Call for Workshop Papers

Second International Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding

ScaNaLU 2004

May 6, 2004, following HLT/NAACL, Boston, MA

http://www.eml-development.de/SCANALU2004

There is a growing need for systems that can understand and generate
natural language in applications that require substantial amounts of knowledge
as well as reasoning capabilities.  Most current implemented systems for 
natural language understanding (NLU) are decoupled from any reasoning 
processes, which makes them narrow and brittle. Furthermore, they do not 
appear to be scalable in the sense that the techniques used in such systems 
do not appear to generalize to more complex applications. While significant 
work has been done in developing theoretical underpinnings of systems that 
use knowledge and reasoning (e.g., development of models of linguistic 
interpretation using abductive reasoning, intention recognition, formal 
models of dialogue, formal models of lexical and utterance meaning, and 
utterance planning), it has often proved difficult to utilize such theories 
in robust working systems. Another major barrier has been the vast amount 
of linguistic and world knowledge needed. But there is now significant 
progress in compiling the required knowledge, using manual,
statistical and hybrid techniques. But even as these resources become
available, we still lack some key conceptual and computational frameworks 
that will form the foundation for effective scalable natural language systems.

There are many applications that would be enabled or benefit greatly
from scalable language systems, including, the design of smart user
interfaces that act more as a personal assistant than a computer, intelligent 
tutoring systems that can fully engage the student in responsive interaction, 
machine translation systems, text and message understanding, and natural 
language interfaces to knowledge management systems that move beyond data 
based queries to enable planning, situational analysis, and other cognitive 
capabilities

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: The format and length requirements will be the
same as for full papers of NAACL/HLT 2004, except that submission will not 
be blind. See http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~pablo/hlt-naacl04/callpapers.html 
for details.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Papers should be sent to
scanalu2004@eml-d.villa-bosch.de.
The paper should be an attachment in PDF format and the heading on the
email should read "PAPER SUBMISSION". Notification of acceptance or rejection
will be sent to the originating email address.

LANGUAGE: all papers must be written and presented in English

IMPORTANT DATES:
Papers due: January 21, 2004
Acceptance/rejection notification: February 21, 2004
Final version due: March 8, 2004
Conference: May 6, 2004

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
James Allen, Rochester
Jerry Feldman, Berkeley
Rainer Malaka, Heidelberg
Johanna Moore, Edinburgh
Robert Porzel, Heidelberg

PROGRAM COMMITTEE 
to be announced

SCOPE/AUDIENCE

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers involved using
knowledge representations and reasoning systems to support language 
understanding and generation, The goal is to find common ground and 
exchange ideas in the fields of ontology, semantics, representation, 
reasoning, and pragmatics, etc. in order to strengthen individual 
approaches and combine modelling efforts.

In the ScaNaLU 2004 workshop we intend to bring together researchers
working in various sub-fields of natural language understanding with an 
interest in building scalable systems. The scope of interest includes 
but is not limited to:

- Integrating hybrid approaches combining knowledge-based and
statistical approaches
- Multi-modal interfaces including language understanding in
knowledge-rich domains
- Natural Language Generation: From sentences to extended discourse
- Utilization of world knowledge into NLU systems
- Semantic formalisms for scalable NLU
- Knowledge-driven discourse models of NLU (e.g., speech act
interpretation, implicature, intention recognition, reference
resolution)
- Representation standards
- Integration of extra-linguistic and pragmatic contexts
- (Semi-)automatic acquisition of linguistic and world knowledge
- Theories of semantic and pragmatic phenomena (e.g., metonymy,
metaphor, degree expressions)
- Applications requiring deep semantic analysis and reasoning

WORKSHOP FORMAT AND SCHEDULE:

The workshop will interleave technical presentations with extensive time
for discussion of the presented work. Before the workshop we will assign a
commentator for each accepted presentation from the attendees, in order
to kick off a lively discussion. Altogether the format will consist of four
elements:

     - Paper presentations with commentators and discussion
     - Invited talk(s)
     - Application and device demonstrations with discussion
     - Panel discussion

We will accept paper submissions for both technical presentations and
demonstrations. We plan to be reasonably selective in order to have a
high quality workshop. The papers will be published in workshop proceedings
and we will try to forward the best ones to some high quality journal.