1) EMNLP Workshop on GEometrical Models of natural language Semantics (GEMS 2011)
GEMS — GEometrical Models of natural language Semantics
Workshop at EMNLP, July 31st 2011, Edinburgh, Scotland
http://sites.google.com/site/geometricalmodels/
GEMS 2011 is the third event in a series of workshops on distributional
models, also known as semantic spaces. These models have become
omnipresent in computational linguistics and neighboring fields.
GEMS 2011 invites original contributions to problems in meaning
representation, acquisition and use, based on distributional and
vector space models. We are interested in methodological innovations
as well as tasks ranging from the induction of linguistic and world
knowledge to practical and industrial NLP applications.
GEMS 2011 will also address one particular challenge of geometrical
models as a scientific field, namely fragmentation — with respect
to data sets, methods and evaluation metrics. To facilitate the
comparison of studies and achieve scientific progress, GEMS will
introduce a shared evaluation:
— We provide two datasets suitable for the evaluation of distributional
models through our website, together with the corpora that can be used
for their modeling.
— These datasets cover two major tasks: differentiation between semantic
relations and addressing compositionality.
— Papers submitted to GEMS are strongly encouraged to evaluate their
models on one of the datasets, or, if this is not possible, to discuss why
their models are not applicable.
Topics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to
— Document-based, collocational and syntax-based spaces
— Eigenvector methods and geometrical embeddings
— Higher order tensors
— Computational complexity and evaluation issues
— Graph-based models over semantic spaces
— Logic and inference in semantic spaces
— Large-scale implementations of distributional models (Map-Reduce, Hadoop)
— Kernels methods for NLP
— Word sense discrimination and discrimination; lexical substitution
— Induction of selectional preferences
— Compositionality in geometrical models: phrase representation; concept combination
— Lexicon acquisition
— Conceptual clustering
— Modeling of linguistic theories and ontological knowledge
— Cognitive theories of semantic space models
— Applications in the humanities and social sciences
— Applications and impact on Web search, Web mining, Query log mining,
Query Intent Modeling, and other industrial activities
Submissions
Authors are invited to submit papers on original, unpublished work on
the topics of this workshop. There are three paper categories: long papers,
short papers and demos.
— Long papers should present completed work. They can have
up to 9 pages of content, plus references.
— Short papers/demos can present work in progress or the description
of a system. They must not exceed 4 pages plus one page of references.
Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL 2011
proceedings, see the official style files at
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml. As reviewing will be blind, please
ensure that papers are anonymous. The papers should not include the
authors’ names and affiliations or any references to web sites,
project names etc. revealing the authors’ identity.
Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the
program committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings.
Important dates
April 22, 2011: Papers due
May 20, 2011: Notification of acceptance
June 03, 2011: Camera-ready deadline
July 31, 2011: Workshop
Chairs
Sebastian Pado, University of Heidelberg (Chair)
Yves Peirsman, Stanford University & KULeuven (Chair)
2) Workshop on Relational Models of Semantics
Collocated with ACL 2011 (www.acl2011.org/)
Portland, Oregon, June 2011
http://sites.google.com/site/relms2011/
Call for papers
(with apologies for multiple postings)
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Description
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This workshop will bring together NLP researchers whose work deals with relational aspects of language understanding. The ability to reason about semantic relations is a fundamental linguistic competence: it is through recognising explicit and implicit relations between entities and events that humans (and machines) can form a coherent representation of a text’s meaning. Numerous recent workshops have focused on lexical semantics; RELMS-11 will highlight relational semantics.
The modeling of semantic relations has been considered from many angles, across a variety of tasks and sub-disciplines. In ontology learning and information extraction, the focus is on learning «encyclopaedic» relations between entities in the domain of discourse. In structured prediction tasks such as semantic role labeling or biomedical event extraction, systems must reason about the relational content of a text, about which entities and events enter into which mutual relations. The interpretation of compound nouns requires reasoning about probable and plausible relations between two entities, with limited knowledge of context. Some sources of textual information are inherently relational — for example, content in on-line social networks — so computational models can benefit from reasoning explicitly about relational structures. There is also much to gain from understanding the connections between NLP tasks in which semantic relations play a key role. Methods which work for one task tend to generalize to others, and semantic relations tend to interact in interesting ways.
Researchers primarily working on specific modeling contexts stand to gain from understanding the connections between the various NLP tasks in which semantic relations play a key role. As well as considering whether methods used for one task may generalize to others, a key question is how different kinds of semantic relations interact. For example, encyclopedic world knowledge may be of use for «guiding» structured prediction; this might be particularly useful in impoverished contexts such as compound noun interpretation and «implicit» semantic role labeling. Conversely, encyclopedic relation learning can be viewed as generalising over instance-level relational analyses. Exploring these connections will be an important theme of the workshop.
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Topics
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Topics of interest include but are not restricted to the following:
* classification of semantic relations in text, for example in the framework of SemEval-2 Tasks 8 and 9 or TempEval;
* semantic structured prediction: semantic role labeling, event extraction;
* semantic applications of statistical relational learning (Markov Logic, Inductive Logic Programming, and so on);
* joint modelling of heterogeneous semantic relations, connections between traditionally distinct relational modelling tasks;
* relational information extraction and ontology learning;
* compound noun interpretation and retrieval of implicit semantic relations;
* annotation and evaluation issues relating to semantic relations;
* domain-specific aspects of relation learning.
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Important Dates
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December 23: First call for papers
January 15: Second call for papers
March 25: Paper submissions due
April 25: Notification of acceptance
May 6: Camera-ready papers due
June 23: RELMS-11 workshop
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Program Committee
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Eneko Agirre, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Timothy Baldwin, University of Melbourne, Australia
Ken Barker, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Paul Buitelaar, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Nathanael Chambers, Stanford University, USA
Yee Seng Chan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Mark Craven, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Matthew Gerber, Michigan State University, USA
Roxana Girju, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Iris Hendrickx, University of Lisboa, Portugal
Raphael Hoffmann, University of Washington, USA
Sophia Katrenko, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Roman Klinger, Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing, Germany
Milen Kouylekov, Celi SRL Torino, Italy
Kenneth Litkowski, CL Research, USA
Dan Moldovan, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Vivi Nastase, HITS gGmbH, Germany
Roberto Navigli, University of Rome «La Sapienza», Italy
Patrick Pantel, Microsoft Research, USA
Marco Pennacchiotti, Yahoo! Inc., USA
Simone Paolo Ponzetto, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Sampo Pyysalo, University of Tokyo, Japan
Sebastian Riedel, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA
Alan Ritter, University of Washington, USA
Lorenza Romano, FBK-irst, Italy
Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
Barbara Rosario, Intel Lab, USA
Caroline Sporleder, Saarland University, Germany
Carlo Strapparava, Fundacione Bruno Kessler, Italy
György Szarvas, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
Peter Turney, National Research Council of Canada, Canada
Benjamin van Durme, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Tony Veale, University College Dublin, Ireland
Andreas Vlachos, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Rui Wang, Saarland University, Germany
Limin Yao, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Deniz Yuret, Koç University, Turkey
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Workshop Organizers
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Su Nam Kim, University of Melbourne, Australia
Zornitsa Kozareva, University of Southern California,USA
Preslav Nakov, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, University of Cambridge, UK
Sebastian Padó, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
Stan Szpakowicz, University of Ottawa, Canada
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Contact
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relms.workshop.2011@gmail.com