Workshop on Text Meaning
Workshop at HLT/NAACL-03
Saturday, May 31 2003
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Organizers
Sergei Nirenburg University of Maryland, Baltimore County
sergei@umbc.edu
Graeme Hirst University of Toronto gh@cs.toronto.edu
Workshop Goal
The main goal of the Workshop on Text Meaning is to re-establish the
research community of knowledge-based meaning processing and to help to
explicate the currently implicit treatments of meaning in knowledge-lean
approaches and how the advances in the latter and in formal semantics
should influence the task.
Overview
Most, if not all, high-end NLP applications - from the earliest, MT, to
the latest, question answering and text summarization - stand to benefit
from being able to use text meaning in their processing. But the bulk of
work in the field has not, over the years, pertained to treatment of
meaning. The main reason given is the complexity of the task of
comprehensive meaning analysis.
Our field, of course, has never been entirely uninterested in meaning.
The tradition of formal semantics has been continuously maintained for
many years. Knowledge representation inside AI has come up with a large
number of proposals concerning the metalanguages that could be used to
formally represent text meaning. A variety of general and special (e.g.,
space- or time-related) logical and common-sense reasoning systems have
been developed that facilitate inference making on the basis of the
representation of "literal" meaning obtained from text. Much work has
been devoted to building practical, increasingly broad-coverage
meaning-oriented analysis and synthesis systems. Lexical semantics has
made significant progress in theories, description, and processing.
Formal aspects of ontology work have also been studied. The Semantic Web
has further popularized the need for automatic extraction,
representation, and manipulation of text meaning: for the Semantic Web
to really succeed, capability of automatically marking text for content
is essential, and this cannot be attained reliably using only
knowledge-lean, semantics-poor methods.
Recently, there has been a flurry of specialized meetings devoted to
formal semantics, lexical semantics, semantic web, formal ontology and
others. But the number of meetings devoted to knowledge-based text
meaning processing - content rather than formalism - has been much
smaller. This workshop will begin to remedy that.
Suggested Topics
The workshop invites papers that relate to (but are not necessarily
limited to) the following topics:
* Broad-coverage semantic analysis
* Knowledge-based text synthesis
* The nature of text meaning required for various practical
broad-coverage applications
* Pragmatics and discourse issues as parts of text meaning extraction
and manipulation
* Ontologies supporting automatic processing of text meaning
* Semantic lexicons
* Language- and world-related microtheories designed to support text
meaning extraction and manipulation: aspect, modality, reference, etc.
* Text meaning representations in semantic analysis
* Reasoning to support semantic analysis and synthesis
* Multilingual aspects of meaning representation and manipulation
* Integrating semantic analysis and non-semantic language processing
* The benefits (if any) to semantic analysis and synthesis systems from
knowledge-lean stochastic corpus-oriented methods.
We encourage discussion of theoretical issues that are relevant to
computational applications, including descriptions of processors and
static knowledge resources. We specifically prefer discussions of
meaning content over discussions of formalisms for its encoding and
discussions of decision heuristics in processing over discussions of
generic processing architectures and theorem proving mechanisms.
This workshop will be not only a forum for presenting complete work with
tangible results (even though this will be encouraged) but also an
opportunity to:
1. take stock of the developments in the field;
2. assess the nature of the most pressing extant problems and reasons
for current lack of satisfactory solutions;
3. re-assess the potential contributions from developments outside the
field (e.g., work on formal ontologies or corpus-based methods); and
4. coordinate and plan future work.
Submission Procedure
Submit papers (not to exceed 8 pages in the HLT/NAACL two-column format)
electronically, PDF strongly preferred, to sergei@umbc.edu.
Deadlines
Paper submission March 17, 2003
Notification of acceptance March 31, 2003
Camera-ready version due April 10, 2003
Workshop date May 31, 2003
Questions
Direct inquiries to either of the organizers, sergei@umbc.edu and
gh@cs.toronto.edu.
Program Committee
Stephen Beale University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Lynn Carlson US Department of Defense
Sanda Harabagiu University of Texas at Dallas
Jerry Hobbs USC Information Sciences Institute
Nancy Ide Vassar College
Richard Kittredge University of Montreal
Tanya Korelsky CoGenTex, Inc.
Marjorie McShane University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Dan Moldovan University of Texas at Dallas
Martha Palmer University of Pennsylvania
James Pustejovsky Brandeis University
Victor Raskin Purdue University
Yorick Wilks Sheffield University
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