Natural Language based Knowledge Representations: New Perspectives Special Track at the 18th International FLAIRS Conference In cooperation with the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Adam's Mark Hotel Clearwater Beach, FL May 16-18, 2005 Paper submission deadline: Friday, October 22, 2004. Notifications sent by: Wednesday, January 7, 2005. Final papers due: Friday, February 4, 2005. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Track Coordinator Vasile Rus The University of Memphis Fedex Institute of Technology ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Call for Papers Goal We define Natural Language based Knowledge Representation as a representation that is closer to NL as opposed to being more artificial. The intuition is that such representations will be more expressive, or at least borrow as much as possible from the expressiveness of NL. The goal of this Special Track is to re-assess the status of Natural Language (NL) based Knowledge Representations (KR) and systems. It was believed that NL-based KR systems would deliver representational and inferential properties of natural language but the hard issues in NL such as ambiguity, context-dependency and the complexity of syntax, semantics and pragmatics limited in the past the progress of building promising knowledge processing systems. Among the advantages of building NL-based KR systems are: 1. NL-based systems would be user friendly 2. Most human knowledge is encoded and transmitted via natural language and thus NL-based KR are a natural development 3. searching on the Internet has become a necessity and a daily task for most of us; natural language is heavily used in this task since more than 90% of the web information is textual 4. NL-based knowledge processing sytems would provide a uniform symbolic representation for encoding knowledge and processing it 5. it is hard to match expressiveness and precision of natural language, particularly in not (well) formalized domains Recent advances of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the areas of syntactic parsing, semantics and pragmatics have opened new perspectives for developing expressive KR and building promising NL-based knowledge processing systems. A special track to re-assess the new perspectives is needed and this Special Track aims to satisfy this need. Topics We invite highly original papers that describe: 1. novel, expressive NL-based representations 2. multi-level representations 3. NL-based inference methods and reasoning engines 4. evaluation techniques for NL-based KR 5. challenges in NL-based representations and in deriving such representations from NL texts, especially how recent advances in NL technologies provide new opportunities for knowledge aquisition and processing 6. techniques for coreference resolution, word sense disambiguation, information extraction, predicate-argument structure, frame semantics, preposition semantics, syntactic parsing, named entity recognition, etc. and their impact on NL-based KR 7. NL-based KR in dialogue management 8. NL-based KR in Question/Query Answering 9. NL-based KR in auto tutoring systems 10. NL-based KR in Information Retrieval 11. large knowledge bases construction using NL-based KR 12. scalability issues of systems built using NL-based KR 13. other related issues Submission Guidelines Interested authors should format their papers according to AAAI formatting guidelines. The papers should not exceed 6 pages and are due by October 22, 2004. Please note the change from 5 to 6 pages from the first CFP. Additional pages (7 and more) have to be cleared by the program chairs and will be $100 each. The papers should not identify the author(s) in any manner. Authors should indicate the special track if one exists that closely matches the topic of their paper. All submissions will be done electronically via the FLAIRS web submission system available through the paper submission site at http://earth.cs.ccsu.edu/~flairs/submission.html. Conference Proceedings Papers will be refereed and all accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings which will be published by AAAI Press. Selected authors will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to a special issue of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT) to be published in 2006. Organizing Committee Vasile Rus, Indiana University Vivi Nastase, University of Ottawa Programme Committee Jerry Hobbs, USC/ISI Andrew Gordon, USC/ICT Art Graesser, University of Memphis Bob Givan, Purdue University Lucja Iwanska, Georgia Southwestern State University Fernando Gomez, University of Central Florida Susan Haller, University of Wisconsin - Parkside Tudor Muresan, Technical University of Cluj Stephen Anthony, University of Sydney Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University Diana Inkpen, University of Ottawa Zdravko Markov, Central Connecticut State University Vasile Rus, Indiana University Vivi Nastase, University of Ottawa Boris Galitsky, University of London David Ahn, University of Amsterdam Valentin Jijkoun, University of Amsterdam Max Louwerse, University of Memphis Paul Morarescu, University of Texas at Dallas Andrew Olney, Fedex Institute of Technology Zygmunt Vetulani, Adam Mickiewicz University Further Information Questions regarding the NL-based KR track should be addressed to the track co-chairs: Vasile Rus at vasile@cs.iusb.edu Viviana Nastase at vnastase@csi.uottawa.ca Questions regarding paper submission should be addressed to the FLAIRS-2005 program co-chairs: Ingrid Russell, irussell@hartford.edu, University of Hartford Zdravko Markov, markovz@ccsu.edu, Central Connecticut State University General questions concerning the conference should be addressed to the FLAIRS-2005 conference co-chairs: Diane Cook, University of Texas at Arlington Lawrence Holder, University of Texas at Arlington Special Tracks Coordinator Todd Neller, Gettysburg College Invited Speakers Lawrence Hunter, University of Colorado Martha Pollack, University of Michigan Ted Senator, DARPA David Stork, Ricoh and Stanford University Conference Web Sites Paper submission site: http://earth.cs.ccsu.edu/~flairs/submission.html NL-based KR special track web page: http://logica.iusb.edu/flairs05.html FLAIRS-2005 conference web page: http://www.flairs.com Florida AI Research Society (FLAIRS): http://www.flairs.com