6-10 Aug 2018
Sofia, Bulgaria
Second CALL FOR EXTENDED ABSTRACTS Workshop on *Ambiguity: Perspectives on Representation and Resolution (ARR)* Workshop at ESSLLI 2018 August 6-10, 2018 https://ambiguity2018.phil.hhu.de INVITED SPEAKERS Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) Diego Valota (Università degli Studi di Milano) WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION Natural language is overloaded in the sense that linguistic symbols can, and usually have, two or more (but enumerably many) possible interpretations from which the hearer has to choose a specific one without being explicitely told to do so. This is what we want to call ambiguity, distinguishing it from the notions of underspecification and vagueness. Understood in this general way, ambiguity exists and arises on virtually all levels of linguistic modelling, and resolving ambiguity undoubtly is one of the main challenges when dealing with language in communication. As a consequence of this diversity, a variety of perspectives exists on how to represent and resolve ambiguity. Also depending on the linguistic object at hand, some represent ambiguity in the semantics by means of, for example, plain disjunction, complex types, or game theoretic models. Some leave it to syntax and assume, for example, two lexical entries for /bank/ that reflect the two different readings. At the same time, however, it is still unclear what semantic ambiguity should be attributed to in logical terms. Finally, if resolution fails, from a philosophical or inferential point of view, one should be interested in the question: given a sentence ambiguous between two readings, does another sentence follow from the two of them? Hence possible treatments of ambiguity include resolution, representation and reasoning. Our main goal is hence to work towards a unified perspective on ambiguity, and for this, we want to bring together researchers from various backgrounds (linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, logic, philosophy) to approach (among other) the following questions: 1. How can ambiguity be represented in terms of logic, distributional vectors, weighted (deep) networks etc.? 2. Is there a ?core? notion of ambiguity, and what does it look like? How does it relate to similar phenomena such as polysemy? 3. What sort of ambiguity should be treated in semantics proper? In particular, when does one want to get rid of ambiguity, and when should we prefer to keep track of it? 4. What can be gained by combining different approaches to ambiguity, for example simple context-based word disambiguation and disambiguation based on semantic content? Are there underlying methods which always work (e.g. game theory)? 5. What sort of knowledge is needed for resolving ambiguity? And how can the interaction between knowledge and resolution be modelled? 6. How can we formalize the distinction between polysemy (including metonymy) and homonymy? Where do we need this distinction, and where not? 7. What constraints exists on which meanings an ambiguous term can have? And how can we capture this? Our special focus is thus on bringing together approaches seeing ambiguity as a mere computational problem and approaches seeing it as a linguistic phenomenon with some interest in itself. TOPICS The conference invites extended abstracts related to themes including but not limited to: The semantic content of ambiguity and its properties Disambiguation tasks Vector-based semantics, ambiguity and disambiguation Ambiguity as a syntactic and/or semantic phenomenon: differences and common ground How much semantics is needed to handle ambiguity? Are simple contexts sufficient? These topics do not restrict the scope of contributions; actually we would like to encourage a variety of submissions relating to any dimension of ambiguity. IMPORTANT DATES April 02, submission deadline May 02, notification May 14, camera-ready version Deadlines are midnight Pacific Standard Time (UTC?8). SUBMISSIONS Extended abstracts should lay out original, unpublished research and/or implementation results. We invite extended abstracts of 2 pages, excluding references. All submissions are electronic and in PDF format via the EasyChair system. Information about the author(s) and other identifying information such as obvious self-references (e.g., ?We showed in [12] ??) and financial or personal acknowledgements should be omitted in the submitted abstracts whenever feasible. Extended abstracts may contain a clearly marked appendix and data files to support its claims. While reviewers are urged to consult this extra material for better comprehension, it is at their discretion whether they do so. Such extra material should also be anonymized to the extent feasible. Use the following link for submission: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=arr18 SPECIAL ISSUE Depending on number and quality of submissions, and interest of authors, we plan to edit a special issue of worked out papers of contributions to the workshop. CONTACT Chairs & Organizers Timm Lichte (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf) Christian Wurm (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf) Email: ambiguity2018 at phil dot hhu dot de Further information about the conference is available at the website: https://ambiguity2018.phil.hhu.de -- [LOGIC] mailing list http://www.dvmlg.de/mailingliste.html Archive: http://www.illc.uva.nl/LogicList/ provided by a collaboration of the DVMLG, the Maths Departments in Bonn and Hamburg, and the ILLC at the Universiteit van Amsterdam