Appel: WIMS'2011 Workshop (Models and Methods of Semantics-Oriented Natural Language Processing)

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2011 09:58:49 +0100
From: Mathieu Roche <Mathieu.Roche at lirmm.fr>
Message-ID: <ec0d66dc84accb1245250a2850697c7e at lirmm.fr>
X-url: http://www.hse.ru/mnm
X-url: http://wims.vestforsk.no/

CALL FOR PAPERS

International Workshop on Models and Methods of Semantics-Oriented 
Natural Language Processing (http://www.hse.ru/mnm)
in conjunction with the International Conference on Web Intelligence, 
Mining and Semantics (WIMS'11), 25 - 27 May 2011, Sogndal, Norway, 
http://wims.vestforsk.no/

Chair: Vladimir A. Fomichov
Faculty of Business Informatics,
State University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
Web page in English: http://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/67739
E-mail: vfomichov at hse.ru; v.fomichov at snhu.edu; vfomichov at gmail.com.

Aims and scope:
The context for this workshop is broadly perceived necessity of
endowing the Web with the ability of understanding natural language
(NL). The aim of the workshop is to explicate, collect, discuss, and
generalize the models of informational (in particular, semantic,
conceptual) structures, the models of the correspondences between a
sentence or a short discourse and its semantic representation with
respect to a knowledge base, the models of the correspondences between
a fragment of a discourse and its semantic representation with respect
to a knowledge base and semantic representation of the preceding part
of a discourse, and the methods (algorithms) of processing information
expressed by means of NL either proved to be effective in any
application domain or being broadly applicable or universal as it is
shown by the results of the fulfilled theoretical analysis.

Expected topics (their list is not exhaustive):
- broadly applicable formal tools for constructing the text meaning
  representations (or semantic representations);
- unified formal means for representing text meanings and for
  constructing high-level conceptual descriptions of visual images;
- the models of semantic-syntactic components of linguistic databases;
- the models of the correspondences between a sentence or a short
  discourse and its semantic representation with respect to a
  knowledge base;
- the models of the correspondences between a fragment of a discourse
  and its semantic representation with respect to a knowledge base and
  semantic representation of the preceding part of a discourse (in
  particular, the models for finding the meaning of an elliptical
  phrase);
- the methods and algorithms of semantic-syntactic analysis of
  NL-texts;
- the methods and algorithms of discovering the referents of anaphoric
  expressions;
- the models, methods, and algorithms of using the ontologies for
  finding the answers to the questions of the users of full-text
  databases;
- the models, methods, and algorithms of using the ontologies for
  knowledge extraction from natural language texts;
- the methods and algorithms of planning the dialogue with an end user
  with respect to an ontology and knowledge about the end user;
- semantics-oriented methods of cross-language information retrieval;
- the methods and algorithms of transforming the meaning
  representations into NL-texts;
- intelligent text summarization;
- content search and analysis for e-learning;
- the methods of transforming the collections of OWL-expressions into 
  NL-texts;
- the methods of transforming the NL-texts into OWL-expressions.

Program Committee:
Rajendra Akerkar (Norway, Sogndal, Western Norway Research University)
Galia Angelova (Bulgaria, Sofia, Institute of Information and 
Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Svetla Boytcheva (Bulgaria, Sofia, University for Library Studies and
Information Technologies)
Vladimir Fomichov (Russia, Moscow, State University – Higher School of
Economics)
Marko Grobelnik (Slovena, Ljubljana, Jozef Stefan Institute)
Preslav Nakov (Singapore, National University of Singapore)
Toshio Okamoto (Japan, Tokyo, University of Electro-Communications)
Jens Pohl (USA, California Polytechnic State University)
Violaine Prince (France, University of Montpellier 2)
Mathieu Roche (France, University of Montpellier 2)

Important dates:
Submission of abstracts: February 8, 2011
Submissions of full papers: February 15, 2011
Notification of acceptance of papers: March 10, 2011
Camera-ready papers: March 25, 2011

Submission of the papers:
The maximum length of full workshop papers is at most 12 pages in ACM
format and of short papers is at most 5 pages in ACM format.
Please note that the submission format is MS Word or PDF. The papers
must be written in English and formatted according to the ACM
guidelines. Author instructions and style files can be downloaded at
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.
The abstracts and papers are to be submitted via e-mail at each of the
following addresses: vfomichov at hse.ru; v.fomichov at snhu.edu (attention:
no point before AT in the first address). Authors of accepted papers
are expected to attend the conference and present their work.

Publication:
Accepted papers will be published by ACM and disseminated through the
ACM Digital Library. Selected extended papers will be invited to
appear in the special issues of reputed journals in the field.
Registration fee: There will be no separate workshop fee.  Since the
workshop will be a part of the main WIMS 2011 program, each workshop
attendee/speaker must pay the WIMS'11 conference fee (to be announced
in January 2011) at the time of submitting the camera ready copy.  Fee
for the conference includes WIMS 2011 proceedings, lunch and
refreshments on 25th to 27th May, invitation to Welcome Reception, one
ticket to the Gala Dinner.

Description of the proposed workshop:
Due to the stormy growth of the Internet, a huge number of the
projects realized in the 2000s, first of all, in Life Sciences and
Health Care, and due to several other factors the users of the
Internet and of specialized computer networks have received the access
to an immense variety of information sources in many natural languages
and to a number of knowledge bases formed with the help of ontology
languages, first of all, the language OWL.

With respect to this situation, many specialists in various countries
suppose that the only real way of realizing an effective interaction
of people throughout the world with these naturallanguage (NL) based
information sources and with knowledge bases is the development of
appropriate NL-interfaces and semantics-oriented advanced search
systems. In favour of this conclusion says the successful experience
of designing in the 2000s a number of NL-interfaces to databases and
NL-interfaces to Semantic Web (SW) data repositories.

Since Web-based informational sources are formed with the help of many
natural languages, it is necessary to intensively develop the
theoretical foundations of multilingual, semantics-oriented
information retrieval on the Web and to expand the foundations of
designing (for many natural languages) the NL-interfaces to SW data
repositories.

On one hand, it is one of the central tasks for Web science - the
science of decentralized information systems. On the other hand, it
seems that this task is a part of more general, large-scale problem –
the problem of developing a Semantic Web of a new generation, where
its principal distinguished feature is to be the well-developed
ability of natural language processing.

The process of endowing the existing Web with the ability of
understanding many natural languages is an objective ongoing
process. It is a decentralized process, because the research centres
in different countries mainly independently develop the translators
from particular natural languages to semantic representations (or text
meaning representations) and the applied computer systems either
extracting the meanings from texts in particular natural languages or
producing summaries of the collections of texts in particular
languages.

The analysis shows that now it is high time to increase the total
successfulness, effectiveness of this global decentralized process. In
particular, it would be important with respect to the need of
cross-language conceptual information retrieval and question -
answering. Most often, semantics-oriented natural language processing
systems, or linguistic processors (LPs), are complex computer systems,
their design requires a considerable time, and its cost is rather
high.  Usually, it is necessary to construct a series of LPs, step by
step expanding the input sublanguage of NL and satisfying the
requirements of the end users. On the other hand, the same
regularities of NL are manifested in the texts pertaining to various
thematic domains.

That is why, in order to diminish the total expenses of designing a
family of LPs by one research centre or group during a certain
several-year time interval and in order to minimize the duration of
designing each particular system from this family of LPs, it seems to
be reasonable to pay more attention to: (a) the search for best
typical design solutions concerning the key semantic-syntactic
subsystems of LPs with the aim to use these solutions in different
domains of employing LPs; (b) the elaboration of domain-independent
formal means for describing the main data structures and principal
procedures of algorithms implemented in semantic-syntactic analyzers
of NL-texts or in the synthesizers of NL-texts.

That is why it appears that the adherence to the following two
principles in the design of semantics-oriented LPs by one research
centre or a group (but better – by many centres and groups) will
contribute, in the long-term perspective, to reducing the total cost
of designing a family of LPs and to minimizing the duration of
constructing each particular system from this family:

The Principle of Stability of the used language of semantic
representations in the context of various tasks, various domains and
various software environments (stability is understood as the
employment of a unified collection of rules for building the semantic
structures as well as domain- and task-specific variable set of
primitive informational units);

The Principle of Succession of the algorithms of LP based on using one
or more compatible formal models of a linguistic database and unified
formal means for representing the intermediate and final results of
semantic-syntactic analysis of natural-language texts in the context
of various tasks, various domains and various software environments
(the succession means that the algorithms implemented in basic
subsystems of LP are repeatedly used by different linguistic
processors).

The aim of the workshop is to explicate, collect, discuss, and
generalize the models of informational structures, the models of
informational correspondences, and the methods (algorithms) of
processing information expressed by means of natural language either
proved to be effective in any application domain or being broadly
applicable or universal as it is shown by the results of a carried our
theoretical analysis.

The particular objectives of the workshop are as follows:

(1) to explicate the collection of ideas, models, methods, and
    algorithms allowing for designing semantics-oriented (a)
    NL-interfaces being convenient, attractive for the end users of
    recommender systems and another Web-based applied computer
    systems; (b) advanced Web-based search systems;

(2) to carry out a comparative analysis of the available formal means
    of constructing text meaning representations (in particular, the
    means provided by the Theory of Conceptual Graphs, Episodic Logic,
    and Theory of K-representations) from the standpoint of following
    the Principle of Stability of the used language of semantic
    representations;

(3) taking into account the available effective models of
    informational structures, the models of informational
    correspondences, and the methods (algorithms) of processing
    natural language texts, to discuss the possibilities of expanding
    the strategy of transforming the existing Web into Semantic Web of
    a new generation (or a Meanings Understanding Web or a
    Multilingual Semantic Web) proposed by V.A. Fomichov in the
    monograph “Semantics-Oriented Natural Language Processing:
    Mathematical Models and Algorithms”, Springer: New York,
    Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, 2010,
    http://www.springer.com/math/applications/book/978-0-387-72924-4
    and in the paper “Theory of K-representations as a Comprehensive
    Formal Framework for Developing a Multilingual Semantic Web”,
    Informatica. An International Journal of Computing and Informatics
    (Slovenia), 2010, Vol. 34, No. 3,
    http://www.informatica.si/vol34.htm#No3.


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