation.
Papers must be sent in electronic form to: prep05 at essex.ac.uk.

Deadlines

Submission deadline:     January 20th, 2005
Notification to authors: Feb 19th, 2005
Final paper due:         March 19th, 2005

Registration:

Registration fees will be kept as low as possible.

Programme Committee:

Anne Abeille (Universit  Paris 7, France)
Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Harry Bunt (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy)
Markus Egg (Saarland University, Germany)
Sonja Eisenbeiss (University of Essex, UK)
Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA)
Anette Frank (DFKI, Germany)
Daniele Godard (Universit  Paris 7, France)
Tracy King (PARC, USA)
Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany)
Paola Merlo (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Anna Papafragou (University of Delaware, USA)
Henk van Riemsdijk (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
Louisa Sadler (University of Essex, UK)
Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, France)
Hidetosi Sirai (Chukyo University, Japan)
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Aline Villavicencio (University of Essex, UK) - Workshop Chair
Clare Voss (Army Research Laboratory, USA)
Tom Wasow (Stanford University, USA)
Emile van der Zee (University of Lincoln, UK)
Joost Zwarts (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

Contacts:

Submissions and inquiries : prep05 at essex.ac.uk

Local organizing committee :

Aline Villavicencio (workshop chair)
Louisa Sadler
Valia Kordoni

WEB site:  http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~avill/Prep05.html