[Apologies for x-postings] NATURAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION (NL-KR) Special Track at FLAIRS 2006 SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS Holiday Inn Melbourne Oceanfront, Melbourne Beach, FLORIDA, USA MAIN CONFERENCE: 11-12-13 MAY 2006 Special track web page: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady0641/Flairs06_NL_KR Main conference web page: http://www.indiana.edu/~flairs06 PURPOSE OF THE NL-KR TRACK We believe the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Knowledge Representation (KR) communities have common goals. They are both concerned with representing knowledge and with reasoning, since the best test for the semantic capability of an NLP system is performing reasoning tasks. Having these two essential common grounds, the two communities ought to have been collaborating, to provide a well-suited representation language that covers these grounds. However, the two communities also have difficult-to-meet concerns. Mainly, the semantic representation (SR) should be expressive enough and should take the information in context into account, while the KR should be equipped with a fast reasoning process. The main objection against an SR or a KR is that they need experts to be understood. Non-experts communicate (usually) via a natural language (NL), and more or less they understand each other while performing a lot of reasoning. An essential practical value of representations is their attempt to be transparent. This will particularly be useful when/if the system provides a justification for a user or a knowledge engineer on its line of reasoning using the underlying KR (i.e. without generating back to NL). We all seem to believe that, compared to Natural Language, the existing Knowledge Representation and reasoning systems are poor. Nevertheless, for a long time, the KR community dismissed the idea that NL can be a KR. That's because NL can be very ambiguous and there are syntactic and semantic processing complexities associated with it. However, researchers in both communities have started looking at this issue again. Possibly, it has to do with the NLP community making some progress in terms of processing and handling ambiguity, the KR community realising that a lot of knowledge is already 'coded' in NL and that one should reconsider the way they handle expressivity and ambiguity. This track is an attempt to provide a forum for discussion on this front and to bridge a gap between NLP and KR. A KR in this track has a well-defined syntax, semantics and a proof theory. It should be clear what authors mean by NL-like, based on NL or benefiting from NL (if they are using one). It does not have to be a novel representation. NL-KR TRACK TOPICS For this track, we will invite submissions including, but not limited to: a. A novel NL-like KR or building on an existing one b. Reasoning systems that benefit from properties of NL to reason with NL c. Semantic representation used as a KR : compromise between expressivity and efficiency? d. More Expressive KR for NL understanding (Any compromise?) e. Any work exploring how existing representations fall short of addressing some problems involved in modelling, manipulating or reasoning (whether reasoning as used to get an interpretation for a certain utterance, exchange of utterances or what utterances follow from other utterances) with NL documents f. Representations that show how classical logics are not as efficient, transparent, expressive or where a one-step application of an inference rule require more (complex) steps in a classical environment and vice-versa; i.e. how classical logics are more powerful, etc g. Building a reasoning test collection for natural language understanding systems: any kind of reasoning (deductive, abductive, etc); for a deductive test suite see for e.g. deliverable 16 of the FraCas project (http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~fracas/). Also, look at textual entailment challenges 1 and 2 <http://www.pascal-network.org/Challenges/RTE> h. Comparative results (on a common test suite or a common task) of different representations or systems that reason with NL (again any kind of reasoning). The comparison could be either for efficiency, transparency or expressivity i. Knowledge acquisition systems or techniques that benefit from properties of NL to acquire knowledge already 'coded' in NL j. Automated Reasoning, Theorem Proving and KR communities views on all this NL_KR TRACK PROGRAM COMMITTEE James ALLEN, University of Rochester, USA Patrick BLACKBURN, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique, France Johan BOS, University of Edinburgh, UK Richard CROUCH, Palo Alto Research Centre, USA Maarten DE RIJKE, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Anette FRANK, DFKI, Germany Fernando GOMEZ, University of Central Florida, USA Sanda HARABAGIU, University of Texas at Dallas, USA John HARRISON, Intel, USA Jerry HOBBS, Information Sciences Institute, USA Chung Hee HWANG, Raytheon Co., USA Michael KOHLHASE, International University Bremen, Germany Shalom LAPPIN, King's College, UK Carsten LUTZ, Dresden University of Technology, Germany Dan MOLDOVAN, University of Texas at Dallas, USA Jeff PELLETIER, Simon Fraser University, Canada Stephen PULMAN, University of Oxford, UK Lenhart SCHUBERT, University of Rochester, USA John SOWA, VivoMind Intelligence, Inc., USA Jana SUKKARIEH, University of Oxford, UK (Chair) Geoff SUTCLIFFE, Miami University, USA Timothy WILLIAMSON, University of Oxford, UK NL_KR TRACK INVITED SPEAKER John SOWA, VivoMind Intelligence, Inc., US FLAIRS 2006 INVITED SPEAKERS Alan BUNDY, University of Edinburg, Scotland Bob MORRIS, Nasa Ames Research Center, USA Mehran SAHAMI, Standford University and Google, USA Barry SMYTH, University College Dublin, Ireland NL-KR TRACK PROPOSED BY Jana Sukkarieh, University of Oxford, UK email: J.Sukkarieh.94@cantab.net WEB and TECH SUPPORT Simon Dobnik, University of Oxford, UK email: Simon.Dobnik@clg.ox.ac.uk SUBMISSION DETAILS Submissions must arrive no later than 21 November 2005. Only electronic submissions will be considered. Details about submission can be found on : http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady0641/Flairs06_NL_KR/submission_details.html Selected papers will be considered for publication in a special journal issue of "The journal of Logic and Computation" in the 2nd half of 2006. PROCEEDINGS Printed Proceedings will be published only on demand. Proceedings on CD will be provided to all. IMPORTANT DATES * Submission of papers: 21 November, 2005 * Notification of acceptance: 20 January, 2006 * Final version of the paper is due : 13 February, 2006 * Main Conference: 11-13 May 2006 * Track: max 1 day during the main conference Those interested in running a demo please contact Jana Sukkarieh <J.Sukkarieh.94@cantab.net> or Simon Dobnik <Simon.Dobnik@clg.ox.ac.uk>.