Announcement
Call for Submission

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NSF Sponsored Symposium
Semantic Knowledge Discovery, Organization and Use


Date: November, 14 and 15, 2008
Location: Warren Weaver Hall, New York University
URL: http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/sk-symposium
Invited Speakers:
Ido Dagan, Bill Dolan, Oren Eztioni, Christiane Fellbaum,
Marti Hearst, Kentaro Inui, Dekang Lin, Bernardo Magnini,
Dan Moldovan, Patrick Pantel, Marius Pasca, Peter Turney
Organizer: Satoshi Sekine

---- Call for General Submission --------------------------------
Send one page proposal to sekine (at) cs.nyu.edu by September 30.
See more detail below!!
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The focus of NLP research has been shifting towards semantic analysis
from syntactic analysis. It has become evident that the methods employed
for developing syntactic analyzers, i.e. supervised methods using small
annotated corpora, are not the best methods for the semantic task. In
order to handle semantics, we need large amounts of knowledge which may
be best collected by semi/un- supervised methods from a huge unannotated
corpus.

Many methods have already been proposed along this line of research, e.g.
discovery of synonyms, hyponym-hypernyms, part-of relations, paraphrase,
textual entailment, relations between things, relations between events
and so on. The technical methods include distributional similarity,
lexico-syntactic patterns, alignment and so on. Although such discovery
techniques have been improving through numerious trials, there has been
little discussion of the background and high-level picture of the field.

The objectives of this symposium will be to discuss the following topics:
- High-level picture of the current technologies
- The types of semantic knowledge we need
- The relationships between knowledge and applications
- The format for representing this knowledge and its re-use
- Community effort for resource and platform
- Possible directions for the technology in the future

The presentations will consist of around 10 invited talks by leaders in
the field (shown below) and partially of general submissions.
Presentations are expected to provide the speaker's high level
position regarding the objectives described above.

Invited Speakers
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Prof. Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University, Israel) http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~dagan/
Dr. Bill Dolan (Microsoft Research, USA) http://research.microsoft.com/~billdol/
Prof. Oren Etzioni (Washington University, USA) http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/etzioni/
Prof. Christiane D. Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA) http://wordnet.princeton.edu/~fellbaum/
Prof. Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/
Prof. Kentaro Inui (NAIST, Japan) http://cl.naist.jp/~inui/
Dr. Dekang Lin (Google, USA) http://research.google.com/pubs/author108.html
Prof. Bernardo Magnini (ITC-IRST Italy) http://tcc.itc.it/people/magnini.html
Prof. Dan Moldovan (Uiversity of Texas at Dallas, USA) http://www.hlt.utdallas.edu/~moldovan/
Dr. Patrick Pantel (Y! Research, USA) http://www.patrickpantel.com/
Dr. Marius Pasca (Google, USA) http://research.google.com/pubs/author107.html
Prof. Peter Turney (National Research Council, Canada) http://www.apperceptual.com/

PC Member
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Prof. Ralph Grishman (New York University)
Prof. Sadao Kurohashi (Kyoto University)
Prof. Dan Roth (UIUC)
Prof. Deepak Ravichandran (Google)
Prof. Julio Gonzalo (UNED)
Prof. Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University)
Dr. Idan Szpektor (Bar-Ilan University)
Prof. Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas)
Prof. Kentaro Torisawa (NICT)
Prof. Jun-ichi Tsujii (Tokyo University)
Dr. Roy Bar-Haim (Bar-Ilan University)
Prof. Eduard Hovy (ISI, USC)
Prof. Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR)
Prof. Mark Stevenson (Sheffield University)
Prof. Diana McCarthy (University of Sussex)
Prof. Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh)
Prof. Chris Callison-Burch (John Hopkins University)
Dr. Peter Clark (Networked Systems Technology, The Boeing Company)
Prof. Martha Palmer (University of Colorado Boulder)

General Submissions
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There are three categories for general submissions. Presentations are
likely to be 15-20 minute talks. Posters or demos will be presented in a
2 hour slot. It is NOT necessary that the material be previously
unpublished. We are expecting presentations giving an overview of the
research at your site, or your top-level view of the topic, or a demo of
a system related to the topic. Please send me a one page description of
your presentation (please indicate if it is a poster or demo). Deadline
for submissions is September 30.

We are NOT planning to produce proceedings (i.e. you do NOT have to
prepare papers), but we would like to produce a binder of the presentation
slides and abstracts, which may due about two weeks before the symposium.

Thank you very much for your interest; we are looking forward to see you
at the symposium.


Best Regards,
Satoshi Sekine