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Workshop on Information Extraction and Knowledge Acquisition

http://sites.google.com/site/ranlpieka/

15 or 16 September 2011

in conjunction with
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
12-14 September 2011, Hissar, Bulgaria

(Apologies for cross-posting)

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CALL FOR PAPERS

*** Description
===============

Until a decade ago, the fields of information extractions (IE) and knowledge acquisition (KA) were limited to identifying and extracting named entities, semantic and ontological relations, events, templates, and facts in relatively small text corpora using a small variety of external resources such as gazetteers, thesauri, and lexical hierarchies.

Today everything has changed. The size of corpora has grown dramatically: using Gigaword-scale data is common, and it is almost standard to use the Web, which contains quadrillions of words, or at least the Web 1T 5-grams (Google n-gram corpus). More importantly, new types of communication have emerged, such as chats, blogs and, in the last 2-3 years, Twitter, whose informal language poses many challenges to automatic IE and KA, yet they are becoming increasingly important, e.g., for learning customer opinions on various products and services. Social network analysis is another emerging topic, where data is naturally much more interconnected than in the rest of the Web.

All these recent developments have posed not only new challenges, but have also created a number of opportunities, opening new research directions, and offering new useful resources. For example, the growth of Wikipedia has given rise to DBpedia and other collaboratively-created resources such as Freebase. Today, IE and KA researchers can even create annotations and resources on demand as they need them for a very low price using crowd-sourcing tools such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The workshop will provide a place for researchers to discuss all these exciting developments and their implications for the future of IE and KA.


*** Topics of Interest
======================

The topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

- Knowledge discovery and mining on the Web

- Social networks and folksonomy analysis

- Ontology population and induction

- Cross-lingual and multi-lingual approaches to IE and KA

- Using crowd-sourcing tools, such as Mechanical Turk, for IE and KA

- IE and KA and the Semantic Web

- Multi-lingual named entity recognition and disambiguation

- Event extraction

- Paraphrase extraction

- Temporal data mining

- Using resources such as Wikipedia, DBpedia, Freebase

- IE and KA from informal text: chats, instant messages, blogs, Twitter



*** Important dates:
====================

Submission deadline: June 17, 2011

Notification of acceptance: July 25, 2011

Camera-ready copy due from authors: August 22, 2011

Workshop: September 15 or 16, 2011

All deadlines refer to 11:59pm Samoa time (UTC/GMT −11 hours)


*** Submission instructions:
============================

We invite regular papers 8 pages as well as demo papers and project notes 4 pages (excluding references). Accepted short papers will be presented either as short oral presentations or as posters.

Submissions will be maintained by the START system:

http://www.softconf.com/ranlp11/ieka2011/

The authors should use the templates at http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2011/submissions.php and follow the guidelines there.

All papers accepted for presentation will appear in the Workshop Proceedings and will be uploaded at the ACL Anthology.


*** Review and multiple submission policy
========================================

All submissions should be anonymous.

The workshop calls for papers describing original research. Multiple submissions are allowed, but this needs to be declared at submission time.


*** Workshop Organizers
========================

Preslav Nakov, National University of Singapore

Zornitsa Kozareva, University of Southern California

Kuzman Ganchev, Google Inc.

Jerry Hobbs, University of Southern California


*** Program Committee:
======================

Javier Artiles, Queens College

Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield

Razvan Bunescu, Ohio State University

Hamish Cunningham, University of Sheffield

Mona Diab, Columbia University

Greg Druck, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Georgi Georgiev, Ontotext AD

Filip Ginter, University of Turku

Jennifer Gillenwater, University of Pennsylvania

Andrew Gordon, USC/ICT

Joao Graca, University of Pennsylvania

Chikara Hashimoto, NICT

Nitin Indurkhya, eBay

Hagen Fürstenau, Saarland University

Alex Kulesza, University of Pennsylvania

Maussam, University of Washington

Su Nam Kim, The University of Melbourne

Alexandre Klementiev, Johns Hopkins University

Ana-Maria Popescu, Yahoo!

Ryan McDonald, Google

Andres Montoyo, University of Alicante

Rafael Munoz, University of Alicante

Roberto Navigli, University of Rome

Manuel Palomar, University of Alicante

Siddharth Patwardhan, IBM

Marco Pennacchiotti, Yahoo!

Simone Paolo Ponzetto, University of Heidelberg

Sampo Pyysalo, University of Tokyo

Sujith Ravi, ISI, University of Southern California

Ellen Riloff, University of Utah

Alan Ritter, University of Washington

Paolo Rosso, University of Valencia

Kenji Sagae, USC/ICT

Thamar Solorio, University of Alabama

Ralf Steinberger, JRC

Mihai Surdeanu, Stanford University

Idan Szpektor, Yahoo Research

Valentin Tablan, University of Sheffield

Jörg Tiedemann, University of Uppsala

Ivan Titov, Saarland University

Aline Villavicencio, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Alexander Yates, Temple University



*** Workshop venue:
===================

The workshop is being held in conjunction with RANLP 2011 in Hissarya, Bulgaria.

See the RANLP 2011 web site at http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2011 for further details.