2nd Call for Papers - Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions

[Valia Kordoni]

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 10th, 2005
Notification to authors: Feb 15th, 2005
Final paper due:         March 19th, 2005

Registration:

Registration fees will be kept as low as possible.


Programme Committee:

Anne Abeille (Université 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 (Université 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