Prague: Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions, at ACL 2007 -- CFP

[Valia Kordoni]

Apologies for multiple postings

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		     CALL for PAPERS

	 Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions 
		     28th June, 2007
		  Prague, Czech Republic

http://csserver.ucd.ie/~fintanc/acl2007/prepositions.html

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Workshop Description

The Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions will be 
hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, the 45th Annual 
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
and will take place on June 28th in Prague, Czech Republic. 


Background

Prepositions, postpositions and other adpositions have 
received a considerable amount of interest in recent 
years, due to their importance in computational tasks. 
For instance, in NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have 
attracted a lot of attention, and different machine 
learning techniques have been employed with varying 
success. Researchers from linguistics, artificial 
intelligence and psycholinguistics have examined spatial 
and temporal aspects of prepositions,their cross-
linguistic differences, monolingual and cross-linguistic
contrasts, the role of prepositions in syntactic 
alternations and their semantics in situated dialog. In 
languages like English and German, phrasal verbs have 
also been the subject of considerable research, ranging 
from the development of techniques for their automatic 
extraction from corpora to methods for determining their 
semantics. In other languages, like Romance languages or 
Hindi, the focus has been either on the incorporation of 
the preposition or its inclusion in the prepositional 
phrase. All these configurations are important both 
semantically and syntactically in natural language 
understanding and processing. 

Building on the success of three previous workshops on 
prepositions (held in Toulouse, 2003, Colchester, 2005 
and Sydney, 2006), the aim of the fourth ACL-SIGSEM 
Workshop on Prepositions is to bring together researchers
from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the syntax, 
semantics, description, representation and 
cross-linguistic aspects of prepositions. We intend this 
workshop to promote collaboration among researchers 
interested in different aspects of prepositions, and hope
that it will advance understanding of these important 
components of language.


Topics

Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following 
topics: 

+ Multilingual & crosslinguistic aspects of prepositions:
 - multilingual and contrastive descriptions (mismatches,
   incorporation, divergences) 
 - prepositions in human and machine translation (for 
   example, issues of automatic word alignment) 
 - prepositions in parallel corpus annotation (for 
   example, sense disambiguation using parallel texts)
 - prepositions in cross-language information retrieval 

+ Description and representation of prepositions: 
 - prepositions in lexical resources (including WordNet, 
   Framenet, and other ontologies) 
 - prepositions in syntactically annotated corpora  
   (Treebanks), productive versus collocation uses, 
   prepositions and thematic roles 
 - Word-sense disambiguation of prepositions (as in the 
   SemEval preposition task to run at ACL-2007) 

+ Applications: 
 - using prepositions in applications such as machine
   translation, grammar and style checking systems 
 - information extraction or language generation, 
   situated dialog systems (robot interfaces, embodied
   conversational agents)
 
+ Cognitive dimensions of prepositions: 
 - how different kinds of prepositions are 
   acquired/interpreted/represented in human cognition 
 - how different kinds of preposition provide distinct 
   challenges to a reasoning system and how they can be 
   handled

 
Submissions

Authors are invited to submit either full papers or 
short papers on original, unpublished work in the topic 
area of this workshop. Full papers should be up to 8 
pages in length; they should emphasize completed work 
rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly 
the state of completion of the reported results. Where
appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be 
included. Short papers should be up to 6 pages in length;
they can describe work in progress rather than completed
work, or smaller-scale implementation/experimentation. 
Presentations for short papers will be proportionally
shorter than presentations for full papers. Submissions 
will be judged on correctness, originality, technical 
strength, significance and relevance to the workshop, and
interest to the attendees. 

Submissions should be formatted using the ACL 2007 
stylefiles without overt author and affiliation 
information and not exceeding 8 pages. The ACL stylefiles
are available at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles/ 

The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe 
PDF. Submission will be electronic, using the START paper
submission website. The submission deadline is March 
26th, 2007. The START submission page for this workshop 
is http://www.softconf.com/acl07/ACL07-WS11/submit.html  


Important Dates

Paper Submission deadline: March 26th, 2007 
Notification of acceptance: April 20th, 2007 
Camera-ready papers due: May 9th, 2007 
Workshop date: June 28th, 2007 


Organising Committee

Fintan Costello (University College Dublin, Ireland)
John Kelleher (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland)
Martin Volk (Stockholms Universitet, Sweden)

Address any queries regarding the workshop to: 

prepositions2007 at ucd.ie 


Programme Committee

Doug Arnold (University of Essex, UK) 
Boban Arsenijevic (University of Leiden, Netherlands) 
Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) 
Collin Baker (University of California Berkeley, USA) 
John Beavers (Stanford University, USA) 
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy) 
Markus Egg (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) 
Anette Frank (DFKI, Germany) 
Tracy Holloway King (PARC, USA) 
Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany) 
Ken Litkowski (CL Research, USA) 
Tom O'Hara (Convera Inc., USA) 
Hidetosi Sirai (Chukyo University, Japan) 
Beata Trawinski (University of Tübingen, Germany) 
Jesse Tseng (Loria, France) 
Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) 
Feiyu Xu (DFKI, Germany) 
Joost Zwarts (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)