COLING-ACL'98 WORKSHOP

           "The Computational Treatment of Nominals"


                      August 16, 1998
                   Universite  de Montreal
                     Montreal, Canada


This workshop aims at bringing together researchers who are
interested in the study of the  computational properties of nominals and noun
phrases. The focus is on representational questions as they relate directly to
NLP requirements and applications.

Understanding the properties of the nominal system is extremely
important since nouns and nominalizations are used extensively by both
people and
systems: searching and communicating with either a telegraphic or a more
expressive
language   involves heavy use of nominal forms.  A number of NLP applications,
ranging from "intelligent" key-word search to text summarization and
information
extraction, among others, not only require some way of recognizing nominal
forms,
but also require a shallow understanding of the semantic information that nouns
carry. It is therefore of great interest  to consider what impact representing
semantic knowledge at a finer level of granularity would have towards
enhancing a
system's performance.

Submissions are invited on one or more of the following topics:



- Representation of nominals:
   * design of noun ontologies for use in lexical semantics and machine
translation
   * ambiguity, polysemy, vagueness, and underspecification in the
semantics of nominals
   * identifying the minimal requirements for lexical representations

- Representational issues in the acquisition of knowledge:
   * from corpora
   * from MRDs
   * syntactic and morphological bootstrapping
   * semantic boostrapping (role of prepositions, arguments, etc.)

- Role of representations for the interpretation of nominals:
   * techniques for recovering implicit information in nominals
   * interpretation and generation of nominals in descriptions of events
     and abstract objects in discourse
   * recovering implicit semantic relations in nominal compounds
   * defining implicit semantic relations between nominalizations and the
forms they are
     derived from



ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Federica Busa (Brandeis University)
Inderjeet Mani (The MITRE Corporation)
Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, Universite Paul Sabatier)

This call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can
be found at http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~federica/workshops/coling

Information about COLING-ACL'98 can be found at:
http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Papers are invited that address any of the topics listed above.
Maximum length is 8 pages (single-spaced) including figures and references.
Please use A4 or US letter format and set margins so that
the text lies within a rectangle of 6.5 x 9 inches (16.5 x 23 cm).
Use classical fonts such as Times Roman or Computer Modern,
11 to 12 points for text, 14 to 16 points for headings and title.
LaTeX users are encouraged to use the style file provided
by COLING-ACL'98: http://coling-acl98.iro.umontreal.ca/colaclsub.sty

Authors should send 5 copies in either electronic (PostScript or Latex)
or hard-copy format to:



Federica Busa
Computer Science Department
Volen Center for Complex Systems
Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts 02254
U.S.A.
federica@cs.brandeis.edu


Criteria for selection will include clarity, originality, relevance, and
significance of results.

DEALDLINES

Deadline for submission: March 15th, 1998
Notification of authors: May 1st, 1998
Final versions due: June 1, 1998


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Federica Busa (Brandeis University)
Bob Ingria (Psyche Systems Corporation)
Beth Levin (Northwestern University)
Inderjeet Mani (The MITRE Corporation)
Paul Portner (Georgetown University)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University)
Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, Universite Paul Sabatier)
Antonio Sanfilippo (SHARP Laboratories of Europe)
Evelyne Viegas (CRL, New Mexico State University)
Piek Vossen (University of Amsterdam)