Call for Participation - 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications

Tue Mar 8 18:05:07 UTC 2005

***** Call for Participation *****

2nd ACL-SIGSEM  Workshop on The Linguistic Dimensions 
of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics 
Formalisms and Applications 

University of Essex - Colchester,  United Kingdom.

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Workshop date:    April, 19th-21st, 2005
Workshop website: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~avill/Prep05.html
Registration now open. 
Early Registration Deadline: March, 19th 
Late Registration Deadline: April, 8th
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To register for the workshop, go to 
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~avill/registration1.html

WORKSHOP OVERVIEW:

Recently, 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. Selected papers of this workshop are now 
planned to be published by Kluwer in a special volume 
("Computational Linguistics Dimensions of the Syntax and the 
Semantics of Prepositions" Patrick Sain-Dizier (ed.), forthcoming).

The aim of the second 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.

REGISTRATION

Information on registration can be found at: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~avill/registration1.html

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Anne Abeille (Université Paris 7, France) 
Doug Arnold (University of Essex, UK) 
Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) 
Colin J Bannard (University of Edinburgh, UK) 
Luc Baronian (Stanford University, USA) 
John Beavers (Stanford University, USA) 
Bob Borsley (University of Essex, UK) 
Harry Bunt (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) 
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy) 
Markus Egg (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) 
Sonja Eisenbeiss (University of Essex, UK) 
Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA) 
Dan Flickinger (Stanford University, USA) 
Frederik Fouvry (Saarland University, Germany) 
Anette Frank (DFKI, Germany) 
Daniele Godard (Université Paris 7, France) 
Sanda Harabagiu (University of Texas at Dallas) 
Julia Hockenmaier (University of Pennsylvania, USA) 
Tracy King (PARC, USA) 
Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany) 
Anna Korhonen (University of Cambridge, UK) 
Jonas Kuhn (University of Texas at Austin, USA) 
Ingrid Leung (University of Essex, UK) 
Alda Mari (CNRS / ENST Infres, France) 
Paola Merlo (University of Geneva, Switzerland) 
Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) 
Anna Papafragou (University of Delaware, USA) 
Steve Pulman (University of Oxford, UK) 
Henk van Riemsdijk (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) 
Louisa Sadler (University of Essex, UK) 
Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, France) 
Karin Kipper Schuler (University of Pennsylvania, USA) 
Advaith Siddharthan (Columbia University, USA) 
Melanie Siegel (DFKI, Germany) 
Hidetosi Sirai (Chukyo University, Japan) 
Andrew Spencer (University of Essex, UK) 
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK) 
Beata Trawinski (University of Tuebingen, Germany) 
Jesse Tseng (Loria, France) 
Aline Villavicencio (University of Essex, UK) - Workshop Chair 
Martin Volk (Stockholms Universitet, Sweden) 
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) 

PROGRAM

Day 1

13.50 - 14.00 - Opening Session

14.00 - 14.30 - Adpositions in Estonian Computational Syntax 
	Kaili Müürisep, Kadri Muischnek and Tiina Puolakainen
14.30 - 15.00 - Prepositions and complement selection 
	Jesse Tseng
15.00 - 15.30 - Preposition-Pronoun Contraction in Polish 
	Beata Trawinski

15.30 - 16.00 - Coffee Break

16.00 - 16.30 - Prepositions as abstract relations 
	Allan Ramsay
16.30 - 17.00 - Prepositions and event participants 
	Boban Arsenijevic
17.00 - 17.30 - The polysemy of "from" within the barrier verb 
construction 
	Christopher Phipps

Day 2

09.00 - 09.30 - Minor prepositions in nominal projections 
	Frank Van Eynde
09.30 - 10.00 - A Minimal Recursion Semantics Analysis of Locatives 
	Fredrik Jørgensen and Jan Tore Lønning
10.00 - 10.30 - Classification of Prepositional Senses for Deep Grammar 
Applications 
	Lars Hellan and Dorothee Beermann

10.30 - 11.00 - Coffee Break

11.00 - 11.30 - Spatial and temporal arguments of the preposition "uz" 
in Serbian 
	Tijana Asic
11.30 - 12.00 - Meaning of Japanese Spatial Nouns 
	Tokunaga Takenobu, Koyama Tomofumi and Saito Suguru
12.00 - 12.30 - B3D - A System for the Description and Calculation of 
Spatial Prepositions 
	Thorsten Reichelt and Etienne Verleih

12.30 - 14.00 - Lunch

14.00 - 15.00 - Invited Speaker - Paola Merlo - TBA
15.00 - 15.30 - Towards More Accurate PP Attachment even with Simple 
Algorithms 
	Brian Mitchell

15.30 - 16.00 - Coffee Break

16.00 - 16.30 - Cognitive Representations of Projective Prepositions 
	John Kelleher and Fintan Costello
16.30 - 17.00 - A context-dependent model of proximity in physically 
situated environments 
	Geert-Jan M. Kruijff and John Kelleher
17.00 - 17.30 Business Meeting

Workshop Dinner

Day 3

09.00 - 09.30 - Concept-Based Meaning Representation of Prepositions 
	Steffen Leo Hansen
09.30 - 10.00 -Reasoning with Prepositions within a Cooperative Question-Answering Framework 
	Farah Benamara
10.00 - 10.30 - Sense Disambiguation for Preposition 'with' 
	Chutima Boonthum,  Shunichi Toida and Irwin Levinstein

10.30 - 11.00 - Coffee Break

11.00 - 11.30 - An overview of PrepNet: abstract notions, frames and inferential patterns 
	Patrick Saint-Dizier
11.30 - 12.00 - The Preposition Project 
	Kenneth C. Litkowski and Orin Hargraves

12.00 - 13.30 - Lunch

13.30 - 14.00 - Looking for Prepositional Verbs in Corpus Data 
      Timothy Baldwin
14.00 - 14.30 - The Extraction of Determinerless PPs 
	Leonoor van der Beek
14.30 - 15.00 - Classifying Verb Particle Constructions by Verb Arguments 
	Jon Patrick and Jeremy Fletcher

15.00 - 15.30 - Coffee Break

15.30 - 16.00 - Teaching a robot spatial expressions 
	Simon Dobnik, Paul Newman, Stephen Pulman and Alastair Harrison 
16.00 - 16.30 - An empirical testing of Levelt's (1984/1996) Principle of Canonical Orientation 
	Emile van der Zee, Karen Walker
16.30 - 17.00 - Closing Session

CONTACT

For inquiries, please e-mail prep05 at essex.ac.uk .

Looking forward to welcoming you at Essex in April.

Aline Villavicencio (University of Essex, UK) - Workshop Chair 
Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany)