Appel: 1st Int Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding (ScaNaLU 2002)

[Alexis Nasr]

			   1st Announcement
		   First International Workshop on
	       Scalable Natural Language Understanding
			     ScaNaLU 2002
	   May 23-24 2002, Villa Bosch, Heidelberg, Germany
		      http://www.eml.org/SCANALU

			Endorsed by SIGSEM
      (ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics)

The need for systems that can understand and generate natural language
is growing rapidly. Current systems for natural language understanding
(NLU) are narrow, brittle, and costly. The major barrier to scalable
NLU systems has been the vast amount of linguistic and world knowledge
needed. But there is now significant progress in compiling the
required knowledge, using manual, statistical and hybrid
techniques. For this workshop, we assume that the resources for
scalable NLU will become available and focus on the conceptual and
computational frameworks that will form the foundation for this
effort.

The symposium aims at bringing together researchers involved in
applying semantic analysis to NLU. The goal is to find common ground
and exchange ideas in the fields of ontology, semantics, pragmatics,
etc. in order to strengthen individual approaches and combine modeling
efforts.

The workshop will take place in the historical Villa Bosch in
Heidelberg, Germany, also home of the European Media Laboratory and
the Klaus Tschira Foundation. Both institutions are sponsoring ScaNaLU
2002.


Scope/Audience

In the ScaNaLU 2002 workshop we intend to bring together researchers
working in various sub-fields of natural language understanding with
an interest in building scalable systems. The scope of interest
includes but is not limited to:

- Integrating hybrid approaches
- Enhancing natural language understanding through multi-modal input
- Natural Language Generation: From sentences to extended discourse
- Integration of world knowledge into NLU systems
- Semantic formalisms for scalable NLU
- Representation standards
- Integration of extra-linguistic and pragmatic contexts
- (Semi-)automatic acquisition of linguistic and world knowledge
- Semantic and pragmatic phenomena (metonomy, metaphor, degree
  expressions, ...)
- Applications requiring deep semantic analysis


Workshop format/Schedule

The workshop will interleave technical presentations with extensive
time for discussion of the presented work. Before the workshop we will
assign a commentator for each accepted presentation from the
attendees, in order to kick off a lively discussion.

Altogether the format will consist of four elements:

- Paper presentations with commentators and discussion
- Invited talk(s)
- Application and device demonstrations with discussion
- Panel discussion

We will accept paper submissions for both technical presentations and
demonstrations. We plan to be reasonably selective in order to have a
high quality workshop. The papers will be published in workshop
proceedings and we will forward the best ones to an appropriate
scientific journal.


Submissions

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and
should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We recommend
the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files
available at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/acl02/style/.

Deadline for paper submissions is February 22, 2002. Papers must be
submitted electronically to: scanalu at eml.villa-bosch.de. They should
be submitted in PDF format.


Important dates:

     February 22, 2002: Deadline for WS submissions
     March 12, 2002: Notification of acceptance to authors
     May 2, 2002: Deadline for camera-ready workshop notes and other
                  information
     May 23-24, 2002: ScaNaLU 2002 workshop in Heidelberg


Organizers:

Michael Strube, EML, Germany
Jerome Feldman, ICSI, Berkeley
Rainer Malaka, EML, Germany
Tilman Becker, DFKI, Germany


Program Committee (confirmed):

Jan Alexandersson, DFKI, Germany
James Allen, Univ. of Rochester, USA
Harry Bunt, Tilburg Univ., The Netherlands
Jaime Carbonell, CMU, USA
Claire Gardent, CNRS, Nancy, France
Emiel Krahmer, Tilburg Univ., The Netherlands
Christopher Manning, Stanford Univ., USA
Katja Markert, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
Srini Narayanan, SRI, USA
Martha Palmer, Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA
Massimo Poesio, Univ. of Essex, UK
Robert Porzel, EML, Germany
Uwe Reyle, Univ. of Stuttgart/EML, Germany
Bonnie Webber, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
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