First Call for Papers OLP2 - 2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population -- Bridging the Gap between Text and Knowledge Workshop at COLING/ACL 2006 July 22nd, 2006 Sydney, Australia Supported By SmartWeb (http://www.smartweb-projekt.de/) Topic and Motivation An ontology is an explicit and formal specification of a shared conceptualization of a domain of interest. Ontologies formalize the intensional aspects of a domain, whereas the extensional part is provided by a knowledge base that contains assertions about instances of concepts and relations as defined by the ontology. The process of defining and instantiating a knowledge base is referred to as knowledge markup or ontology population, whereas (semi-)automatic support in ontology development is usually referred to as ontology learning. Ontologies have been broadly used in knowledge management applications, including Semantic Web applications and research. In recent years, ontologies have regained interest also within the NLP community, specifically in such applications as information extraction, text mining and question answering. However, as ontology development is a tedious and costly process there has been an equally growing interest in the automatic learning of ontologies. Much of this work has been focused on textual data as human language is a primary mode of knowledge transfer. In this way, textual data provide both a resource for the ontology learning process as well as an application medium for developed ontologies. Automatic methods for text-based ontology learning and population have developed over recent years, but it is difficult to compare approaches and results. In the 1st Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population (at ECAI 2004, Spain) we addressed this issue through an emphasis on the evaluation aspects of the reported work. In the context of the 2nd workshop we intend to continue this emphasis by providing a common data set for participants to work with, consisting of an ontology and document collection in the football (soccer) domain and a corresponding automatically extracted knowledge base. Participants will be free to use this or other data, but are encouraged to use the common data set for their experiments in order to better compare results with other participants. Please notify the organizers your interest in this. An additional topic we intend to address at this workshop is the relation between NLP and ontology development, the communities of which are working on similar topics but using different terminology. As this leads to a confound communication, the potential for interdisciplinary work becomes much less pronounced. We therefore intend the workshop to contribute to an enhanced interdisciplinary understanding of tasks, methods and evaluations. Areas of Interest To provide a clear focus we request novel work on: - Concept formation on the basis of text - Learning concept hierarchies / non-taxonomic relations / rules / - axioms from text - Named-Entity Recognition with respect to an ontology - Ontology-based information extraction - Ontology learning for IE, IR, MT, QA - Gold standard and task-based evaluation of ontology learning, - e.g. in IE, IR, MT, QA Important Dates April 17th Submission Deadline May 17th Notification June 2nd Camera-ready Version July 22nd Workshop Submission Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. The papers must be submitted no later than April 17, 2006. Papers submitted after that time will not be reviewed. Organizing Committee Paul Buitelaar - DFKI, Germany Philipp Cimiano - AIFB, Univ. of Karlsruhe, Germany Berenike Loos - European Media Lab, Germany Program Committee Eneko Agirre - Basque Country University, Spain Enrique Alfonseca - Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles - IRIT- CNRS Toulouse, France Timothy Baldwin - University of Melbourne, Australia Roberto Basili - Universita di Roma "Tor Vergata", Italy Johan Bos - Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy Christopher Brewster - University of Sheffield, UK Nigel Collier - National Institute of Informatics, Japan Ido Dagan - Bar Ilan University, Israel Eric Gausier - XEROX XRCE, France Asuncion Gomez-Perez - Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain Marko Grobelnik - Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia Andreas Hotho - University of Kassel, Germany Eduard Hovy - USC, Information Sciences Institute, USA Vipul Kashyap - Partners HealthCare System, USA Bernardo Magnini - ITC-IRST, Italy Diana Maynard - University of Sheffield, UK Adeline Nazarenko - LIPN - Universite Paris-Nord, France Claire Nedellec - MIG, INRA, France George Paliouras - NCSR "Demokritos", Greece Robert Porzel - European Media Lab, Germany Marie-Laure Reinberger - Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium Marta Sabou - Knowledge Media Institute, UK Michael Sintek - DFKI, Germany Peter Spyns - Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Steffen Staab - University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany Vojtech Svatek - University of Economics, Prague, Czech Rep. Paola Velardi - Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy Dominic Widdows - MAYA Design, USA Workshop Registration All workshop participants must register for COLING/ACL 2006