CALL FOR PAPERS


Semantic Web Meets Language Resources

Held in conjunction with the
Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide/events/AAAI02-ws.html

Researchers in AI are deeply involved in Semantic Web development, 
working on such topics as standardized ontologies, formal foundations 
for ontologies, new representation languages and the adaptation of old 
languages to the web.

At the same time, researchers in computational linguistics are 
developing means to adequately represent linguistically annotated data, 
with the goal of developing formats and standards that will eventually 
enable full exploitation of the information represented. They are 
increasingly turning toward resources developed within the XML framework 
such as the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) to model the information 
in ways that will allow for maximal flexibility and extensibility. This 
demands, in turn, development of abstract models that capture the 
properties of linguistic annotations at various levels of specificity, 
and development of ontologies to represent them. The need to develop and 
standardize representation formats for linguistic data and its 
annotations has grown to the point where a new working group has been 
formed within the International Standards Organization (ISO) to oversee 
this activity. However, much of this activity is going on with only 
superficial knowledge of developments in the framework of the Semantic 
Web and the potential for accessing and exploiting information that it 
is intended to eventually allow.

This workshop is intended to bring together researchers in AI who are 
working on the Semantic Web and those involved in the development of 
standards for linguistic annotation, to enable an exchange of 
information and ideas. This is a critical point at which to bring 
together these two groups, who typically have little interaction. Those 
involved in developing language resources need to gain a deeper 
understanding of the potential of and requirements for the Semantic Web 
and standardized ontologies, and AI researchers, who are working on a 
general model, will gain insight by considering an application of their 
work to actual content and, more generally, by considering the needs for 
a specific domain that requires complex representation mechanisms and 
sophisticated means to exploit the information.

The workshop will consist of two invited talks providing an overview of 
current work in the areas of Semantic Web development, on the one hand, 
and language resource representation, on the other. This will be 
followed by 4-5 presentations detailing work in either or both areas 
and, where possible, outlining needs that may be met by the other 
community. A panel discussion and open discussion in the afternoon will 
attempt to identify areas and means for collaboration and continued 
development.

We invite short proposals for workshop presentations, addressing any of 
the following topics:

- representing meaning in natural languages using ontological support 
and/or practical applications of such ontological-semantic work;

- problems for representing linguistic data, including the need to 
accommodate potentially different theoretical approaches in a common 
framework, inadequacies of current means to represent linguistic 
annotations, and requirements for "annotation ontologies";

- potential for exploiting inferencing capabilities etc. in 
linguistically annotated data, and the representation requirements that 
will enable this;

- techniques for combining statistical and non-statistical approaches to 
ontology development.

Proposals should be approximately 2 pages in length, providing an 
overview of the work to be described. For papers addressing work 
primarily in the area of ontology development or primarily concerned 
with linguistic annotation, a clear statement of the relevance and/or 
applicability of work in the other domain should be provided.

The Program Committee will select 4-5 proposals for presentation at the 
workshop, with the overall goal of assuring a balance in the 
presentation topics. Authors of accepted papers will then be invited to 
submit a full paper of approximately 10 pages in length, which will be 
included in a special issue of a major international journal.

Submissions


Please send proposals in ASCII, postscript, pdf, or word rtf format to 
aaai02-ws@cs.vassar.edu

- Submission deadline: March 15, 2002
- Notification date: April 19, 2002
- Final date for camera-ready copies to organizers: May 3, 2002


Workshop Organizers


Nancy Ide
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520
Tel: (+1 845) 437 5988
Fax: (+1 845) 437 7498
Email: ide@cs.vassar.edu


Chris Welty
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0462
Tel: (+1 845) 437 5992
Fax: (+1 845) 437 7498
Email: welty@cs.vassar.edu

Program Commitee

Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany
Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC-CNR, Italy
Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University, USA
Aldo Gangemi, ITBM-CNR, Italy
Nicola Guarino, LADSEB-CNR, Italy
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
Atanas Kiryakov, SIRMA Ontotext Lab, Bulgaria
Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico State University, USA
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA
Laurent Romary, LORIA/INRIA, France