Logic List Mailing Archive
ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions, September 2003, Toulouse
<<< 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