19.1426, Calls: Computational Ling/UK; Computational Ling/Italy

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LINGUIST List: Vol-19-1426. Mon Apr 28 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.1426, Calls: Computational Ling/UK; Computational Ling/Italy

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1)
Date: 28-Apr-2008
From: Sabine Schulte im Walde < schulte at ims.uni-stuttgart.de >
Subject: Coling 2008 Workshop on Human Judgements in CL 

2)
Date: 26-Apr-2008
From: Johan Bos < bos at di.uniroma1.it >
Subject: Semantics in Text Processing

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:17:16
From: Sabine Schulte im Walde [schulte at ims.uni-stuttgart.de]
Subject: Coling 2008 Workshop on Human Judgements in CL
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Full Title: Coling 2008 Workshop on Human Judgements in CL 
Short Title: hjcl 

Date: 23-Aug-2008 - 23-Aug-2008
Location: Manchester, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Sabine Schulte im Walde
Meeting Email: schulte at ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Web Site: http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/hjcl/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 05-May-2008 

Meeting Description:

Coling 2008 workshop on human judgements in Computational Linguistics

Manchester, UK
23 August 2008 

http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/hjcl/ 

Final Call for Papers

Deadline for submission: 5 May 2008

Workshop Description:
Human judgements play a key role in the development and the assessment of
linguistic resources and methods in Computational Linguistics. They are commonly
used in the creation of lexical resources and corpus annotation, and also in the
evaluation of automatic approaches to linguistic tasks. Furthermore,
systematically collected human judgements provide clues for research on
linguistic issues that underlie the judgement task, providing insights
complementary to introspective analysis or evidence gathered from corpora.

We invite papers about experiments that collect human judgements for
Computational Linguistic purposes, with a particular focus on linguistic tasks
that are controversial from a theoretical point of view (e.g., some coding tasks
having to do with semantics or pragmatics). Such experimental tasks are usually
difficult to design and interpret, and they typically result in mediocre
inter-rater reliability. We seek both broad methodological papers discussing
these issues, and specific case studies.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Experimental design:
- Which types of experiments support the collection of human judgements? Can any
general guidelines be defined? Is there a preference between lab-based
experiments and web-based experiments?
- Which experimental methodologies support controversial tasks? For instance,
does underspecification help? What is the role of ambiguity and polysemy in
these tasks?
- What is the appropriate level of granularity for the category labels?
- What kind of participants should be used (e.g., expert vs. non-expert), how is
it affected by the type of experiment, and how should the experiment design be
varied according to this issue?
- How much and which kind of information (examples, context, etc.) should be
provided to the experiment participants? When does information turn into a bias?
- Is it possible to design experiments that are useful for both computational
linguistics and psycholinguistics? What do the two research areas have in
common? What are the differences?

Analysis and interpretation of experimental data:
- How important is inter-annotator agreement in human judgement collection
experiments? How is it best measured for complex tasks?
- What other quantitative tools are useful for analysing human judgement
collection experiments?
- What qualitative methods are useful for analysing human judgement collection
experiments? Which questions should be asked? Is it possible to formulate
general guidelines?
- How is the analysis similar to psycholinguistic analysis? How is it different?
- How do results from all of the methods above affect the development of
annotation instructions and procedures?

Application of experiment insights:
- How do the experimental data fit into the general resource-creating process?
- How to modify the set of labels and the criteria or guidelines for the
annotation task according to the experimental results? How to avoid circularity
in this process?
- How can the data be used to refine or modify existing theoretical proposals?
- More generally, under what conditions can the obtained judgements be applied
to research questions?

Organisers:
Ron Artstein, University of Southern California
Gemma Boleda, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Frank Keller, University of Edinburgh
Sabine Schulte im Walde, Universität Stuttgart

Keynote Speaker:
Martha Palmer, University of Colorado

Programme Committee:
Toni Badia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra 
Marco Baroni, University of Trento 
Beata Beigman Klebanov, Northwestern University 
André Blessing, Universität Stuttgart
Chris Brew, Ohio State University 
Kevin Cohen, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center 
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago 
Katrin Erk, University of Texas at Austin 
Stefan Evert, University of Osnabrück 
Afsaneh Fazly, University of Toronto 
Alex Fraser, Universität Stuttgart 
Jesus Gimenez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya 
Roxana Girju, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Ed Hovy, University of Southern California 
Nancy Ide, Vassar College 
Adam Kilgarriff, University of Brighton 
Alexander Koller, University of Edinburgh 
Anna Korhonen, University of Cambridge 
Mirella Lapata, University of Edinburgh 
Diana McCarthy, University of Sussex 
Alissa Melinger, University of Dundee 
Paola Merlo, University of Geneva 
Sebastian Padó, Stanford University 
Martha Palmer, University of Colorado 
Rebecca Passonneau, Columbia University 
Massimo Poesio, University of Trento 
Sameer Pradhan, BBN Technologies 
Horacio Rodriguez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya 
Bettina Schrader, Universität Potsdam 
Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto 

Submission:
Deadline for the receipt of papers is 5 May 2008, 23:59 UTC. Submit your paper
via the submissions web page: http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/hjcl/submission.html

Submissions should be anonymous. Please submit only PDF files, 8 pages
long (including data, tables, figures, and references). We recommend to follow
the Coling 2008 style guidelines. Include a one-paragraph abstract of the entire
work (about 200 words). Accepted papers will appear in an on-line proceedings
volume.

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: 5 May 2008
Notification of acceptance: 10 June 2008
Camera-ready copy due: 1 July 2008
Workshop date: 23 August 2008



	
-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:17:24
From: Johan Bos [bos at di.uniroma1.it]
Subject: Semantics in Text Processing
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http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-1426.html&submissionid=176702&topicid=3&msgnumber=2 
	

Full Title: Semantics in Text Processing 
Short Title: STEP 2008 

Date: 22-Sep-2008 - 24-Sep-2008
Location: Venice, Italy, Italy 
Contact Person: Johan Bos
Meeting Email: bos at di.uniroma1.it
Web Site: http://project.cgm.unive.it/html/STEP2008/index.htm 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 09-May-2008 

Meeting Description:

Symposium on Semantics in Systems for Text Processing.
September 22-24, 2008 - Venice, Italy 

2nd Call for Papers: STEP 2008

Symposium on Semantics in Text Processing
http://project.cgm.unive.it/html/STEP2008/index.htm
September 22-24, 2008

Auditorium Santa Margherita
Venice (Italy)

Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL special interest group
on computational semantics

Motivation:
Thanks to both statistical approaches and finite state methods, natural language
processing (NLP), particularly in the area of robust, open-domain text
processing, has made considerable progress in the last couple of decades. It is
probably fair to say that NLP tools have reached satisfactory performance at the
level of syntactic processing, be the output structures chunks, phrase
structures, or dependency graphs. Therefore, the time seems ripe to extend the
state-of-the-art and consider deep semantic processing as a serious task in
wide-coverage NLP. This is a step that normally requires syntactic parsing, as
well as named entity recognition, anaphora resolution, thematic role labelling
and word sense disambiguation, as well as other lower levels of processing for
which reasonably good methods have already been developed. Accurate automatic
semantic interpretation of text is expected to benefit newly emerging areas
targetting semantic and pragmatic issues, such as affectivity and sentiment
analysis of texts, textual entailment, and consistency checking.

Workshop Scope:
The goal of the STEP workshop is to provide a forum for anyone active in
semantic processing of text to discuss innovative technologies, representation
issues, inference techniques, prototype implementations, and real applications.
The preferred processing targets are large quantities of texts - either
specialised domains, or open domains such as newswire text, blogs, and
wikipedia-like text. Implemented rather than theoretical work is emphasised in
STEP. In particular, relevant topics are:

- wide-coverage semantic/logical analysis of text
- computation and use of discourse relations
- use of lexical-conceptual and semantically related resources
- thematic role labelling in semantic representations
- word sense disambiguation in semantic representations
- implementations of specific semantic phenomena
- anaphora or ellipsis resolution in semantic representations
- implementations of sentiment analysis
- automatic detection of subjective and non-literal language
- acquisition of lexical knowledge and paraphrase from raw corpora
- background knowledge acquisition, representation, and selection
- semantic lexicons and ontologies for text interpretation
- learning semantic representations from raw text
- automated reasoning in the service of semantic analysis of text
- creation of gold standard meaning representations
- evaluation of semantic representations
- textual entailment and consistency checking
- systems that extract, represent or manipulate text meaning
- applications of semantic analysis in text processing

Applications inlude, but are not limited to, machine translation, text
understanding, question answering, summarisation, information extraction, and
the semantic web.


Shared Task: Comparing Semantic Representations
STEP 2008 will also feature a ''shared task'' to compare semantic
representations as output by state-of-the-art NLP systems. Participating systems
will be given a number of (small) texts, before the workshop.  The output of
these systems will be judged on a number of aspects by a panel of experts in the
field, during the workshop. Aim of the shared task is to discuss the feasibility
of a gold standard for deep semantic representations. Aim of the panel is to
identify a set of problematic and relevant issues for semantic evaluation. The
panel will reward the system with the most complete and accurate semantic
representation with a special prize. Preliminary dates for the Step Shared Task are:

Shared Task paper submission: June  6, 2008
Notification of acceptance: June 23, 2008
Release of test data: June 25, 2008
System's results due: July  4, 2008
Final version paper due: July 25, 2008
Workshop: Sept 22-24, 2008

To participate in the shared task, submit a paper containing (1) a system
description, (2) a description of the semantic formalism used by the system, and
(3) an authentic small text and the way it is analysed by the system. This text
should not exceed five sentences and 120 tokens. The test data for the shared
task will be composed out of all the texts submitted by the participants.

Shared task submissions should follow the workshop format for regular papers and
submission guidelines (see below), and will be published in the STEP 2008
proceedings. Please mark shared task paper submissions by specifying "shared
task" as one of the keywords. The final paper must include a discussion of the
system's performance on the shared task data.  Please contact Johan Bos
(bos at di.uniroma1.it) for further questions on the shared task.

Submissions:
Authors are invited to submit original research papers. Papers should indicate
the state of completion of the reported results. Overlap with previously
published work should be clearly indicated. Submissions will be judged on
correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, significance,
and relevance to the workshop.

Submissions should be in Abobe PDF format, not exceed eight A4-sized
pages, and be typeset in a 11 point font. Detailed guidelines and a latex
stylefile package are available at the STEP 2008 web page. Paper submission will
be electronic using the EasyChair system.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the programme
committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. The
publication of selected and revised papers is under consideration for a special
issue in a journal.

Invited Speaker:
Harry Bunt (University of Tilburg)

Important Dates:
Regular Paper submission deadline: May 9, 2008
Shared Task paper submission: June 6, 2008
Notification of acceptance: June 23, 2008
Camera-ready version due: July 25, 2008
Workshop: Sept 22-24, 2008

Organising Committee:
Rodolfo Delmonte (Universita' Ca' Foscari, Venice)
Johan Bos (Universita' La Sapienza, Rome)

Programme Committee:
Roberto Basili (University Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy)
Amedeo Cappelli (CELCT, Trento Italy)
Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge, UK)
Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
Sanda Harabagiu (HLT, University of Texas, USA)
Alexander Koller (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Leonardo Lesmo (DI, University of Tourin, Italy)
Katja Markert (University of Leeds, UK)
Dan Moldovan (HLT, University of Texas, USA)
Srini Narayanan (ICSI, Berkeley, USA)
Sergei Nirenburg (University of Maryland, USA)
Malvina Nissim (University of Bologna, Italy)
Vincenzo Pallotta (Universitaet Freiburg, Schweiz)
Emanuele Pianta (ITC, Trento, Italy)
Massimo Poesio (University of Trento, Italy)
Stephen Pulman (Oxford University, UK)
Michael Schiehlen (IMS Stuttgart, Germany)
Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh, UK)


 





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