ANLP-97 WORKSHOP CALL FOR PAPERS

Priscilla Rasmussen (rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu)
Fri, 20 Sep 96 10:27:34 EDT

Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics:
Why, What, and How?

April 4-5, 1997, Washington, D.C., USA
(in conjunction with ANLP-97)

sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics
Special Interest Group on the Lexicon

Call for Papers

It is widely accepted that lexical semantic information is needed for
processing human language. Hand tagged text (e.g., Penn Treebank) has
proven useful for researchers working on assigning to language
expressions non-semantic characteristics such as part-of-speech tags
and syntactic structure. (In hand tagged text we include
automatically tagged text that was post-edited by hand.) It is likely
that hand tagged text will also be of use for assigning semantic
characteristics to words in their context. The aim of this workshop
is to address the following questions: to what end should hand tagging
be performed, what lexical semantic information should be hand tagged,
and how should this tagging be done.

Lexical semantic information is determined in part by the words
themselves and in part by the context in which they appear. Such
lexical semantic information includes verbal aspect, nominal
classification (e.g., count-mass, locative and frequency), modifier
classification (e.g., positive-negative, intersective-nonintersective,
and eventive-propositional) and relations between participants and
events (e.g., sentience and volition). Other examples of lexical
semantic information include membership in classes from hierarchies
such as WordNet or Beth Levin's verb classification.

Thus, robust NLP systems need to have a large store of lexical
semantic information (i.e., a lexicon) and a method for accounting for
the effect of context (e.g., modules for handling discrete word sense
ambiguity, regular polysemy, semantic coercion, metaphorical
extension, etc.).

Given the experience with part-of-speech tagging and robust parsing,
it is hoped that hand tagged text will make the comparison of systems
possible and provide training data for quantitative approaches. Some
semantically tagged texts already exist including the WordNet 1.4
semantic concordance (wnsemcor). An additional example was discussed
at ACL-96: Hwee Tou Ng and Hian Beng Lee made use of a corpus of
192,800 occurrences of 191 words hand tagged with WordNet classes.
This corpus was used as a training set for a case-based word sense
disambiguation algorithm. Although we are aware of no systems that
use hand tagged corpora in service of acquiring lexical semantics, it
seems likely that such corpora would aid the identification of
non-semantic cues for lexical semantic information.

Thus, we are soliciting papers that address one or more of the
following questions:

-Why tag corpora with lexical semantics?
-What should the tags be?
-How should the tagging be done?
-How should the tagging be evaluated?

Especially desirable are papers that shed light on these questions
through the discussion of actual tagging experience both hand and
automatic.

In addition to paper presentations, working sessions that discuss
actual attempts at tagging text, such as the Wordnet taggings, the
Singapore taggings, and the semantic tagging done as part of the MUC
competitions are planned. Samples of tagged text will be sent to
participants in advance for careful consideration, with specific
issues in mind. A discussion of obstacles to achieving consensus is
planned.

Invited Speakers
----------------

Hwee Tou Ng: Defence Science Organisation (Singapore)
Christiane Fellbaum: Princeton University

Format for Submission
---------------------

Authors are asked to submit previously unpublished papers only; a
workshop proceedings will be published. There is a 2000 word limit
(exclusive of references) on the length of submissions. Electronic
submission of either self-contained latex or postscript is strongly
preferred. Please use the aclsub.sty latex style file. Hard copy
submissions should include 6 copies of the paper. Since the papers
will be reviewed anonymously, please do not place the author name on
the paper. Instead include a separate title page with title,
abstract, author, and e-mail address. Unless requested otherwise,
notification of acceptance will be sent electronically to the first
author. Parallel submission is unproblematic; however if your paper
is accepted to this workshop and you decide to present it here, we
will ask you to withdraw it from any other events.

Important Dates
---------------

Deadline for submission: November 8th, 1996
Notification of authors: January 15th, 1997
Final versions due: February 15th, 1997

Address for Submission and Further Information
-----------------------------------------------

Marc Light
SfS Computerlinguistik
Wilhelmstrasse 113
D-72074 Tuebingen Germany
Phone: +49 (07071) 290 (ask for extension 74279)
light@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de
http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~light/semtag_ws.html
(all latex style files will be available from this page)

Program Committee
-----------------

Martha Evans
Helmut Feldweg
Michael Johnston
Doug Jones
Kevin Knight
Marc Light (chair)
Boyan A. Onyshkevych
Martha Palmer
Philip Resnik
Evelyne Viegas
David Yarowsky
Annie Zaenen