Call for Papers for the Special Issue of Computational Linguistics on Prepositions in Applications

[Valia Kordoni]

			Call for Papers for
	      Special Issue of Computational Linguistics
		on Prepositions in Applications


		SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31, 2006

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GUEST EDITORS

Aline Villavicencio
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Valia Kordoni
Saarland University and DFKI GmbH, Germany

Timothy Baldwin
University of Melbourne, Australia and NICTA Victoria Research Labs

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CONTENTS:

1. THE SPECIAL ISSUE
2. TOPICS OF INTEREST
3. SUBMISSION INFORMATION

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1. THE SPECIAL ISSUE

The special issue will concentrate on the theoretical aspects of
computational research on prepositions. Due to their importance
in computational tasks prepositions, as well as prepositional
phrases and markers of various sorts, have received a considerable
amount of attention and occupied a central position in research
in Computational Linguistics (CL) and Language Technology (LT),
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP),
as well as Computational Psycholinguistics (CP).  Researchers
from these backgrounds and CL-related disciplines have looked
at the role of prepositions in shallow and deep language processing.

Despite increasing awareness of the importance of prepositions in NLP tasks,
very little progress has been made in systematically describing preposition
semantics. Notably, the only account of the lexical semantics of
prepositions
in resources such as WordNet, FrameNet and PropBank is indirect, in that
they
feature in significant numbers within multiword expressions or as frame
elements. If prepositions are to be incorporated into such resources as
first-order entities, a large number of issues must be resolved such as how
to
taxonomically deconstruct the spatial semantics of prepositions, how to
delineate preposition senses, and how to tease apart preposition and verb
semantics in phrasal verbs. Our expectation is that such questions will be
guided by careful analysis of what semantic distinctions and
representational
granularity are required in a range of applications, which will in turn be
guided by such research as the representation of prepositions within
implemented grammars, crosslingual preposition semantics, machine perception
and visualisation of preposition semantics, and computational models of the
human processing of prepositions.

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2. TOPICS OF INTEREST

For the proposed special issue we specifically invite submissions
that bring a theoretical basis to research on prepositions in lexical
resources and NLP tasks of the sort described above. In particular, we
focus on the syntactic and semantic treatment of productive and
collocation uses of prepositional phrases and markers in resources such as
WordNet and FrameNet, and the utilization of such resources in NLP tasks,
such as Machine Translation, IE/IR and QA.

* Extraction of Prepositions:
There has been considerable research into extraction of prepositions
and related constructions (e.g. phrasal verbs). Papers which describe
the extraction of these constructions, including their subcategorisation
frames and alternation patterns, as are necessary for the semi-automatic
extension of lexical resources are particularly welcome.

* Representation of Prepositions in Lexical Resources:
We encourage papers describing the challenges of providing adequate
representation of prepositions and related constructions such as would be
generally applicable in NLP applications.

* Prepositions in Applications:
We invite papers that discuss the role of prepositions in NLP tasks,
focusing specifically on what insights various applications offer
for lexical resource building, what particular needs different
application areas have (e.g. what an ideal prepositional lexical
resource would be like), necessary extensions to existing resources,
and how prepositional lexical resources of various types could enhance
performance over a given task like MT, IR, QA and multi-modal systems.

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3. SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Deadline for paper submissions: July 31, 2006.

All submissions will be subject to the normal peer review process
for this journal. Submissions are to be done electronically in
pdf format, by sending the paper to the editors at the following email
address:

cl-prep at unimelb.edu.au

Papers must conform to the Computational Linguistics specifications,
which are available at:

       http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/compling/style.html .

Any initial queries should be addressed to:

cl-prep at unimelb.edu.au


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Website: http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~avillavicencio/prep-cl.html