32.176, Calls: Applied Ling, Comp Ling, Pragmatics, Semantics/Thailand or Online

Tue Jan 12 17:43:14 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-176. Tue Jan 12 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.176, Calls: Applied Ling, Comp Ling, Pragmatics, Semantics/Thailand or Online

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Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2021 12:42:19
From: Michael Roth [michael.roth at ims.uni-stuttgart.de]
Subject: First Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language

Full Title: First Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language 
Short Title: UnImplicit 

Date: 05-Aug-2021 - 06-Aug-2021
Location: Bangkok, Thailand 
Contact Person: Michael Roth
Meeting Email: michael.roth at ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Web Site: https://unimplicit.github.io/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 26-Apr-2021 

Meeting Description:

Recent developments in NLP have led to excellent performance on various
semantic tasks. However, an important question that remains open is whether
such methods are actually capable of modeling how linguistic meaning is shaped
and influenced by context, or if they simply learn superficial patterns that
reflect only explicitly stated aspects of meaning. An interesting case in
point is the interpretation and understanding of implicit or underspecified
language.

More concretely, language utterances may contain empty or fuzzy elements, such
as the following: units of measurement, as in ''she is 30'' vs. ''it costs
30'' (30 what?), bridges and other missing links, as in ''she tried to enter
the car, but the door was stuck'' (the door of what?), implicit semantic
roles, as in ''I met her while driving'' (who was driving?), and various sorts
of gradable phenomena; is a ''small elephant'' smaller than a ''big bee''?
Where is the boundary between ''orange'' and ''red''?

Implicit and underspecified phenomena have been studied in linguistics and
philosophy for decades (Sag, 1976; Heim, 1982; Ballmer and Pinkal, 1983), but
empirical studies in NLP are scarce and far between. The number of datasets
and task proposals is however growing (Roesiger et al., 2018; Elazar and
Goldberg, 2019; Ebner et al., 2020; McMahan and Stone, 2020) and recent
studies have shown the difficulty of annotating and modeling implicit and
underspecified phenomena (Shwartz and Dagan, 2016; Scholman and Demberg, 2017;
Webber et al., 2019).

The use of implicit and underspecified terms poses serious challenges to
standard natural language processing models, and they often require
incorporating greater context, using symbolic inference and common-sense
reasoning, or more generally, going beyond strictly lexical and compositional
meaning constructs. This challenge spans all phases of the NLP model's life
cycle: from collecting and annotating relevant data, through devising
computational methods for modelling such phenomena, to evaluating and
designing proper evaluation metrics.

Furthermore, most existing efforts in NLP are concerned with one particular
problem, their benchmarks are narrow in size and scope, and no common platform
or standards exist for studying effects on downstream tasks. In our opinion,
interpreting implicit and underspecified language is an inherent part of
natural language understanding, these elements are essential for human-like
interpretation, and modeling them may be critical for downstream applications.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together theoreticians and practitioners
from the entire NLP cycle, from annotation and benchmarking to modeling and
applications, and to provide an umbrella for the development, discussion and
standardization of the study of understanding implicit and underspecified
language.

This workshop will be co-located with one of the top conferences on
computational linguistics (ACL). The workshop may take place as an online or
hybrid conference.

Call for Papers: 

We solicit papers on the following, and other, topics:
 - Verb-phrase ellipsis and syntactic gaps
 - Implicit semantic roles and semantic relations
 - Bridging anaphora
 - Gradable/imprecise terms
 - Fused heads
 - Other phenomena that involve underspecification or implicit information

We specifically encourage to address the following themes, for a single
phenomenon or a set of phenomena:
 - New benchmarks for implicit/underspecified phenomena
 - Models and modeling strategies for uncovering implicit/underspecified
phenomena
 - Evaluation schemes and metrics for the identification and interpretation of
implicit and underspecified utterances
 - Implicit/Underspecified phenomena that are not yet within reach with
current NLP technology.

We invite both long (8 pages) and short (4 page) papers. The limits refer to
the content and any number of additional pages for references are allowed. The
papers should follow the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 formatting instructions (see
https://2021.aclweb.org/calls/papers/). Each submission must be anonymized,
written in English, and contain a title and abstract. Please submit your
papers at https://www.softconf.com/acl2021/w19_UnImplicit/

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