********************************************************* CALL for PAPERS Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions 28th June, 2007 Prague, Czech Republic http://csserver.ucd.ie/~fintanc/acl2007/prepositions.html ********************************************************* Workshop Description The Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions will be hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and will take place on June 28th in Prague, Czech Republic. Background Prepositions, postpositions and other adpositions have received a considerable amount of interest in recent years, due to their importance in computational tasks. For instance, in NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have attracted a lot of attention, and different machine learning techniques have been employed with varying success. Researchers from linguistics, artificial intelligence and psycholinguistics have examined spatial and temporal aspects of prepositions,their cross- linguistic differences, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts, the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations and their semantics in situated dialog. In languages like English and German, phrasal verbs have also been the subject of considerable research, ranging from the development of techniques for their automatic extraction from corpora to methods for determining their semantics. In other languages, like Romance languages or Hindi, the focus has been either on the incorporation of the preposition or its inclusion in the prepositional phrase. All these configurations are important both semantically and syntactically in natural language understanding and processing. Building on the success of three previous workshops on prepositions (held in Toulouse, 2003, Colchester, 2005 and Sydney, 2006), the aim of the fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions is to bring together researchers from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the syntax, semantics, description, representation and cross-linguistic aspects of prepositions. We intend this workshop to promote collaboration among researchers interested in different aspects of prepositions, and hope that it will advance understanding of these important components of language. Topics Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics: + Multilingual & crosslinguistic aspects of prepositions: - multilingual and contrastive descriptions (mismatches, incorporation, divergences) - prepositions in human and machine translation (for example, issues of automatic word alignment) - prepositions in parallel corpus annotation (for example, sense disambiguation using parallel texts) - prepositions in cross-language information retrieval + Description and representation of prepositions: - prepositions in lexical resources (including WordNet, Framenet, and other ontologies) - prepositions in syntactically annotated corpora (Treebanks), productive versus collocation uses, prepositions and thematic roles - Word-sense disambiguation of prepositions (as in the SemEval preposition task to run at ACL-2007) + Applications: - using prepositions in applications such as machine translation, grammar and style checking systems - information extraction or language generation, situated dialog systems (robot interfaces, embodied conversational agents) + Cognitive dimensions of prepositions: - how different kinds of prepositions are acquired/interpreted/represented in human cognition - how different kinds of preposition provide distinct challenges to a reasoning system and how they can be handled Submissions Authors are invited to submit either full papers or short papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Full papers should be up to 8 pages in length; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Where appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. Short papers should be up to 6 pages in length; they can describe work in progress rather than completed work, or smaller-scale implementation/experimentation. Presentations for short papers will be proportionally shorter than presentations for full papers. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the workshop, and interest to the attendees. Submissions should be formatted using the ACL 2007 stylefiles without overt author and affiliation information and not exceeding 8 pages. The ACL stylefiles are available at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles/ The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. Submission will be electronic, using the START paper submission website. The submission deadline is March 26th, 2007. The START submission page for this workshop is http://www.softconf.com/acl07/ACL07-WS11/submit.html Important Dates Paper Submission deadline: March 26th, 2007 Notification of acceptance: April 20th, 2007 Camera-ready papers due: May 9th, 2007 Workshop date: June 28th, 2007 Organising Committee Fintan Costello (University College Dublin, Ireland) John Kelleher (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) Martin Volk (Stockholms Universitet, Sweden) Address any queries regarding the workshop to: prepositions2007@ucd.ie Programme Committee Doug Arnold (University of Essex, UK) Boban Arsenijevic (University of Leiden, Netherlands) Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia) Collin Baker (University of California Berkeley, USA) John Beavers (Stanford University, USA) Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy) Markus Egg (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) Anette Frank (DFKI, Germany) Tracy Holloway King (PARC, USA) Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany) Ken Litkowski (CL Research, USA) Tom O'Hara (Convera Inc., USA) Hidetosi Sirai (Chukyo University, Japan) Beata Trawinski (University of Tübingen, Germany) Jesse Tseng (Loria, France) Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Feiyu Xu (DFKI, Germany) Joost Zwarts (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)