[HPSG-L] Call for papers: Semantic annotation at LREC 2020

[Harry Bunt]

First Call for Papers


ISA-16, 16th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation

Full-day workshop at at LREC 2020, Marseille, 12 May 2020

Submission date: February 25, 2020

Website: https://sigsem.uvt.nl/isa16/


DESCRIPTION:
ISA-16 is the sixteenth edition of a series of joint workshops of the ACL Special Interest Group in Semantics (SIGSEM) and the International Organisation for Standardisation ISO. The first workshop in this series took part in conjunction with the IWCS 2003 conference in Tilburg (Netherlands); the latest editions were held as part of LREC 2017 in Portoroz, of COLING 2018 in Santa Fé, and of IWCS 2019 in Gothenburg.

ISA-workshops bring together experts in the annotation of semantic information as expressed in text, speech, gestures, graphics, video, images, and in communicative behaviour where multiple modalities are combined. Examples of semantic annotation include the markup of events, time, space, dialogue acts, discourse relations, semantic roles, coreference, quantification phenomena, and other aspects of meaning for which the ISO organisation pursues the establishment and application of standardised annotation methods and representation schemes, in order to support the creation of interoperable semantic and pragmatic resources.

Besides a main track, ISA-16 will feature two specialised tracks, focused on (a) the annotation of quantification (and quantified modification) in natural language and (b) the design and representation of data structures for generating visualisations of linguistically represented objects, properties, and events. These topics relate to a recently started project on developing an ISO annotation standard for quantification (ISO/WD 24617-12) and a proposal for developing an ISO standard for the representation of visual information ('VoxML').

Both specialised tracks will consist of a pre-conference on-line portion and an on-site portion during the ISA-16 workshop. For the pre-conference on-line portion participants will be invited to submit their commented annotations and representations for a batch of example items that will be provided with documentation and guidelines of the envisaged annotation and representation schemes.

Concerning the quantification track: comparisons will be made to recent representations for quantification and scope in the Groningen MeaningBank, as well as to efforts to represent quantifier scope with AMR annotation. Material from diverse sources will be supplied for annotation, analysis and identification of problematic issues. The results, specific issues that emerge in the process, and comparisons will be discussed in the on-site part of the workshop.

Concerning the 'VoxML'/visual information track: for the pre-conference on-line work, we will supply a batch of images of objects and people participating in activities and events. There will be no captions provided with the images. There will be a vocabulary of objects, attributes, actions, and relations, with which annotators need to create an annotation of the image, as exhaustively as possible. We provide guidelines for how annotation should be performed.

For both tracks, annotators should attempt to follow the guidelines and stay within the provided vocabulary where possible, but are permitted to go outside if required.  In this case, we ask that they submit a brief summary of and justification for their additions.

We will provide feedback on submitted annotations. We will select certain annotation submissions for spotlight presentations. These are to be given during the on-site portion of the workshop and will focus on the results of the annotation exercise. This will be followed by a discussion of the entire annotation effort, lessons learned (problems, gaps, suitability of results for ML, automated generation, etc), and the adequacy and expressiveness of the representation language.


TOPICS OF INTEREST:
Topics for submissions to the main track of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

* methodological aspects of semantic annotation
* experiments in semantic annotation
* context in semantic annotation
* applications of semantic annotation
* generating scenes from annotated text
* events and participants in annotation and visualisation
* uncertainty and ambiguity in annotations
* combining annotations from different schemes
* semantic annotation, interpretation, and inference
* granularity in annotation schemes
* evaluation and comparison of semantic annotations
* semantic annotation in specialised domains
* issues in the modelling of semantic information in specific areas, such as:
 - events, states, processes, circumstances, facts
 - space, motion events and 3D objects as participants
 - modality, factuality, polarity and negation
 - quantification and modification
 - relations in discourse and dialogue
 - referential relations
 - attribution, sentiment, attitudes, and emotions


SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Three types of submission are invited:

- Research papers, describing original research in the area of semantic annotation; these can be either long (6-8 pages,
  with additional pages for references) or short (3-5 pages, plus references);
- Project notes, describing recent, ongoing or planned projects involving semantic annotation (2-4 pages including references;
- Commented annotations/representations for the special tracks.

Submission of papers is in PDF form through the ISA-16 submission site: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/ISA16/.
All submitted papers should be formatted using the LREC 2020 stylesheet -- see the LREC Author's Kit: https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/.


LANGUAGE RESOURCES:
Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility,  when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository.  This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org<http://www.islrn.org>), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers  will be offered at submission time.


IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission deadline: February 25, 2020
Notification of acceptance: March 16, 2020
Camera-ready material: April 1, 2020

ISA-16 Workshop: May 12, 2020

The two specialised tracks will each have their own detailed time schedule, in particular for their on-line pre-conference part (t.b.a.)


ORGANISING COMMITTEE:
Harry Bunt (chair)
Nancy Ide
Kiyong Lee
Volha Petukhova
James Pustejovsky
Laurent Romary


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
Lasha Abzianidze
Jan Alexandersson
James Allen
Ron Artstein
Johan Bos
Harry Bunt (chair)
Jae-Woong Choe
Robin Cooper
Ludivine Crible
David DeVault
Simon Dobnik
Jens Edlund
Alex Fang
Robert Gaizauskas
Kallirroi Georgila
Jan Hajic
Koiti Hasida
Nancy Ide
Elisabetta Jezek
Nikhil Krishnaswamy
Kiyong Lee
Paul Mc Kevitt
Adam Meyers
Roser Morante
Philippe Muller
Rainer Osswald
Volha Petukhova
Massimo Poesio
Eric Postma
Laurent Prevot
James Pustejovsky
Livio Robaldo
Laurent Romary
Ielka van der Sluis
Manfred Stede
Matthew Stone
Thora Tenbrink
Thorsten Trippel
Sara Tonelli
Carl Vogel
Menno van Zaanen
Annie Zaenen
Heike Zinsmeister


MORE INFORMATION
For up to date information see the workshop page at https://sigsem.uvt.nl/isa16/; for any questions contact the workshop chair Harry Bunt (mailto:harry.bunt at uvt.nl).




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