CALL FOR PAPERS

 
           AAAI Workshop on Event Extraction and Synthesis 
            URL: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ashish/ee.htm     

 
(A workshop in conjunction with  AAAI-06, July 16th 2006, Boston, MA)

 

DESCRIPTION

The focus of this workshop is on the extraction and synthesis  of 
events from raw information in text or other modalities.  Event 
extraction from raw input is of significant interest for a variety 
of applications such as situational awarness systems, intelligence 
analysis etc. Consider the following sentence from a Voice of 
America news report: "The United Nations says Somali gunmen who 
hijacked a U.N.-chartered vessel carrying food aid for tsunami 
victims have released the ship after holding it for more than two 
months." This sentence expresses multiple events--a focal event (the 
release of a hijacked ship), and several contextual events providing 
a temporal and semantic framework for it.  Not only is an adequate 
accounting of this structure challenging, but the information 
contained in the event is often partial, subject to evolution over 
time, conflicting reports from other sources, and the question of 
trust in the source of the information.  Solving a task of this 
complexity appears to call for ideas from multiple disciplines, such 
as machine learning, natural language understanding, knowledge 
representation, data management, and linguistic theory related to 
language semantics.  It is ultimately not enough to label text 
spans; accounting for uncertainty, both that attached to a whole 
report, and any expressed in the report itself, requires measures of 
certainty and techniques for manipulating them. Such measures are a 
common subject in related disciplines (e.g., "information quality" 
in the context of multi-agent systems).  Also, while work on event 
extraction has mostly focused on text, events are certainly embedded 
in information streams in other modalities as well, such as audio 
and video.  The problem of corroborating uncertain information 
argues for approaches that span modalities.


The goals of this workshop are the following:

1. Obtain a clear understanding of the new challenges posed by event-
oriented information extraction vs. work done earlier in relation or 
entity extraction.

2. Discuss approaches and techniques, including combinations of 
techniques from different disciplines to perform efficient event 
extraction.

3. Identify unifying concepts valid for multiple modalities.

4. Grapple with questions of uncertainty and reliability, in an 
attempt to promote the use of uncertainty measures in extraction 
systems.

 

TOPICS OF INTEREST

We are particularly interested in position, vision, or research 
papers, and system demonstrations outlining or addressing challenges 
in the extraction of event oriented information. Topics of Interest 
include, but are not limited to:

%G•%@           Event definition, modeling, and representation 
%G•%@           The role of semantics in event extraction 
%G•%@           Combining multiple techniques (machine learning, 
            ontologies, NLP, structured machine learning, etc.,) for
            event extraction 
%G•%@           Audio, visual, and audio-visual event extraction 
%G•%@           Temporal aspects and evolution of extracted information 
%G•%@           Extracted information quality and pedigree
            (trustworthiness, uncertainty) 
%G•%@           Event identity and disambiguation, or event co-reference 
%G•%@           Evaluating event extraction systems 

 

SCHEDULE AND DEADLINES

Paper submission:       March 31, 2006
Notification:           April 24, 2006            

 
Please email inquiries and submissions 

to    events2006[at] ics [dot] uci [dot]edu   

 

ORGANIZERS

Doug Appelt, SRI 
Naveen Ashish, UC Irvine
Dayne Freitag, Fair Isaac Corporation
Dmitry Zelenko, SRA

Demonstrations Chair

Fabio Ciravegna,  University of Sheffield


More details at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ashish/ee.htm