First Call for Papers

Title of the workshop:
Language Diversity and the Acquisition of Linguistic Semantic Knowledge

The host conference:
6th International Conference on Multimedia and Network Information Systems, Wroclaw, Poland, September 18-19, 2008

Web site:
http://www.zsi.pwr.wroc.pl/MISSI2008/LDALSK/

The proportion of Web pages written in English keeps decreasing, but a majority of text-handling tools and techniques have been developed for English and tested on English resources. Many languages have been reasonably well served by the existing systems, but large typological differences (complex morphology, rich inflection, freer-order syntax, not to mention cultural biases) tend to make those tools and resources less than fully adequate. This may be particularly true of deeper processing, including the acquisition of natural language semantics from text.

The workshop seeks to explore methodologies developed from scratch for a variety of languages, and perhaps their reapplication to the processing of English texts. We invite submissions on the topics we list below, and on closely related topics in the general spirit of the workshop. We target the problem of automatic extraction of some form of natural language semantics from corpora and application of the knowledge extracted in that way in systems that deal with natural language.

Work on any language is welcome; we particularly encourage submissions related to "less privileged" languages. The workshop will be held in English, to ensure the broadest dissemination of its contributions. We have room for up to 50 papers, including posters, so there will be ample opportunity to report on work in progress. To suit the host conference, papers on applications of the semantic knowledge extracted from text will also be considered; such applications include
machine translation, parsing, sentiment analysis, information retrieval, information extraction, and text mining.

All submissions must present original work. There will be a strict reviewing process. (Submission instructions will be announced later.) The proceedings will be printed by IEEE.

Topics:

Distributional semantics, semantic relatedness, semantic similarity
Extraction of lexico-semantic relations
Extraction of logical models for natural language semantics
Extraction of selectional restrictions
Lexicon extraction from corpora
Pattern-based methods in lexical knowledge acquisition
Recognition of expressions of opinions and emotions in text
Resources and tools for word-sense disambiguation
Software support for lexical knowledge acquisition
Thesaurus construction, extension and critique

Schedule:

submission March 27, 2008
reviews in April 30, 2008
acceptance May 7, 2008
camera-ready May 21-28, 2008

All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings published by IEEE.

The format of the papers will be announced soon.