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CALL FOR PAPERS

Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing: 
    Paraphrase Acquisition and Applications

    July 11, 2003, in Sapporo, Japan 
    in conjunction with ACL-2003 (WS5)
    http://nlp.nagaokaut.ac.jp/IWP2003/


BACKGROUND
           
A common characteristic of human languages is the possibility to convey
the same information in several ways. Paraphrases, which in the literature
have also been referred to as variants, reformulations, or inference rules,
span a wide range of variation:

  - article / paper / publication
  - Oswald killed Kennedy. / Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald.
  - a plant in Alabama / the Alabama plant
  - Edison invented the light bulb. / Edison's invention of the light bulb
  - He plays better than everybody else in the team. / He's the best in the team.
  - The tree healed its wounds by growing new bark. / 
    The tree healed its wounds. It grew new bark.
  - The stapler costs $10. / The price of the stapler is $10.
  - Where is Thimphu located? / Thimphu is the capital of what country?

This diversity of expression presents a major challenge for many NLP
applications. Thus, automatic paraphrase identification and generation
can benefit a broad range of NLP tasks, including machine translation,
summarization, information retrieval, question answering, generation,
and authoring and reading assistance.

Previous workshops on paraphrasing:
  - Workshop on Automatic Paraphrasing, November 2001
      accompanying the NLPRS2001 conference, with 55 participants
      http://nlp.nagaokaut.ac.jp/pub/NLPRS2001WS.html
  - Workshop on Automatic Paraphrasing (in Japanese), March 2001
      accompanying Japanese NLP conference, with 165 participants
      http://nlp.nagaokaut.ac.jp/pub/NLP2001WS.html


TOPICS OF INTEREST

The workshop will be open to any research topic related to paraphrases.
More specifically, topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  * definition and typology of paraphrases
  * representation of paraphrases
  * algorithms for recognizing, generating and choosing among paraphrases
  * construction of paraphrase resources
  * existing and potential applications of paraphrases:
    - question answering, summarization, information retrieval,
      machine translation, authoring and reading assistance
    - inferencing with paraphrases
  * evaluation of paraphrase algorithms and resources

Special topic: Paraphrase Acquisition

The increased availability of parallel corpora and comparable corpora
has opened up possibilities for automatic paraphrase acquisition.  As
we have recently witnessed, a number of new methods for paraphrase
extraction have emerged.

The availability of appropriate evaluation techniques is a key part of
a progress in the area.  Is it possible to create a common benchmark
for evaluating different paraphrase extraction approaches?  On which
terms should different acquisition approaches be compared? How can we
define the notion of baseline?


Another important objective of the workshop is to take a first step
towards a standardized paraphrase resource that could be shared among
a large variety of researchers.

  "SOMETHING_1 costs MONETARY_QUANTITY_2"
  :is-equivalent-to "the price of SOMETHING_1 is MONETARY_QUANTITY_2"
  :can-be-inferred-from "to sell SOMETHING_1 for MONETARY_QUANTITY_2"

Such a resource, with possibly tens of thousands of entries such as
the one above (in one format or another), can be viewed as a valuable
extension of WordNet and holds great promise to advance many areas of
natural language processing.


SUBMISSIONS

Paper submissions must be anonymous and are limited to at most 8 pages
including references, figures etc.  Authors are encouraged (but not
required) to use the ACL style format of the main conference. Only
electronic submissions will be accepted. Please email your submission
in pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS Word to the following address:

  iwp2003-submission@nlp.nagaokaut.ac.jp

Each submission should also specify the author's name, affiliation,
postal address, email address and title in the body of the email message.
For more information, please make contact with the workshop co-chairs:

  Kentaro Inui, NAIST: inui@is.aist-nara.ac.jp
  Ulf Hermjakob, ISI:  ulf@isi.edu


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline:    April 21, 2003
Notification of acceptance:   May 14, 2003
Camera-ready manuscripts due: May 26, 2003
Workshop date:                July 11, 2003


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

  Kentaro Inui, Co-Chair, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
  Ulf Hermjakob, Co-Chair, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA
  Regina Barzilay, Cornell University, USA
  Mark Dras, Macquarie University, Australia
  Satoshi Sato, Kyoto University, Japan
  Kazuhide Yamamoto, Nagaoka Univ. of Tech./ATR, Japan

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

  Bruce Croft, University of Massachusetts, USA
  Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
  Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
  Christian Jacquemin, LIMSI, France
  Hongyan Jing, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
  Gen'ichiro Kikui, ATR, Japan
  Judith Klavans, Columbia University, USA
  Helen Langone, Princeton (WordNet team), USA
  Maria Lapata, University of Edinburgh, UK
  Dekang Lin, University of Alberta, Canada
  Daniel Marcu, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA
  Teruko Mitamura, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  Hiroshi Nakagawa, Tokyo University, Japan
  Patrick Pantel, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
  Harold Somers, Univ. of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, UK
  Karen Sparck-Jones, University of Cambridge, UK
  Manfred Stede, Universitaet Potsdam, Germany
  Ralph Weischedel, BBN, USA
  Yujie Zhang, CRL, Japan
  Chengqing Zong, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PRC
  Ingrid Zukerman, Monash University, Australia