2nd International Workshop on the Semantic Representation of Spoken Language

EACL2009

Athens, Greece; March 30 or 31, 2009

http://www.ofai.at/~manuel.alcantara/SRSL2009

Submission Deadline: December 19, 2008

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The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in
the semantic representation of spoken corpora, especially spontaneous
speech. On one hand, the semantic gap between contents conveyed by
natural languages and their formal representations is a burning aspect
in tasks such as information extraction and corpus annotation. The
current state-of-the-art supports solutions from very different
backgrounds and perspectives, but still remain important and complex
issues to deal with, such as the accurate segmentation of speech in
semantic units. The discussion of those aspects are one of the main
reasons for this workshop. On the other hand, spoken language is a
pending issue in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence,
both traditionally focused on written language, although semantic
processing of speech is necessary for the understanding of both natural
and human-machine interaction. Finally, the problems found when trying
to linguistically structure spontaneous speech are leading to works
focused on its semantic representation. In-depth research on the
semantic representation of speech can provide us with a suitable basis
for further analysis of related linguistic levels, like prosody or
pragmatics.

Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research
concerning the semantic representation of spoken language. Possible
topics include:

* Corpus annotation: structures (frame-banks, proposition banks,
etc.) and concepts (ontologies, named entities, etc.).

* Content identification and segmentation in spontaneous speech.

* Semantic interpretation in dialogues.

* Dialogue and discourse structures.

* Topic Detection and tracking.

* Multimodal Representations including speech.

* Natural language understanding and reasoning in spoken dialogue
systems.

* Speech in embedded systems.

* Project descriptions about applications of spoken corpora semantic
representations.

* Standardization work.

* Interoperability/Comparison work of spoken and written corpora.


Submissions must be written in English and should follow the EACL2009
style format. They can be full (6-8 pages including references) or short papers (3-4 pages including references). As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include author's names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity should be avoided. Submissions that do not conform to these styles will be rejected.

The only accepted format for submitted papers is PDF. Please remember
that the paper submission deadline is December 19th, 2008. Papers that
are being submitted in parallel to other conferences or workshops must
indicate this on the title page, as must papers that contain significant overlap with previously published work. Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings of the SRSL-2009.

Both full and short papers (3-4 pages) will have an oral presentation at the workshop within the framework of the EACL2009 conference in Athens (Greece). For this reason, at least one author has to register for the workshop.

For further information, please visit
http://www.ofai.at/~manuel.alcantara/SRSL2009

(already confirmed) Scientific Committee:

Christina Alexandris (National University of Athens)
Enrique Alfonseca (Google)
Paul Buitelaar (DFKI GmbH)
Harry Bunt (Universiteit van Tilburg)
Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR)
Anette Frank (Universität Heidelberg)
Johannes Matiasek (OFAI)
Massimo Moneglia (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
Juan Carlos Moreno Cabrera (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Antonio Moreno Sandoval (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Gael Richard (École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, GET-ENST)
Carlos Subirats (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Isabel Trancoso (Universidade Técnica de Lisboa)

Organizing Committee:

Manuel Alcantara-Pla (OFAI, Vienna). Contact:
manuel(dot)alcantara(at)ofai(dot)at

Thierry Declerck (DFKI GmbH, Saarbruecken). Contact:
declerck(at)dfki(dot)de