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                 WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

          ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing


Date:      June, 28 (afternoon) and 29, 2007
Location:  Prague, in conjunction with ACL 2007

Workshop web page:   http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/WTEP
Conference web page: http://www.acl2007.org/
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Recognizing and generating textual entailment and paraphrase are regarded as
important technologies in a broad range of NLP applications, including machine
translation, information retrieval, information extraction, summarization,
question answering and text generation. Both textual entailment and paraphrasing
address relevant aspects of natural language semantics. Entailment is a
directional relation between two expressions in which one of them implies the
other, whereas paraphrase is a relation in which two expressions convey essentially
the same meaning. Indeed, paraphrase can be defined as bi-directional entailment.
While it may be debatable how such semantic definitions can be made well-founded,
in practice we have already seen evidence that such knowledge is essential for
many applications.

There have been two lines of workshops in this field. One is a series of three
workshops on paraphrase -- in Tokyo 2001, in Sapporo at ACL-2003 and in Jeju at
IJCNLP-2005.The other is the Workshop on Empirical Modeling of Semantic
Equivalence and Entailment (at ACL-2005), and two workshops of the previous
PASCAL Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) Challenges (2005 and 2006).
We combine those two lines of similar effort together at this workshop in order
to see the convergence of the field and exchange ideas among a wider audience.
The workshop has two parts, one is the general session where submission is open,
and the other is the concluding workshop of the 3rd PASCAL RTE Challenge. The
program will include general session papers and selected presentations and a poster
session of RTE-3 systems. See http://www.pascal-network.org/Challenges/RTE3/ for
details about the RTE-3 challenge (with result submission deadline on March 12).

This CFP calls for papers for the general session. Any research topic related to
textual entailment and paraphrasing in any language is welcome. More specifically,
topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Definitions of textual entailment and paraphrasing
* The relationship between the two problems
* Typology of entailment/paraphrasing
* Representation levels
* Utilizing background knowledge
* Acquisition methods (automatic and manual)
* Recognition and generation of textual entailment and paraphrasing
* Inference methods
* Existing and potential applications
* Computational modeling of linguistic theories of entailment/paraphrasing
* Open resources
* Evaluation methods
* Data analysis

Schedule
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Workshop Paper Submission deadline:       March 26, 2007
Notification of acceptance:   April 23, 2007
Camera ready due:   May 6, 2007
Workshop Date:                            June 28(pm)-29, 2007


Workshop Organizers
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General Session:
Satoshi Sekine (New York University)
Kentaro Inui (Nara Institute of Science and Technologies)

PASCAL RTE-3 Challenge:
Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University)
Bill Dolan (Microsoft Research)
Danilo Giampiccolo (CELTC)
Bernardo Magnini (ITC-irst)


Program Committee
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Caroline Brun (Xerox Research Centre Europe, France)
Johan Bos (University of Rome "La Sapienza")
Robert Dale (Macquarie University)
Mark Dras (Macquarie University)
Anette Frank (DFKI)
Ralph Grishman (New York University)
Sanda Harabagiu (University of Texas at Dallas)
Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
Yves Lepage (Universite de Caen)
Dekang Lin (Google)
Katja Markert (University of Leeds)
Chris Manning (Stanford University)
Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas)
Dan Moldovan (University of Texas at Dallas)
Patrick Pantel (ISI)
Kiyonori Ohtake (ATR)
Ellen Riloff (University of Utah)
Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Satoshi Sato (Nagoya University)
Hinrich Schuetze (University of Stuttgart)
Donia Scott (Open University)
Kentaro Torisawa (JAIST)
Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft)
Kazuhide Yamamoto (Nagaoka University of Technology)
Fabio Zanzotto (University of Milan)