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EUROLAN-2003 Summer School (Bucharest)

EUROLAN-2003

Summer School on

"The Semantic Web and Language Technology - Its Potential and Practicalitie
s"

28 July - 8 August 2003
Bucharest - Romania
http://www.infoiasi.ro/~eurolan/eurolan2003

- First Call For Participation -

The Eurolan series of summer schools was established in 1993 and has been
held every other year, with the goal of stimulating young researchers from
all over the world to pursue high-level research in natural language
processing and language technology.

Theme

The fifth EUROLAN in the series will have as topic all aspects of the
developing Semantic Web technology and consider its potential and the
practicalities of applying it to enhance language processing applications.

The promise of the Semantic Web has evoked enormous interest within the
community developing language technologies. On the one hand, it offers the
potential to exploit ontological descriptions of language data in order to
enable inferencing capabilities, which may not only drastically enhance
semantic processing, but also alter our conceptions of the ways in which
knowledge is represented and exploited in language processing
applications. On the other hand, to take full advantage of this evolving
technology, researchers and developers will need to understand the
potential as well as the limitations of the Semantic Web and master a
range of new technologies that have been designed to enable it. Finally,
the language technology community must be ready to contribute to Semantic
Web development in order to ensure that it meets the requirements for
language processing applications.

The so-called "Semantic Web community" encompasses several research
communities that have previously worked independently of one another,
including researchers in knowledge representation, ontology development,
and "knowledge exploitation"; web developers (including developers of
standards such as XML, RDF, OWL, etc.); and those who directly need to
exploit knowledge in applications. Linguistic knowledge used in language
processing at its various levels (morphological, syntactic, lexical,
discourse, etc.) includes a substantial part of general knowledge and
poses a significant challenge to Semantic Web developers in order to
handle the precision and complexity required for language processing
applications. Whatever the Semantic Web may evolve to be, researchers and
developers in language technology clearly need to learn what it is and how
it can be exploited for language processing, and at the same time, work
with semantic web developers to ensure that the semantic web
infrastructure is maximally usable for language processing applications.
EUROLAN-2003 will provide two weeks of intensive study of semantic web
technology and its application to natural language processing.
Internationally known scholars and researchers involved in leading-edge
work in relevant areas will serve as professors at the school, providing
half- and full-day seminars and hands-on labs to provide students with
in-depth understanding and experience.

Topics to be covered in the school include the following:

* What is the Semantic Web? 
* Potential and limitations of the semantic web 
* Supporting web technologies (XML, RDF) 
* Ontologies, ontology design and development 
* Ontology exploitation via inferencing 
* Description logics and other approaches to inferencing 
* Lexical semantics and the semantic web 
* Use of the semantic web and related technologies in
  language processing applications

The list of invited personalities is as follows:

* Dan Cristea, "Al. I. Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania
* Thierry Declerck, DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany
* James Hendler, University of Maryland at College Park, USA
* Jerry Hobbs, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, USA
* Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
* Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa, Italy
* Robert Meersman, Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium
* Srini Narayanan, SRI-International, Menlo Park, SUA
* Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico University, USA
* Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania
* Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI and University of Saarbruecken, Germany
* Wolfgang Wahlster, DFKI and University of Saarbruecken, Germany
* Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, England

Program

Eurolan-2003 will take place between 28 July and 8 August 2003 in
Bucharest - Romania.

The summer school will be organized to allow for both lectures and
hands-on experience for each of the areas covered. Morning sessions will
be devoted to tutorials, followed by afternoon sessions at which students
will work in collaboration with professors on practical applications. The
school will also include one workshop as well as round tables and work
meetings on topics of particular interest related to the school?s theme.
They will be announced at a later date.

On Sunday, 3 August, a trip to significant Romanian landmarks will be
organized.

Registration and Fees

Information about registration and fees will be posted at a later date.

Program Committee

Dan Cristea
Nancy Ide
Jerry Hobbs
Dan Tufis
Hans Uszkoreit

Information on previous Eurolan events can be consulted at the address:
http://www.infoiasi.ro/fcs/en/events.html.