------------------------------------------------------------- *** CALL FOR PAPERS *** 5th workshop on INFERENCE IN COMPUTATIONAL SEMANTICS ICoS-5 Buxton, England, 20-21 April 2006 http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~ipratt/ICoS-5/ Submission deadline: 16 January 2006 Endorsed by SIGSEM, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Special Interest Group (SIG) on computational semantics. ------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT ICOS ---------- Natural Language Processing has reached a stage where the exploration and development of inference is one of its most pressing tasks. On the theoretical side, it is clear that inference plays a key role in such areas as semantic construction and the management of discourse and dialogue. On the practical side, the use of sophisticated inference methods could lead to improvements in application areas such as natural language generation, automatic question answering, and spoken dialogue systems. ICoS-5 is intended to bring together researchers interested in inference-oriented NLP from areas such as Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Formal Semantics, and Logic. We invite submissions addressing the theme of inference in computational semantics broadly construed. Subjects relevant to ICoS-5 include but are not restricted to: - natural language generation - natural language pragmatics - discourse and dialogue processing - (spoken) dialogue systems - underspecified representations - ambiguity resolution - interfacing lexical and computational semantics - lexically-driven inference - inference for shallow semantics - inference in question answering - recognising textual entailment - background knowledge: use and acquisition - applications of semantic resources (e.g. CYC, WordNet, FrameNet, PropBank, ontologies) - automatic ontology creation - common-sense reasoning in NLP - temporal and epistemic reasoning - resource-bounded inference - applications of automated reasoning (e.g. model building, model checking, theorem proving) - alternative inference strategies (e.g. abduction, nonmonotonic reasoning, default) - decidable fragments of natural language - controlled languages - natural language inference in decidable logics (e.g. description logic) - probabilistic and statistical approaches to inference - machine learning and inference - inference and information extraction and/or text mining - novel applications (e.g. semantic web) - evaluation methodolgies and resources for inference - robustness and scalability of inference - system descriptions Submitted papers should not exceed 10 pages (A4, single column, 12 point font) including references. All submissions must be in PDF, and must be sent by email to icos5@coli.uni-sb.de. SYSTEM DEMONSTRATIONS --------------------- We also encourage submission of papers describing systems that show aspects of inference in computational semantics. There will be a separate slot at the workshop where people can demonstrate their systems. System descriptions should follow the same submission guidelines as regular papers. IMPORTANT DATES --------------- Submission Deadline: January 16, 2006. Notification: February 20, 2006. Final Versions: March 20, 2006. Conference: April 20-21, 2006. INVITED SPEAKERS ---------------- TBA PROGRAM COMMITTEE ----------------- Carlos Areces Peter Baumgartner Christoph Benzmueller Raffaella Bernardi Patrick Blackburn Johan Bos (co-chair) Harry Bunt Ann Copestake Dick Crouch Ido Dagan Kees van Deemter Nissim Francez Alexander Koller (co-chair) Shalom Lappin Alex Lascarides Bernardo Magnini Katja Markert Dan Moldovan Jeff Pelletier Maarten de Rijke Michael Schiehlen Matthew Stone Bonnie Webber PUBLICATION ----------- As well as producing the workshop proceedings, we plan to publish a selection of accepted papers as a book or special issue of a journal.