SKDOU 2008

Announcement Call for Submission

NSF Sponsored Symposium - Semantic Knowledge Discovery, Organization and Use
Date: November, 14 and 15, 2008 Location: Warren Weaver Hall, New York University URL: http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/sk-symposium Invited Speakers: Ido Dagan, Bill Dolan, Oren Eztioni, Christiane Fellbaum, Marti Hearst, Kentaro Inui, Dekang Lin, Bernardo Magnini, Dan Moldovan, Patrick Pantel, Marius Pasca, Peter Turney Organizer: Satoshi Sekine

Call for General Submission
Send one page proposal to sekine (at) cs.nyu.edu by September 30. See more detail below!!

The focus of NLP research has been shifting towards semantic analysis from syntactic analysis. It has become evident that the methods employed for developing syntactic analyzers, i.e. supervised methods using small annotated corpora, are not the best methods for the semantic task. In order to handle semantics, we need large amounts of knowledge which may be best collected by semi/un- supervised methods from a huge unannotated corpus.

Many methods have already been proposed along this line of research, e.g. discovery of synonyms, hyponym-hypernyms, part-of relations, paraphrase, textual entailment, relations between things, relations between events and so on. The technical methods include distributional similarity, lexico-syntactic patterns, alignment and so on. Although such discovery techniques have been improving through numerious trials, there has been little discussion of the background and high-level picture of the field.

The objectives of this symposium will be to discuss the following topics:
 * High-level picture of the current technologies
 * The types of semantic knowledge we need
 * The relationships between knowledge and applications
 * The format for representing this knowledge and its re-use
 * Community effort for resource and platform
 * Possible directions for the technology in the future

The presentations will consist of around 10 invited talks by leaders in the field (shown below) and partially of general submissions. Presentations are expected to provide the speaker's high level position regarding the objectives described above.

Invited Speakers

 * Prof. Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University, Israel) http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~dagan/
 * Dr. Bill Dolan (Microsoft Research, USA) http://research.microsoft.com/~billdol/
 * Prof. Oren Etzioni (Washington University, USA) http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/etzioni/
 * Prof. Christiane D. Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA) http://wordnet.princeton.edu/~fellbaum/
 * Prof. Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/
 * Prof. Kentaro Inui (NAIST, Japan) http://cl.naist.jp/~inui/
 * Dr. Dekang Lin (Google, USA) http://research.google.com/pubs/author108.html
 * Prof. Bernardo Magnini (ITC-IRST Italy) http://tcc.itc.it/people/magnini.html
 * Prof. Dan Moldovan (Uiversity of Texas at Dallas, USA) http://www.hlt.utdallas.edu/~moldovan/
 * Dr. Patrick Pantel (Y! Research, USA) http://www.patrickpantel.com/
 * Dr. Marius Pasca (Google, USA) http://research.google.com/pubs/author107.html
 * Prof. Peter Turney (National Research Council, Canada) http://www.apperceptual.com/

PC Member

 * Prof. has PC member::Ralph Grishman (New York University)
 * Prof. has PC member::Sadao Kurohashi (Kyoto University)
 * Prof. has PC member::Dan Roth (UIUC)
 * Prof. has PC member::Deepak Ravichandran (Google)
 * Prof. has PC member::Julio Gonzalo (UNED)
 * Prof. has PC member::Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University)
 * Dr. has PC member::Idan Szpektor (Bar-Ilan University)
 * Prof. has PC member::Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas)
 * Prof. has PC member::Kentaro Torisawa (NICT)
 * Prof. has PC member::Jun-ichi Tsujii (Tokyo University)
 * Dr. has PC member::Roy Bar-Haim (Bar-Ilan University)
 * Prof. has PC member::Eduard Hovy (ISI, USC)
 * Prof. has PC member::Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR)
 * Prof. has PC member::Mark Stevenson (Sheffield University)
 * Prof. has PC member::Diana McCarthy (University of Sussex)
 * Prof. has PC member::Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh)
 * Prof. has PC member::Chris Callison-Burch (John Hopkins University)
 * Dr. has PC member::Peter Clark (Networked Systems Technology, The Boeing Company)
 * Prof. has PC member::Martha Palmer (University of Colorado Boulder)

General Submissions
There are three categories for general submissions. Presentations are likely to be 15-20 minute talks. Posters or demos will be presented in a 2 hour slot. It is NOT necessary that the material be previously unpublished. We are expecting presentations giving an overview of the research at your site, or your top-level view of the topic, or a demo of a system related to the topic. Please send me a one page description of your presentation (please indicate if it is a poster or demo). Deadline for submissions is September 30.

We are NOT planning to produce proceedings (i.e. you do NOT have to prepare papers), but we would like to produce a binder of the presentation slides and abstracts, which may due about two weeks before the symposium.

Thank you very much for your interest; we are looking forward to see you at the symposium.

Best Regards, Satoshi Sekine

This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP