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1st ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS: STEP 2008

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Symposium on Semantics in Systems for Text Processing

http://project.cgm.unive.it/html/STEP2008/index.htm

September 22-24, 2008

Auditorium Santa Margherita
Venice (Italy)

Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL special interest group
on computational semantics


MOTIVATION
============
Thanks to both statistical approaches and finite state methods,
natural language processing (NLP), particularly in the area of robust,
open-domain text processing, has made considerable progress in the
last couple of decades. It is probably fair to say that NLP tools have
reached satisfactory performance at the level of syntactic processing,
be the output structures chunks, phrase structures, or dependency
graphs. Therefore, the time seems ripe to extend the state-of-the-art
and consider deep semantic processing as a serious task in
wide-coverage NLP. This is a step that normally requires syntactic
parsing, as well as named entity recognition, anaphora resolution,
thematic role labelling and word sense disambiguation, as well as other
lower levels of processing for which reasonably good methods have
already been developed. Accurate automatic semantic interpretation of
text is expected to benefit newly emerging areas targetting semantic
and pragmatic issues, such as affectivity and sentiment analysis of
texts, textual entailment, and consistency checking.


WORKSHOP SCOPE
================
The goal of the STEP workshop is to provide a forum for anyone active
in semantic processing of text to discuss innovative technologies,
representation issues, inference techniques, prototype
implementations, and real applications. The preferred processing
targets are large quantities of texts -- either specialised domains,
or open domains such as newswire text, blogs, and wikipedia-like text.
Implemented rather than theoretical work is emphasised in STEP.
In particular, relevant topics are:

- wide-coverage semantic/logical analysis of text
- computation and use of discourse relations
- use of lexical-conceptual and semantically related resources
- thematic role labelling in semantic representations
- word sense disambiguation in semantic representations
- implementations of specific semantic phenomena
- anaphora or ellipsis resolution in semantic representations
- implementations of sentiment analysis
- automatic detection of subjective and non-literal language
- acquisition of lexical knowledge and paraphrase from raw corpora
- background knowledge acquisition, representation, and selection
- semantic lexicons and ontologies for text interpretation
- learning semantic representations from raw text
- automated reasoning in the service of semantic analysis of text
- creation of gold standard meaning representations
- evaluation of semantic representations
- textual entailment and consistency checking
- systems that extract, represent or manipulate text meaning
- applications of semantic analysis in text processing

Applications inlude, but are not limited to, machine translation, text
understanding, question answering, summarisation, information
extraction, and the semantic web.


PANEL: COMPARING SEMANTIC REPRESENTATIONS
===========================================
STEP 2008 will also feature a panel comparing semantic representations
as output by state-of-the-art NLP systems. Participating systems will
be given a small number of previously unseen texts. The output will be
judged on a number of aspects by a panel of experts in the field. Aim
of the panel is to discuss the feasibility of a gold standard for deep
semantic representations. The panel will reward the system with the
most complete and accurace semantic representation with a special
prize. This will be a special event at the workshop.


SUBMISSIONS
=============
Authors are invited to submit original research papers. Papers should
indicate the state of completion of the reported results. Overlap with
previously published work should be clearly indicated. Submissions
will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of
presentation, significance, and relevance to the workshop.

Submissions should be in Abobe PDF format, not exceed eight A4-sized
pages, and be typeset in a 12 point font. Detailed guidelines and a
latex stylefile will be available at the STEP 2008 web page. Each
submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the programme
committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings. The publication of selected and revised papers is under
consideration for a special issue in a journal.


INVITED SPEAKERS
==================
TBA


IMPORTANT DATES
=================
Paper submission deadline: May 9, 2008
Notification of acceptance: June 23, 2008
Camera-ready version due: July 25, 2008
Workshop: Sept 22-24, 2008


ORGANISING COMMITTEE
======================
Rodolfo Delmonte (Universita' Ca' Foscari, Venice)
Johan Bos (Universita' La Sapienza, Rome)


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
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Roberto Basili (University Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy)
Amedeo Cappelli (CLECT, Trento Italy)
Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge, UK)
Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
Sanda Harabagiu (HLT, University of Texas, USA)
Alexander Koller (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Leonardo Lesmo (DI, University of Tourin, Italy)
Katja Markert (University of Leeds, UK)
Dan Moldovan (HLT, University of Texas, USA)
Srini Narayanan (ICSI, Berkeley, USA)
Sergei Nirenburg (University of Maryland, USA)
Malvina Nissim (University of Bologna, Italy)
Vincenzo Pallotta (Universitaet Freiburg, Schweiz)
Emanuele Pianta (ITC, Trento, Italy)
Massimo Poesio (University of Trento, Italy)
Stephen Pulman (Oxford University, UK)
Michael Schiehlen (IMS Stuttgart, Germany)
Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh, UK)