2nd Workshop on Computational Semantics Beyond Events and Roles (SemBEaR)

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
SemBEaR 2018
Location: 
Hyatt Regency New Orleans hotel
AttachmentSize
Plain text icon cfp2-sembear-2018.txt6.47 KB
Tuesday, 5 June 2018
State: 
Louisiana
Country: 
USA
City: 
New Orleans
Contact: 
Eduardo Blanco
Roser Morante
Submission Deadline: 
Monday, 12 March 2018

(Apologies for multiples postings)

Second Call for Papers

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2nd Workshop on Computational Semantics Beyond Events and Roles (SemBEaR)
Colocated with NAACL 2018
New Orleans, June 5, 2018

***Students travel grants sponsored by NSF available***

http://www.cse.unt.edu/sembear2018
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During the last decade, semantic representation of text has focused on extracting propositional meaning, i.e., capturing who does what to whom, how, when and where. Several corpora are available, and existing tools extract this kind of knowledge, e.g., role labelers trained on PropBank or NomBank. Nevertheless, most current representations tend to disregard significant meaning encoded in human language. For example, sentences 1-2 below share the same argument structure regarding verb contracted, but do not convey the overall meaning. While in the first example John contracting the disease is factual, in the second it is not:

- John likely contracted the disease when a mouse bit him in the Adirondacks.
- John never contracted the disease although a mouse bit him in the Adirondacks.

In order to truly capture what these sentences mean, aspects of meaning that go beyond identifying events and their roles (e.g., uncertainty, negation and attribution) must be taken into account.

The Workshop on Computational Semantics Beyond Events and Roles focuses on a broad range of semantic phenomena that lays beyond the identification and linking of eventualities and their semantic arguments with relations such as agent (who), theme (what) and location (where), here so called SemBEaR.

SemBEaR is pervasive in human language and, while studied from a theoretical perspective, computational models are still scarce. Humans use language to describe events that do not correlate with a real situation in the world. They express desires, intentions and plans, and also discuss events that did not happen or are unlikely to happen. Events are often described hypothetically, and speculation can be used to explain why something is a certain way without a strong commitment. Humans do not always (want to) tell the (whole) truth: they may use deception to hide lies. Devices such as irony and sarcasm are employed to play with words so that what is said is not what is meant. Finally, humans not only describe their personal views or experiences, but also attribute statements to others. These phenomena are not exclusive of opinionated texts. They are ubiquitous in language, including scientific works (Hyland 1998) and news as exemplified below:

- Female leaders might have avoided world wars.
- Political experts speculate that Donald Trump's meltdown is beginning.
- Infected people typically don't become contagious until they develop symptoms.
- Medical personnel can be infected if they don't use protective gear, such as surgical masks and gloves.
- You can only catch Ebola from coming into direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who has the disease and is showing symptoms.
- We have never seen a human virus change the way it is transmitted.
- The government did not release the files until 1998.

In its 2018 edition, the SemBEaR workshop aims at bringing together scientists working on these type of semantic phenomena within computational semantics. The goal is to attract researchers interested in theoretical frameworks, annotation schemas, modeling and implementing real systems, as well as analyzing the impact of SemBEaR in NLP applications. The workshop also aims at building a bridge between theoretical and computational linguistics. In particular, it will address these topics:

- Negation: verbal/non-verbal, analytic/synthetic, clausal/subclausal; scope and focus
- Modality: defining and annotating types for computational linguistics
- Factuality: determining factuality changes within and across documents
- Veridicity and veridicality: measuring author commitment
- Attribution and perspectives: determining whose perspective is being presented
- Irony and sarcasm
- SemBEaR and lexical resources
- SemBEaR at the sentence and discourse level: how much context is necessary?
- SemBEaR across domains: news, scientific texts, legal documents, economy texts, etc.
- SemBEaR and implicit meaning: what do sentences really mean?
- SemBEaR in spoken language
- (Automatically) extracting SemBEaR: strategies, resources and algorithms
- Supervised, unsupervised and rule-based approaches to extract SemBEaR
- Integrating SemBEaR in the NLP pipeline
- SemBEaR for NLP applications: does it help?

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Submissions
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Authors are invited to submit papers describing original, unpublished work in the topic areas listed above. Full papers should not exceed eight pages. Additionally, authors are invited to submit short papers not exceeding 4 pages. Short papers usually describe:

- a small, focused contribution;
- work in progress;
- a negative result;
- an opinion piece; or
- an interesting application nugget.

All papers can have up to 2 pages of references. All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official NAACL 2018 style guidelines (http://naacl2018.org/call_for_paper.html). The reviewing process will be blind and papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings and available at the ACL Anthology.

Multiple Submission Policy. Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications are acceptable, but authors must indicate this information at submission time. If accepted, authors must notify the organizers as to whether the paper will be presented at the workshop or elsewhere.

Electronic Submission. Papers should be submitted electronically at https://www.softconf.com/naacl2018/SemBEaR18/.

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Important Dates
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December 8, 2017: First call for papers
March 12, 2018: Submission deadline for short and full papers
April 2, 2018: Notification of acceptance
April 16, 2018: Camera-ready papers due
June 5 or 6, 2018: SemBEaR workshop

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Organisers
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Eduardo Blanco - University of North Texas
Roser Morante - VU Amsterdam

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Contact
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Contact details are available at the workshop website.