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

[Valia Kordoni]

***** 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 (Universit=E9 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 (Universit=E9 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 M=FC=FCrisep, 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 J=F8rgensen and Jan Tore L=F8nning
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
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)