Appel: EKAW2000 Workshop "ontologies and texts"

Mon Jun 19 13:56:31 UTC 2000

From: Sylvie Szulman <sylvie.szulman at lipn.univ-paris13.fr>

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CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION
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    Ontologies and Texts

        Workshop during the EKAW'2000 conference
        Juan-Les-Pins (France), October 2nd 2000
   http://www.irit.fr/wsontologies2000

Ontology design remains a difficult and challenging problem. Most of the
current research studies and papers focus on the technical problems
raised by the representation and structuring of knowledge in the
ontology. Many works are also devoted to the problem of formalization
and reusability of ontologies. More recently, new interests bore on the
influence of the target application on the task of designing an
ontology.

In this workshop, we concentrate on ontology design considered as a
process stemming from knowledge sources to a structured conceptual
model. Among all knowledge sources (human experts, existing ontologies
and texts), we pay special interest to texts (technical documentation,
interview transcripts, handbooks and so on).

We claim that texts are an important source of knowledge for any kind
of application, in particular because most of the texts contain shared
and stabilized knowledge among a community of specialists. Moreover,
NLP tools are mature enough to be worth being integrated in knowledge
engineering methods. Available linguistics results (principles and
techniques) are also relevant for building semantic networks and
ontologies from texts. In spite of such potential values, knowledge
acquisition from texts for ontology design is hardly studied. We
assert that text analysis could significantly improve the efficiency
of the process of ontology building, as well as the quality and the
relevance of the resulting ontologies.

We wish to stress that knowledge engineering is ready to face a major
evolution by integrating texts as knowledge sources and mainly by giving
a new status to concepts and linguistic data. Our aim is to discuss
these assertions within the community as long as several teams have been
experiencing practical work in ontology design and theoritical
reflexions on the topic for many years.

Technical and theoretical issues to be discussed at the workshop
include, but are not limited to:

Texts as knowledge sources

 - What kind of knowledge can be acquired from which class of texts ?
shared and stabilized domain knowledge versus individual know-how
 - Complementarity of analysing texts, interviewing domain experts and
reusing existing ontologies
 - The expert's role in a text centered view : from experts' knowledge
elicitation to model validation by domain specialists.
 - Typology of data that can be acquired from these knowledge sources,
their status and role in a domain model or an ontology.

Linguistic resources for ontology design

 - Mixing textual or linguistic information and conceptual information in
ontologies : should a conceptual model always include a linguistic
dimension ?
 - Connections between texts and conceptual models, texts and ontologies
 - The nature of the term-concept relation ; justifications of a concept
definition.
 - The status of linguistics in knowledge engineering.
 - What kind of linguistics is needed ? Conceptual semantics vs. textual
semantics.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools

 - What kinds of NLP tools can prove useful ?
 - How much should they be adapted to match the needs of knowledge
acquisition and ontology design ? How is the use of these tools
influenced by the target application ?
 - How to define and select the data they should apply on ?
 - How to combine their use with the purpose of conceptual modelling and
ontology design ?
 - Role and limitations of general lexical resources (like WordNet) vs.
specific terminological resources (like Terminological Knowledge Bases,
thesaurus and so on)

Call for papers
---------------
Papers should be no longer than 2500 words. They can either report
research works, practical experiments or discuss more theoretical
questions. Papers will be published in paper-back proceedings
distributed to the workshop participants and available on-line the week
before the
worskhop.
Please use the same format as the one suggested for the conference.
Send papers by email (html AND ps files) to Brigitte BIEBOW
(bb at lipn.univ-paris13.fr) and Sylvie SZULMAN (ss at lipn.univ-paris13.fr)
before July 7th

Participation conditions
-------------------------
Anyone wishing to take part in this workshop should send
a one page abstract about its motivations to attend the workshop
and/or its recent works related to the workshop topic.
This page should also contain a question-issue to be debated
during the workshop.
Send your text to Nathalie AUSSENAC-GILLES (aussenac at irit.fr)
before September 18th.

Calendar
-------------
Paper submissions : July, 7th
Acceptance information : August, 28th
Motivation texts : Sept, 18th
Final paper : Sept, 21st

Scientific Organisation
--------------------------------
This workshop is promoted by the French working group on Terminology and

Artificial Intelligence (TIA) (web site
http://www.biomath.jussieu.fr/TIA)
to which the chairwomen belong. Most of the issues mentionned as topics
reflect the group scientific debates and orientations.

Workshop chairs :

Sylvie SZULMAN (LIPN,  Paris)
Brigitte BIEBOW (LIPN, Paris)
Nathalie AUSSENAC-GILLES (IRIT - CNRS, Toulouse)

Local organisation
--------------------------
Rose DIENG (INRIA Sophia Antipolis)
Olivier CORBY (INRIA Sophia Antipolis)
http://sophia.inria.fr/EKAW2000

Program Committee (provisional list)
-----------------------------
Nathalie AUSSENAC-GILLES (IRIT - CNRS, Toulouse,  F)
Richard BENJAMINS (Univ. Amsterdam, NL)
Brigitte BIEBOW (LIPN, Paris, F)
Rose DIENG (INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, F)
Dieter FENSEL (Vrije Universiteit, NL)
Asuncion GOMEZ PEREZ (UPM, Madrid, S)
Gregory GREFENSTETTE (Xerox Research Center Europe, Meylan, F) (to be
confirmed)
Nicola GUARINO (Italian National Research Council, I)
Udo HAHN (Frieburg University, G)
Adeline NAZARENKO (LIPN, Paris, F)
Roberto BASILI (University Tor Vergata, Roma,I)  (to be confirmed)
François ROUSSELOT (LIIA, Strasbourg, F)
Sylvie SZULMAN (LIPN - CNRS, Paris)
Michael USCHOLD (Boeing, USA)
Gertjan Van HEIJST (Kenniscentrum CIBIT, Utrecht, NL)
Bernard VICTORRI (ENS , Paris, F)

Registration information
----------------------------------
Registration information will be available on the EKAW web site
(http://sophia.inria.fr/EKAW2000)

--
Sylvie Szulman             | tel : +33/(0) 1 49 40 36 09
LIPN - Universite Paris 13 | fax : +33/(0) 1 48 26 07 12
av. J.-B. Clement          | email : sylvie.szulman at lipn.univ-paris13.fr
F-93430 Villetaneuse       | http :
//www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/membres/~szulman

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