************************* CALL FOR PAPERS ****************************** SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND CATEGORISATION Workshop at ESSLLI XIII (Helsinki) Helsinki, August 13th - 17th 2001 http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/~esslli --------------------------------------------------------------------- The sheer amount of knowledge necessary to shed light on the way word meanings mutually relate in context or distribute in lexico-semantic classes appears to exceed the limits of human conscious awareness and descriptive capability. Particularly at this level of linguistic analysis, then, we seem to be in need of automatic ways of filtering, structuring and classifying semantic evidence through inspection of a large number of word uses in context. Totally or partially unsupervised inductive methods of knowledge acquisition from corpus data are credited with being able to provide such ways. Yet, it remains to be seen how acquired information can best be represented in current formal models for knowledge representation, for it to be made available to mainstream NLP applications. There are reasons to believe that this integration will require much more than a simple extension of off-the-shelf machine learning technology. At the same time, any major breakthrough in this area is bound to have significant repercussions on the way word meanings and lexico-semantic classes in general are formally represented and used for applications. With these purposes in mind, the workshop intends to focus on the issue of interaction between techniques for inducing semantic information from corpus data and formal methods of linguistic knowledge representation. In particular, we encourage in-depth analysis of underlying assumptions of the proposed techniques and methods and discussion of possible relevant connections with cognitive, linguistic,logical and philosophical issues. TOPICS OF INTEREST Possible themes for contributions are: - development of 'data-driven' semantic type systems - dynamic update and tuning of formal ontologies with text data - 'hybrid models' of knowledge extraction, whereby machine learning methods are integrated with formal structures of knowledge representation - creation of dynamic lexical knowledge-bases - formal representation and structuring of the flow of information extracted from texts. WORKSHOP ORGANISATION The workshop will be held on five subsequent days, August 13th-17th 2001. It will take place during the ESSLLI-Summer School in Helsinki, and will be open to all members of the LLI-community, computational linguistics and cognitive science as well. Each session will consist of two talks plus discussion (30mins + 15mins each). The workshop language will be English. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS The organizers welcome contributions from different fields of computational linguistics, logic and cognitive science. 1. Submissions will consist of full papers reporting on original, unpublished works. Papers should not exceed 5000 words (including references), must contain a 5-10 lines abstract, and must be submitted in postscript format 2. The reviewing of papers will be blind. Hence the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity should be avoided. 3. Identification information will be put in a separate file consisting of: Title of the paper: Author(s): Affiliation(s): E-mail(s): Abstract: 4. Submitted papers and identification information must be sent to the following address by MARCH 15th 2001: esslli2001@ilc.pi.cnr.it Accepted papers will be notified by APRIL 30th, together with the comments of the reviewers. The final version of the papers will be prepared in LaTeX by MAY 31st, for publication in the Workshop proceedings. The stylesheet will be circulated in due time. Note that all workshop participants must register as participants of ESSLLI. The early registration fees apply to authors of accepted papers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT DATES March 15th 2001 - Deadline for submitting papers April 30th 2001 - Notification of acceptance May 31st 2001 - Preparation of the final version of the paper June 15th 2001 - Final program of the workshop August 13th 2001 - The workshop begins --------------------------------------------------------------------------- PROGRAM COMMITEE Ted Briscoe (Cambridge University, Cambridge, United Kingdom) Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, CNR, Pisa, Italy) Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, Princeton, USA) Ed Hovy (USC, Marina del Rey CA, USA) Dekang Lin (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada) Antonio Sanfilippo (LingoMotors Inc., Cambridge MA, USA) Piek Vossen (SAILLABS, Antwerpen, The Netherlands) ORGANISING COMMITEE Alessandro Lenci Simonetta Montemagni Vito Pirrelli Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ILC) - CNR Area della Ricerca CNR Via Alfieri 1 (San Cataldo) I-56010 PISA Italy CONTACT ADDRESS esslli2001@ilc.pi.cnr.it WEB: http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/~esslli --------------------------------------------------------------------------