Call for Papers for
			      Special Issue of Computational
			      Linguistics
				on Prepositions in Applications


				   SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31, 2006

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GUEST EDITORS

Aline Villavicencio
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Valia Kordoni
Saarland University and DFKI GmbH, Germany

Timothy Baldwin
University of Melbourne, Australia and NICTA Victoria Research Labs

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CONTENTS:

1. THE SPECIAL ISSUE
2. TOPICS OF INTEREST
3. SUBMISSION INFORMATION

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1. THE SPECIAL ISSUE

The special issue will concentrate on the theoretical aspects of
computational research on prepositions. Due to their importance
in computational tasks prepositions, as well as prepositional
phrases and markers of various sorts, have received a considerable
amount of attention and occupied a central position in research
in Computational Linguistics (CL) and Language Technology (LT),
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP),
as well as Computational Psycholinguistics (CP).  Researchers
from these backgrounds and CL-related disciplines have looked
at the role of prepositions in shallow and deep language processing.

Despite increasing awareness of the importance of prepositions in NLP
tasks, very little progress has been made in systematically describing
preposition semantics. Notably, the only account of the lexical
semantics of prepositions in resources such as WordNet, FrameNet and
PropBank is indirect, in that they feature in significant numbers
within multiword expressions or as frame elements. If prepositions are
to be incorporated into such resources as first-order entities, a
large number of issues must be resolved such as how to taxonomically
deconstruct the spatial semantics of prepositions, how to delineate
preposition senses, and how to tease apart preposition and verb
semantics in phrasal verbs. Our expectation is that such questions
will be guided by careful analysis of what semantic distinctions and
representational granularity are required in a range of applications,
which will in turn be guided by such research as the representation of
prepositions within implemented grammars, crosslingual preposition
semantics, machine perception and visualisation of preposition
semantics, and computational models of the human processing of
prepositions.

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2. TOPICS OF INTEREST

For the proposed special issue we specifically invite submissions that
bring a theoretical basis to research on prepositions in lexical
resources and NLP tasks of the sort described above. In particular, we
focus on the syntactic and semantic treatment of productive and
collocation uses of prepositional phrases and markers in resources
such as WordNet and FrameNet, and the utilization of such resources in
NLP tasks, such as Machine Translation, IE/IR and QA.

* Extraction of Prepositions:
There has been considerable research into extraction of prepositions
and related constructions (e.g. phrasal verbs). Papers which describe
the extraction of these constructions, including their
subcategorisation
frames and alternation patterns, as are necessary for the
semi-automatic
extension of lexical resources are particularly welcome.

* Representation of Prepositions in Lexical Resources:
We encourage papers describing the challenges of providing adequate
representation of prepositions and related constructions such as would
be
generally applicable in NLP applications.

* Prepositions in Applications:
We invite papers that discuss the role of prepositions in NLP tasks,
focusing specifically on what insights various applications offer
for lexical resource building, what particular needs different
application areas have (e.g. what an ideal prepositional lexical
resource would be like), necessary extensions to existing resources,
and how prepositional lexical resources of various types could enhance
performance over a given task like MT, IR, QA and multi-modal systems.

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3. SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Deadline for paper submissions: July 31, 2006.

All submissions will be subject to the normal peer review process
for this journal. Submissions are to be done electronically in
pdf format, by sending the paper to the editors at the following email
address:

cl-prep@unimelb.edu.au

Papers must conform to the Computational Linguistics specifications,
which are available at:

      http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/compling/style.html .

Any initial queries should be addressed to:

cl-prep@unimelb.edu.au