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<<< NEW DEADLINE: April 25th !! >>>>
Call for Papers :
ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications.
September 4-6, 2003, Toulouse, France
Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL's Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics.
A great deal of attention has been devoted in the past ten years in the linguistic and computational linguistics communities to the syntax and the semantics of nouns, verbs and also, but to a lesser extent, to adjectives. Related phenomena such as quantification or tense and aspect have motivated a number of in-depth studies and projects. In contrast, prepositions have received less attention. The reasons are quite clear: prepositions are probably the most polysemic category, possibly more so than adjectives, and linguistic realizations are extremely difficult to predict, not to mention the difficulty of identifying cross-linguistic regularities.
Let us mention, however, several projects devoted to prepositions expressing space, time and movement in AI and in NLP, and also the development of formalisms and heuristics to handle PP attachment ambiguities. Let us also mention the large number of studies in psycholinguistics and in ethnolinguistics around specific preposition senses. Finally, prepositions seem to reach a very deep level in the cognitive-semantic structure of the brain: cognitive grammar developers often use prepositions in their metalanguage, in order to express very primitive notions. An important and difficult question to address, is whether these notions are really primitive or can be decomposed and lexically analysed
In argument structure, prepositions often play the crucial role of a mediator between the verb's expectations and the semantics of the nominal argument. The verb-preposition-noun semantic interactions are very subtle, but totally crucial for the development of an accurate semantics of the proposition. Let us note that a number of languages have postpositions or other markers like case instead of prepositions that play a quite similar role. Finally, languages like English have verbal compounds that integrate prepositions (compositionally or as collocations) while others, like Romance languages or Hindi either incorporate the preposition or include it in the prepositional phrase. All these configurations are semantically as well as syntactically of much interest.
Prepositions turn out to be a very useful category in a number of applications such as indexing and knowledge extraction since they convey basic meanings of much interest like instruments, means, comparisons, amounts, approximations, localizations, etc. They must necessarily be taken into account---and rendered accurately---for effective machine translation and lexical choice in language generation.
Prepositions are also closely related to semantic structures such as thematic roles, semantic templates or frames. From a linguistic perspective, several investigations have been carried out on quite diverse languages, emphasizing e.g., monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts or the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations. These observations cover in general a small group of closely related prepositions. The semantic characterization of prepositions has also motivated the emergence of a few dedicated logical frameworks and reasoning procedures.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together linguists, NLP researchers and practitioners, and AI people in order to define a common ground, to advance the state-of-the-art, to identify the primary issues and bottlenecks, and to promote future collaborations. If appropriate, the workshop will also establish a working group and the development of projects and resources.
Paper presentations Both short research notes (3 pages) and longer conference-style papers (up to 10 pages) submissions as well as working session proposals (1 page proposal on a precise topic) are welcome. Papers must be in .ps, .pdf or .doc formats. The 12 point Times new Roman font is preferred, leave about 2.5 cm margins on both sides. More precise formatting instructions will be given for final versions, since a book publication is under preparation. Paper must be sent in electronic form to: stdizier@irit.fr
The main topics are: - The syntax of prepositions: formal or descriptive syntax, prepositions in alternations, principles in the syntax of PPs, syntactic and semantic restrictions. General syntactic-semantic principles. Postpositions or other equivalent markers (e.g. case).
- Polysemy of prepositions, identification and classification of preposition senses, contrastive uses, metaphorical uses, semantic and cognitive foundations for prepositions.
- Descriptions: Potential WordNet / EuroWordNet descriptions of preposition uses, productive uses versus collocations, multi-lingual descriptions: mismatches, incorporation, divergences. Prepositions and thematic roles, prepositions in semantic frameworks (e.g. Framenet.).
- Cognitive or logic-based formalisms for the description of the semantics of prepositions, in isolation, and in composition/confrontation with the verb and the NP. Compositional semantics. Logical and reasoning aspects.
- The role of prepositions in applications, in particular: * in machine translation * in information extraction * in lexicalization in language generation.
- Corpus-based studies that support or challenge any of the approaches described above.
- Lexical knowledge bases and prepositions. Prepositions in AI, KR and in reasoning procedures.
Deadlines
Submission deadline: April 25th, 2003 <<<<< NEW DEADLINE >>>>>> Notification to authors: May 30th Final paper due July 1st (a book publication is under preparation) Registration preferably before July 7th. (to be confirmed) Registration frees will be kept as low as possible, around 100 Euros with lunch.
Programme Committee:
Nicholas Asher (Austin) Pushpak Bhattacharyya (IIT Mumbai) Harry Bunt (Tilburg) Nicoletta Calzolari (Pisa) Bonnie Dorr (Maryland) Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton) Claire Gardent (CNRS Nancy) Betsy Klipple (Upenn) Alda Mari (ENST Paris) Palmira Marraffa (Lisboa) Martha Palmer (Upenn) James Pustejovsky (Brandeis) Patrick Saint-Dizier (Chair, IRIT, Toulouse) Gloria Vazquez (Lerida) Laure Vieu (IRIT, Toulouse)
Contacts : Submissions and inquiries : stdizier@irit.fr and submissions also to : patrick_saintdizier@yahoo.fr Local organizing committee : Farah Benamara, Patrick Saint-Dizier WEB site: www.irit.fr/cgi-bin/voir-congres