ACL 2007 Workshop

Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions

Sponsored by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (ACL-SIGSEM)

28th June, 2007

Prague, Czech Republic

Workshop Description

The Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions will be hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and will take place on June 28th in Prague, Czech Republic.

Background

Prepositions, postpositions and other adpositions have received a considerable amount of interest in recent years, due to their importance in computational tasks. For instance, in NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have attracted a lot of attention, and different machine learning techniques have been employed with varying success. Researchers from linguistics, artificial intelligence and psycholinguistics have examined spatial and temporal aspects of prepositions, their cross-linguistic differences, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts, the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations and their semantics in situated dialog. In languages like English and German, phrasal verbs have also been the subject of considerable research, ranging from the development of techniques for their automatic extraction from corpora to methods for determining their semantics. In other languages, like Romance languages or Hindi, the focus has been either on the incorporation of the preposition or its inclusion in the prepositional phrase. All these configurations are important both semantically and syntactically in natural language understanding and processing.

Building on the success of three previous workshops on prepositions (held in Toulouse, 2003, Colchester, 2005 and Trento, 2006), the aim of the fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions is to bring together researchers from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the syntax, semantics, description, representation and cross-linguistic aspects of prepositions. We intend this workshop to promote collaboration among researchers interested in different aspects of prepositions, and hope that it will advance understanding of these important components of language.

Topics

Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:
  • Multilingual and cross-linguistic aspects of prepositions
    • multilingual and contrastive descriptions (mismatches, incorporation, divergences)
    • prepositions in Human and Machine Translation (incl. issues of automatic word alignment)
    • prepositions in Parallel Corpus Annotation (incl. sense disambiguation based on parallel texts)
    • prepositions in Cross-language information retrieval
  • Description and representation of prepositions:
    • prepositions in lexical resources (including WordNet, Framenet, and other ontologies)
    • prepositions in syntactically annotated corpora (Treebanks)
    • productive versus collocation uses, prepositions and thematic roles
    • Word-sense Disambiguation of Prepositions (as in the SemEval preposition task to run at ACL-2007)
  • Applications:
    • using prepositions in applications e.g. Machine Translation, Grammar and Style Checking Systems
    • information extraction or Language Generation, Situated Dialog systems (robot interfaces and embodied conversational agents)
  • Cognitive dimensions of prepositions:
    • how different kinds of prepositions are acquired/interpreted/ represented in human cognition.
    • how different kinds of preposition provide distinct challenges to a reasoning system and how they can be handled

Program

The program for The Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions is now available here: Workshop Program.

Submissions

Submissions are now closed.

Registration

Information on registration and registration fees will be provided on the ACL 2007 conference web page, here: ACL 2007.

Important Dates

Paper Submission deadline: March 26th, 2007
Notification of acceptance: April 20th, 2007
Camera-ready papers due: May 9th, 2007
Workshop date: June 28th, 2007

Contact Details

Address any queries regarding the workshop to: prepositions2007@ucd.ie

Program Committee members and reviewers for this workshop can access the START administrative site for the workshop here: http://www.softconf.com/acl07/ACL07-WS11/ using the logins and passwords they've been given. If you do not know your login or password for this site, please email the address above.

Organising Committee

Fintan Costello, University College Dublin, Ireland
John Kelleher, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Martin Volk, Stockholms Universitet, Sweden

Programme Committee

Boban Arsenijevic (University of Leiden, Netherlands)
Doug Arnold (University of Essex, UK)
Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Collin Baker (University of California Berkeley, USA)
John Beavers (Georgetown University, USA)
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy)
Markus Egg (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Anette Frank (DFKI, Germany)
Tracy Holloway King (PARC, USA)
Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany)
Ken Litkowski (CL Research, USA)
Tom O'Hara (Convera Inc., USA)
Patrick Saint-Dizier (IRIT-Toulouse, France)
Hidetosi Sirai (Chukyo University, Japan)
Beata Trawinski (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Jesse Tseng (Loria, France)
Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
Paul Watts (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Feiyu Xu (DFKI, Germany)
Joost Zwarts (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)