21.1832, Calls: Computational Ling, Semantics, Text/Corpus Ling/Finland

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-1832. Thu Apr 15 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.1832, Calls: Computational Ling, Semantics, Text/Corpus Ling/Finland

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1)
Date: 14-Apr-2010
From: Maarit Niemela < maarit.h.niemela at oulu.fi >
Subject: Workshop on Computational Approaches to Synonymy
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:49:48
From: Maarit Niemela [maarit.h.niemela at oulu.fi]
Subject: Workshop on Computational Approaches to Synonymy

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Full Title: Workshop on Computational Approaches to Synonymy 

Date: 29-Oct-2010 - 29-Oct-2010
Location: Helsinki, Finland 
Contact Person: Graeme Hirst
Meeting Email: gh at cs.toronto.edu
Web Site: http://www.linguistics.fi/synonymy/tyopaja.shtml 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 30-Jun-2010 

Meeting Description:

This workshop at the Symposium on Re-Thinking Synonymy will explore
computational approaches to synonymy. 

Call for Papers

Many problems and applications in computational linguistics and natural language
processing implicitly invoke, in various forms, the concept of synonymy or
identity of meaning.  In one way or another, they involve either determining
identity (or non-identity) of meaning in different surface forms or creating
different surface forms for a single meaning. 

For example, paraphrase recognition is an important component of the
more-general problem of recognizing textual entailment.  Textual tailoring and
personalization seeks to find the most effective linguistic realization of a
message for a particular user; automatically simplifying texts and creating
stylistic variations are special cases of this.  Lexical choice in text
generation tries to find the best word for a given meaning and to discriminate
it from other words that are close in meaning but not synonymous in the context.
Cross-lingual document retrieval and other cross-lingual applications such as,
in particular, machine translation conflate the ideas of synonymy and
translation equivalence.

But while there has been a large amount of research on computational methods for
determining degree of similarity in lexical meaning and for recognizing
paraphrase, little attention has been given to theoretical considerations of
synonymy.  Mostly, it is treated as a boolean property (two words are or aren't
in the same synset; two sentences are or aren't mutual entailments) with little
thought of any theoretical underpinning.

On the other hand, the real-world linguistic problems that natural language
processing addresses provide useful test cases for linguistic theories of
synonymy, and the computational methods developed are de facto theories of
synonymy even if not intended as such.

This workshop will explore computational approaches to synonymy, with an
emphasis on explicating their implicit theoretical notions and their
implications for linguistic theory.  Papers are solicited on the following topics:

-   Computational theories of lexical, phrasal, and sentential synonymy.
-   Principled methods of paraphrase recognition and generation.
-   Principled methods of text tailoring and stylistic variation.
-   Cross-lingual synonymy and machine translation.
-   Beyond the synset: Principles of synonymy in computational lexical resources

The following are not appropriate except insofar as they explicitly address the
topics above:

-   Yet another paraphrase-recognition or textual entailment system.
-   Yet another lexical similarity metric.
-   Yet another personalization or text-simplification system.

Submissions:  Abstracts of up to 500 words should be submitted (as pdf
attachments) to synonymy at cs.toronto.edu by 30 June 2010.  Decisions on
acceptance will be notified by 15 July 2010.

Organizers:  Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto); Kentaro Inui (Tohoku
University); Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam).





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