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SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS
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Workshop NeSp-NLP 2010
Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing

Organised by the University of Antwerp and Saarland University

July 10, 2010, Uppsala, Sweden

http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/NeSpNLP2010

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Papers are invited for the one-day workshop to be held in Uppsala on the 10th of July, 2010.

In recent years, research has yielded substantial progress in NLP tasks like NE recognition, WSD, parsing, semantic role labeling, and anaphora resolution among others. This has been in part supported by the organisation of shared tasks, which provide annotated data, a definition of the task and an evaluation framework, motivating researchers to develop new techniques to tackle these tasks. Other tasks like paraphrasing, summarization or textual entailment have also progressed, but results are still relatively low because deep understanding of language - mapping meaning to meaning - is necessary. This raises methodological questions. Furthermore, large scale linguistic resources are still lacking.

Negation and speculation are two phenomena involved in deep understanding of text. Both are related to expressing the factuality of statements, that is, expressing to which extent a statement is or is not a fact or a speculation. Negation turns an affirmative statement into negative (it rains/it does not rain). Speculation is used to express to which extent a statement is certain or speculated (it might rain/apparently, it will rain/ it is likely to rain/it is not clear whether it will rain/we suspect that it will rain).

SCOPE AND TOPICS

In this workshop we aim at bringing together researchers working on negation and speculation from any area related to computational language learning and processing. The general goal of the workshop is to stimulate research about these topics. Specific goals are to describe the lexical aspects of negation and speculation, to define how the semantics of these phenomena can be modelled for computational purposes, to explore techniques aimed at learning the factuality of an statement, and to analyse how the treatment of these phenomena affects the efficiency of NLP applications. Finally, the workshop aims at encouraging discussion about the need of deep linguistic processing as a way to take computational linguistics a step further.

The wokshop will address the following aspects of negation and speculation, although it will be open to other related topics:

- Lexical aspects of negation and speculation
- Linguistic resources with information about negation and speculation: corpora, dictionaries, lexical databases
- Descriptive analysis of negation and speculation cues
- Negation and speculation across domains and genres
- Negation and speculation in biomedical texts and biomedical text mining
- Handling negation and speculation in NLP: dialogue systems, sentiment analysis, text mining, textual entailment, information extraction, machine translation, paraphrasing
- Learning the scope of negation and speculation cues
- Interaction of negation and speculation for evaluating the factuality of an statement
- Corpora annotation: guidelines, bootstrapping techniques, quality assessment
- Modelling factuality for computational purposes
- Algorithms to learn negation and speculation
- Structured prediction of negation and speculation
- Joint learning of negation and speculation
- Inference of factual knowledge


SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. All submissions must conform to the official ACL 2010 style guidelines and should not exceed 8 pages. Formatting instructions can be found in the ACL web page: http://www.acl2010.org/authors.html

The reviewing of the papers will be blind and the papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings with an ISBN.

Papers should be submitted as PDF no later than May 14, 2010, via the following website:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nespnlp2010


IMPORTANT DATES

May 14 - Deadline for workshop papers
June 15 - Notification of acceptance
June 25 - Camera-ready papers due
July 10 - Workshop in Uppsala

ORGANISATION

Roser Morante, CLiPS-LTG, University of Antwerp
roser.morante [at] ua dot ac dot be
Caroline Sporleder, MMCI / Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University
csporled [at] coli dot uni-sb dot de

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Timothy Baldwin - University Melbourne
Aljoscha Burchardt - TU Darmstadt
Claire Cardie - Cornell University
Xavier Carreras - Technical University of Catalonia
Wendy W. Chapman - University of Pittsburgh
Kevin B. Cohen - University of Colorado
Walter Daelemans - University of Antwerp
Bonnie Dorr - University of Maryland
Roxana Girju - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sanda Harabagiu - University of Texas at Dallas
Iris Hendrickx - University of Lisbon
Veronique Hoste - University College Ghent
Halil Kilicoglu - Concordia University
Lori Levin - Carnegie Mellon University
Lluis Màrquez - Technical University of Catalonia
Erwin Marsi - Tilburg University
Roser Morante - University of Antwerp
Arzucan Özgür - University of Michigan
Manfred Pinkal - Saarland University
Sampo Pyysalo - University of Tokyo
Owen Rambow - Columbia University
Josef Ruppenhofer - Saarland University
Roser Saurí - Barcelona Media Innovation Center
Khalil Sima'an - University of Amsterdam
Caroline Sporleder - Saarland University
Mihai Surdeanu - Stanford University
Antal van den Bosch - Tilburg University
Michael Wiegand - Saarland University
Theresa Wilson - University of Edinburgh