1st 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)
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)
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