Appel: ECAI2002 workshop : ML and NLP for Ontology Engineering

Tue Jan 29 15:17:07 UTC 2002

Workshop held in conjunction with the ECAI 2002 conference

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Machine Learning and Natural Language
Processing for Ontology Engineering
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CALL FOR PAPERS

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Lyon (France), July 22-23 2002
http://www.inria.fr/acacia/OLT2002
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Workshop chairs
Nathalie AUSSENAC-GILLES (IRIT, Toulouse, F)
Alexander MAEDCHE (FZI, Univ. of Karlsruhe, G)

SCHEDULE

o Deadline for paper submissions      March 15th 2002
o Notification of acceptance April 26th 2002
o Deadline for motivation abstracts    May 24th 2002
o Camera ready papers                  May 24th 2002
o Workshop et ECAI2002                 July 22nd-23rd 2002

SCOPE

Ontologies serve as a means to establish a conceptually concise basis
for communicating knowledge for many purposes. Recent years have seen a
surge of interest in the discovery, automatic or semi-automatic creation
of complex, multirelational knowledge structures. For example, the
natural language community tries to acquire word semantics from texts,
database researchers tackle the problem of schema induction, and
numerous intelligent information agents are built by learning complex
structures from semi-structured input (HTML, XML files).
This interest converges with the recent proposals from various
communities to build a Semantic Web. One popular solution relies on
ontologies and annotations of Web resources w.r.t. these ontologies. The
size of the Web implies being able to automate some parts of the process
and to scale it up. Therefore NLP (Natural Language Processing) tools as
well as learning techniques seem to be very promising.

Engineering ontologies may be considered as a process that, starting
from (possibly evolutive) knowledge sources, produces a structured
conceptual model. Among all knowledge sources, special interest will be
paid to texts (technical documentation, interview transcripts,
handbooks, documents gathered from the Web and so on), semi-structured
data and existing knowledge bases. Among all possible techniques, NLP
tools, linguistic approaches, machine learning algorithms and any
combination of these are encouraged. As a matter of fact, efforts in the
machine learning community pursue the induction of more concise and more
expressive knowledge structures (e.g. relational learning). Moreover,
results (principles, methods and techniques) in machine learning, NLP,
linguistics are mature enough to be worth integrating into knowledge
engineering methods. It is time to evaluate how their combination could
improve the efficiency of building ontologies as well as their quality
and their relevance.

Engineering such knowledge structures raises some theoretical issues
that are little studied. The originality of this workshop is to call for
several disciplines such as linguistics, terminology, natural language
processing, knowledge representation and machine learning to go deeply
into these issues and related epistemological foundations. It will give
these communities a unique opportunity to confront their views and
results. To this end, the workshop will focus not only on practical and
technical problems but also on a theoretical reflection about building,
maintaining and reusing terminological resources and ontologies. We
would also like to debate the nature of ontologies, their genericity
according to applications and sources. Cross-disciplinary contributions,
in particular those involving linguistics, are strongly encouraged.

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

Ø Status of texts as knowledge sources, connections between ontologies
and texts
Ø Linguistic and terminological resources as knowledge sources
Ø Learning from machine-readable dictionaries
Ø Extending existing ontologies (Wordnet)

Ø Text Mining for building ontologies
Ø Linguistics (techniques and principles) to build ontologies
Ø Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for building and maintaining
ontologies
Ø Ontologies for Text and Document Processing

Ø Learning selectional restrictions
Ø Multi-relational learning, Inductive Logic Programming
Ø Instance mining
Ø Learning ontologies with inferences (e.g. using description logics)
Ø Cooperative learning of ontologies

Ø Ontologies and NLP tools for the semantic web
Ø Learning ontologies from the Web (from DTDs, XML files, RDF files)

SUBMISSION FORMAT OF PAPERS

Papers should be no longer than 5000 words. They can either report
research work, practical experiments whether completed or in progress.
Papers discussing more theoretical questions are also welcome.
Each paper will be reviewed by two persons from the program committee
having in mind the willingness to promote discussions and debates rather
than selection. Papers will be published in paperback proceedings
distributed to the workshop participants and available on-line after
June 10th, 2002. Please use the same format as the one suggested for the
conference.

Send papers by email (html, ps or pdf files) to
mailto:OLT2002 at sophia.inria.fr before March 15th.

PARTICIPATION CONDITIONS

Beside the papers' authors, anyone wishing to take part in this workshop
should send a one page abstract about his/her motivations to attend the
workshop and/or his/her recent work related to the workshop topic. This
page should also contain one question-issue to be debated during the
workshop. Motivation abstracts will be reviewed.

Send your text to mailto:OLT2002 at sophia.inria.fr before May 24th.

All workshop participants are required to register for the ECAI 2002
main conference.

WORKSHOP TIME-TABLE

In order to make exchanges easier during the workshop, each paper will
be assigned a discutant selected among the authors of the other papers.
Discutants will contribute to paper presentations and discussions.
Paper presentations will be organized into thematic sessions. A large
amount of time will be dedicated to debates at the end of each session
or during specific sessions according to the questions suggested by the
participants (see participation conditions).

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Brigitte BIEBOW (LIPN, Paris, F)
Anne CONDAMINES (ERSS, Toulouse, F)
Rose DIENG-KUNTZ (INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, F)
Adeline NAZARENKO (LIPN, Paris, F)
Claire NEDELLEC (LRI, Paris, F)
Stephen STAAB (AIFB, Karslruhe, G)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Roberto BASILI (University Tor Vergata, Roma, I)
Teresa CABRE (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, S)
Farid CERBAH (Dassault Electronique, Paris, F)
Ido DAGAN (Bar Ilan University, Israel) *
Dieter FENSEL (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, NL)
Udo HAHN (Freiburg University, D)
Ed HOVY (Information Science Institute, USA)
Paul JOHANNSON (Univ. of Stockholm, Sw)
Yves KODRATOFF (LRI, Paris, F)
Stan MATWIN (Univ. of Ottawa, Can)
Ulrich REIMER (Zuerich, CH) *
Chantal REYNAUD (LRI, Paris, F)
Monique SLODZIAN (CRIM-INALCO, Paris, F)
Stefan WROBEL (Univ. of Magdeburg, D)
Pierre ZWEIGENBAUM (SIM-APHP, Paris, F)
(* to be confirmed)

- --

Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles
IRIT - UMR 5505 du CNRS                       Tel : +33 5 61 55 82 93
Universite P. Sabatier                        Fax : +33 5 61 55 62 58
118, route de Narbonne                        mailto :aussenac at irit.fr
31062 TOULOUSE Cedex 4
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