ACL 2004 WORKSHOP 

2nd Workshop on TEXT MEANING and INTERPRETATION
25-26 July 2004, Barcelona

In conjunction with the 42nd annual meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (www.acl2004.org)

Workshop home page: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gh/TextMeaning.html

Overview

This 1.5-day workshop will continue the success of the 2003 Workshop
on Text Meaning, which was held at HLT/NAACL-2003 in Edmonton.  It
aims to:

* Re-establish the research community of knowledge-based
      interpretation of text meaning.
* Explicate the implicit treatments of meaning in current
      knowledge-lean approaches and how they and knowledge-rich 
      methods can work together.
* Emphasize the construction of systems that extract, represent,
      manipulate, and interpret the meaning of text (rather than theoretical
      and formal methods in semantics).

Most, if not all, high-end NLP applications -- such as machine
translation, question answering and text summarization -- stand to
benefit from being able to use text meaning in their processing.  But
the bulk of work in the field in recent years has not pertained to
treatment of meaning.  The main reason given is the complexity of the
task of comprehensive meaning analysis and interpretation.

Computational linguistics has always been interested in meaning, of
course.  The tradition of formal semantics, logics, and common-sense
reasoning system has been continuously maintained for many years.  But
also, much work has been devoted to building practical, increasingly
broad-coverage meaning-oriented analysis and synthesis systems.
Lexical semantics has made significant progress in theories,
description, and processing.  Formal aspects of ontology work have
also been studied.  The Semantic Web has further popularized the need
for automatic extraction, representation, and manipulation of text
meaning: for the Semantic Web to really succeed, capability of
automatically marking text for content is essential, and this cannot
be attained reliably using only knowledge-lean, semantics-poor
methods.

While there has recently been a flurry of specialized meetings devoted
to formal semantics, lexical semantics, semantic web, formal ontology
and others, the number of meetings devoted to knowledge-based text
meaning processing -- content rather than formalism -- has been much
smaller.  The first Workshop on Text Meaning began to remedy this, and
ten papers were presented on implemented systems and on related
topics.  


Suggested Topics
(not necessarily limited to the following)

* Implemented systems that extract, represent, or manipulate text meaning.
* Broad-coverage semantic analysis and interpretation.
* Knowledge-based text synthesis.
* The nature of text meaning required for various practical
   broad-coverage applications.
* Manual annotation of text meaning, including interlingual annotations.
* Pragmatics and discourse issues as parts of meaning extraction and
   manipulation.
* Ontologies supporting automatic processing of text meaning.
* Semantic lexicons.
* Microtheories to support text meaning extraction and
   manipulation: aspect, modality, reference, etc.
* Text meaning representations in semantic analysis.
* Reasoning to support semantic analysis and synthesis.
* Multilingual aspects of meaning representation and manipulation.
* Integrating semantic analysis and non-semantic language processing.
* Semantic analysis and synthesis systems based on knowledge-lean
   stochastic corpus-oriented methods. 

We encourage discussion of theoretical issues that are relevant to
computational applications, including descriptions of processors and
static knowledge resources.  We specifically prefer discussions of
content and meaning over discussions of formalisms for encoding
meaning, and discussions of decision heuristics in processing over
discussions of generic processing architectures and theorem-proving
mechanisms.


Submission Procedure

Submit papers electronically (no more than 8 pages in the ACL
two-column format available at www.acl2004.org), PDF strongly
preferred, to gh@cs.toronto.edu

Deadlines

* Paper submission		1 April 2004 
* Notification re acceptance	30 April 2004
* Camera-ready version due	16 May 2004  
* Workshop dates		25-26 July 2004


Organizers

* Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto  (gh@cs.toronto.edu)
* Sergei Nirenburg, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (sergei@umbc.edu)

Program Committee

* Jan Alexandersson (DFKI Saarbrücken)
* Collin Baker (ICSI Berkeley)
* Peter Clark (Boeing)
* Dick Crouch (PARC)
* Richard Kittredge (University of Montreal)
* Paul Kingsbury (Penn)
* Tanya Korelsky (CoGenTex, Inc.)
* Claudia Leacock (ETS Technologies)
* Dan Moldovan (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Antonio Moreno Ortiz  (University of Málaga)
* Martha Palmer (University of Pennsylvania)
* Gerald Penn (University of Toronto)
* Victor Raskin (Purdue University)
* Ellen Riloff (University of Utah)
* Graeme Ritchie (University of Edinburgh)
* Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam)
* Karin Verspoor (Los Alamos National Labs)
* Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield)


Additional information
URL:  http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gh/TextMeaning.html

 Graeme Hirst
 Department of Computer Science
 University of Toronto
 Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4
 gh@cs.toronto.edu