A workshop held as part of the
10th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
(ESSLLI-98)
August 17 - 28, 1998, Saarbruecken, Germany
** SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS **
ORGANIZERS: Johan Bos (Saarbruecken) and Paul Buitelaar (Brandeis University)
The workshop aims at bringing together research in two complementary fields of
semantic analysis that are still too far apart. In order to achieve both a
broad and a deep understanding of any given text document, a system needs both
advanced acquisition of corpus specific lexical semantic knowledge and powerful
inference mechanisms that utilize that knowledge in discourse analysis.
Given the still relatively limited results within both areas there has been
little impetus to combine them. Corpus-based extraction of lexical semantic
knowledge has only recently become a more feasible task, because of the growing
availibility of on-line text documents; robust corpus processing technologies,
such as broad coverage part-of-speech tagging and shallow parsing; and readily
available statistical methods. The various approaches to discourse analysis,
originating in such diverse fields as formal semantics, psychology and AI, are
in the process of converging into a unified approach to the analysis and
representation of the cohesive structure of natural language documents.
The intersection between these two fields lies in the application of lexical
semantic knowledge to such problems in discourse analysis as anaphora
resolution and discourse segmentation. In fact, the benefit will be mutual,
because knowledge of discourse structure is helpful to lexical knowledge
extraction as well.
In summary, large scale domain specific lexical semantic knowledge acquisition
can assist in analyzing discourse structures, which in turn can assist in
acquiring even more accurate lexical semantic representations for the relevant
terms in the domain.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
To obtain further information please visit the workshop home page at
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~paulb/esslli98.html