DiSCo 2009: Distributional Semantics beyond Concrete Concepts
July 29th, Amsterdam

Workshop organized as a part of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society (CogSci 2009)

Overview

DiSCo 2009 is a pre-conference workshop organized on July 29th, at
CogSci-2009, Amsterdam. It focuses on distributional models of
(lexical) semantics, like LSA or HAL, that aim to model the meaning of
a word in terms of its contexts in a corpus. To this day, these
approaches have mainly been used in the modeling of concrete concepts,
where they have proved very successful. The DiSCo workshop therefore
wants to focus on a number of challenges that have been left
relatively unexplored so far. These challenges include, but are not
limited to:

* The modeling of verb meaning.
* The modeling of different aspects of semantics, like the
extraction of concept properties from text.
* The combination of different types of (linguistic and
non-linguistic) data.

DiSCo aims to bring together computational linguists and cognitive
scientists interested in distributional models of semantics. We
welcome all researchers to submit novel and interesting work in the
field of distributional semantics, with specific attention to the new
challenges set out above. Additionally, we are interested in receiving
other contributions that further research on distributional models
and/or their implications for cognitive science.

Submission details

Submissions should adhere to the CogSci style files, and should be no
longer than 6 pages. They need to be submitted in pdf-format. More
information can be found on the workshop's website.

Important dates

* Sun June 7, 2009: Submission deadline
* Mon June 22, 2009: Notification of acceptance
* Fri June 26, 2009: Early registration deadline
* Sun July 12, 2009: Deadline for revised version
* Wed July 29, 2009: Workshop

Program Committee (preliminary)

* Marco Baroni, University of Trento, Italy
* Simon de Deyne, University of Leuven, Belgium
* Katrin Erk, University of Texas at Austin, USA
* Stefan Evert, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
* Dirk Geeraerts, University of Leuven, Belgium
* Falk Huettig, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands
* Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa, Italy
* Diana McCarthy, University of Sussex, UK
* Sebastian Pado, University of Stuttgart, Germany
* Yves Peirsman, University of Leuven, Belgium (co-organizer)
* Tim Van de Cruys, University of Groningen, Netherlands
(co-organizer)
* Yannick Versley, University of Trento, Italy (co-organizer)

Further details

For more information, visit the workshop's website at
http://www.let.rug.nl/disco2009