Natural Language and Knowledge Representation
 

For a long time, the Knowledge Representation (KR) community has dismissed the idea that Natural Language (NL) can be a KR. That's because NL can be very ambiguous and there are syntactic and semantic processing complexities associated with it. However, researchers in both communities have started looking at this issue again. Possibly, it has to do with the NLP community making some progress in terms of processing and handling ambiguity, the KR community realising that a lot of knowledge is already 'coded' in NL and that one should reconsider the way they handle expressivity and ambiguity.

This track is an attempt to provide a forum for discussion on this front, and to bridge a gap between NLP and KR. A KR in this track has a well-defined syntax, semantics and a proof theory. It should be clear what authors mean by NL-like, based on NL or benefiting from NL (if they are using one). It does not have to be a novel representation.

Topics

For this track, we will invite submissions including, but not limited to:

%G•%@ A novel NL-like KR or building on an existing one
%G•%@ Reasoning systems that benefit from properties of NL to reason with NL
%G•%@ Semantic representation used as a KR : compromise between expressivity and efficiency?
%G•%@ More Expressive KR for NL understanding (Any compromise?)
%G•%@ Any work exploring how existing representations fall short of addressing some problems involved in modelling, manipulating or reasoning (whether reasoning as used to get an interpretation for a certain utterance, exchange of utterances or what utterances follow from other utterances) with NL documents
%G•%@ Representations that show how classical logics are not as efficient, transparent, expressive or where a one-step application of an inference rule require more (complex) steps in a classical environment and vice-versa; i.e. how classical logics are more powerful, etc.
%G•%@ Building a reasoning test collection for natural language understanding systems: any kind of reasoning (deductive, abductive, etc); for a deductive test suite see for e.g. deliverable 16 of the FraCas project (http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~fracas/). Also, look at textual entailment challenges 1 and 2 (http://www.pascal-network.org/Challenges/RTE).
%G•%@ Comparative results (on a common test suite or a common task) of different representations or systems that reason with NL (again any kind of reasoning). The comparison could be either for efficiency, transparency or expressivity
%G•%@ Knowledge acquisition systems or techniques that benefit from properties of NL to acquire knowledge already "coded" in NL
%G•%@ Automated Reasoning, Theorem Proving and KR communities views on all this.

Important dates

Submission of papers: November 21, 2005
Notification of acceptance: January 20, 2006
Camera-ready version due: February 13, 2006

Publication

Selected papers will be considered for publication in the Journal of Logic and Computation in the 2nd half of 2006.

Submission details

Submitted papers must be original, and not submitted concurrently to a journal or another conference. The proceedings of FLAIRS will be published by the AAAI. Papers must be prepared using the AAAI instructions for authors (http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/authorinstructions.pdf), and may be up to 6 pages. Reviewers will be asked to focus on the technical content of the papers, so that all reviews are substantive, providing expert constructive feedback to the authors.

Papers must be submitted in PDF format through the online submission system (http://www.easychair.org/FLAIRS-2006/submit/). Authors of accepted papers will be required to sign a form transferring copyright of their contribution to AAAI. An author of each accepted paper is required to register and attend FLAIRS, and present the paper.
 

    * http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady0641/Flairs06_NL_KR