The 4th Workshop on Events

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Location: 
Co-located with NAACL 2016
Friday, 17 June 2016
State: 
California
Country: 
United States
City: 
San Diego
Contact: 
Martha Palmer
Tim O'Gorman
Eduard Hovy
Teruko Mitamura
Submission Deadline: 
Thursday, 25 February 2016

Proper understanding of the events of a text is increasingly important in NLP. The 4th Workshop on Events seeks to bring together researchers focusing on events with a variety of perspectives, to foster cooperation and build consensus about the representation and detection of events, event coreference, and event relations.

Event definition and detection has a number of large divisions, largely due to differences in which events are annotated. Many annotations only consider events within a particular domain or ontology, as in LDC’s ACE and Machine Reading event annotation, or define other conditions (such as only looking at realis events). We hope to foster conversation between those dealing with "all events" approaches (where event detection has approached human performance in the recent Clinical Tempeval evaluations (Bethard et al. 2015)) and those dealing with added constraints added by specific ontologies or domains.

Dramatic strides have been taken in event coreference. Event coreference has been driven by the event coreference annotations of ACE and Ontonotes, and the cross-document annotations of the ECB (Bejan and Harabagiu (2010, extended by Lee et al. (2012) and Agata and Vossen (2014) ), but large questions remain, particularly with regard to how complicated phenomena related to coreference should be treated, such as bridging anaphora and subevent relationships between events (Poesio and Artstein 2005; 2008, Recasens et al. 2011, Araki et al. 2014).

Similarly, the relationships between events (as with temporal or causal relations), and the relationships between events and larger structures (such as scripts, timelines, or larger events) are important factors in event understanding. TimeML (Pustejovsky, et. al., 2010), or temporal relation annotation, has held numerous Semeval tasks regarding detection of temporal relations. Other relations between events, such as causation (Bethard and Martin 2008; Mizra et al. 2014) or contradiction detection (De Marneffe et al. 2008), have been studied. However, outside of temporal relations there is a paucity of consensus regarding what one's inventory of relations should be, and a lack of shared evaluations regarding them.

This workshop will be an active, discussion-driven workshop, with sessions devoted to particular issues and a poster session for accepted papers. One session will be devoted to discussion of the shared annotation task (below).

--- Topics seen in prior Events workshops ---

- Event coreference resolution or annotation
- Detecting relations between events (causation; opposition; temporal order, etc.)
- Event detection
- Event ordering and clustering
- Annotation of corpora with events
- Usage of events detection or event coreference for other tasks
- Frames and Script induction

--- Shared Annotation ---
This Events Workshop will also involve a shared annotation task. A small set of documents (some of which may deal with the same real-world event) will be released, and participants will invited to provide annotations of these documents. A basic set of event annotations will be provided (using Richer Event Description guidelines), to enable participants to focus on particular relations or features of interest. A session of the workshop will focus on the various annotations provided.

--- Submission Information ---

All submissions should follow the two-column format of the NAACL-HLT 2016 proceedings. Please use ACL’s LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word style files tailored for this year’s conference (available from the NAACL-HLT 2016 website). Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in the style files, and they must be electronic in PDF format. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The papers will be presented either orally or as posters.

We accept the following two kinds of submissions:
- Long Papers up to 8 pages, with up to 2 additional pages for references
- Short Papers up to 4 pages, with up to 2 additional pages for references

Submission dates are:
- February 25 2016: Workshop Paper Due Date
- March 20 2016: Notification of Acceptance
- March 30 2016: Camera-ready papers due
- June 17, 2016: Workshop

--- Organizers ---

Martha Palmer (University of Colorado - Boulder)
Tim O'Gorman (University of Colorado - Boulder)
Eduard Hovy (Carnegie Mellon University)
Teruko Mitamura (Carnegie Mellon University)

--- Program Committee ---

Dan Bikel (LinkedIn, Inc)
Rodolfo Delmonte (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice – Italy)
Robert Frederking (Carnegie Mellon University)
Marjorie Freedman (BBN)
Boyan Onyshkevych (DOD)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University)
Marta Recasens (Google Inc.)
Tomohide Shibata (Kyoto University)
Ian Soboroff (NIST)
Stephanie Strassel (Linguistic Data Consortium)
Mihai Surdeanu (University of Arizona)
Lucy Vanderwende (Microsoft)
Piek Vossen (VU University Amsterdam)
Luke Zettlemoyer (University of Washington)
Alexis Palmer (Heidelberg University)
Annemarie Friedrich (Universitat des Saarlandes)
Bernardo Magnini (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
Sara Tonelli (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
German Rigau (Universidad del Pais Vasco)
Steven Bethard (University of Alabama at Birmingham)
Nate Chambers (United States Naval Academy)
Travis Wolfe (John Hopkins University)
Rachel Rudinger(John Hopkins University)
Ann Bies (Linguistic Data Consortium)