ACL Workshop Extra-propositional aspects of meaning in computational linguistics

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Participation
Abbreviated Title: 
ExProM 2012
Location: 
International Convention Center Jeju (ICC Jeju)
Friday, 13 July 2012
Country: 
Korea
City: 
Jeju Island
Contact: 
Roser Morante
Caroline Sporleder

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
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ACL Workshop ExProM 2012
Extra-propositional aspects of meaning in computational linguistics

Organised by the University of Antwerp and Saarland University
Colocated with ACL 2012

July 13, 2012, Jeju Island, Korea

http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/exprom2012

PASCAL2 invited speaker: Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh

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Until recently, research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has focused predominantly on propositional aspects of meaning. For example, semantic role labeling, question answering or text mining tasks aim at extracting information of the type "who does what, when and where". However, understanding language involves also processing Extra-Propositional Aspects of Meaning (EPAM), such as factuality, uncertainty, or subjectivity, since the same propositional meaning can be presented in a diversity of statements. While some work on phenomena like subjectivity has been carried out in the context of sentiment processing, other phenomena like the detection of sarcasm have received less attention.

By proposing this workshop we aim at bringing together scientists working on EPAM from any area related to computational language learning and processing. By EPAM we understand aspects of meaning that cannot be captured with a propositional representation such as the output of semantic role labelers.

For instance, the meaning of the sentence in Example (1) can be represented with the proposition ADD(earthquake,further threats to the global economy), whereas representing the meaning of the sentences in Example (2) requires additional mechanisms, despite the fact that all sentences share a propositional meaning.

(1) The earthquake adds further threats to the global economy.

(2) Does the earthquake add further threats to the global economy?
The earthquake adds further threats to the global economy, doesn't it?
The earthquake does not add further threats to the global economy.
The earthquake will never add further threats to the global economy.
The earthquake will probably add further threats to the global economy.
Who could (possibly) think the earthquake adds further threats to the global economy?
The earthquake might have added further threats to the global economy.
The last analysis shows that the earthquake will add further threats to the global economy.
It is expected that the earthquake will add further threats to the global economy.
It has been denied that the earthquake adds further threats to the global economy.

Some of the sentences above could also be combined in a paragraph such as (3), which shows that the same event can be presented from different perspectives, at different points in time and with different extra-propositional meanings.

(3) The main question 6 months ago was whether the earthquake would add further threats to the global economy. Some days after the earthquake the authorities were convinced that it would be possible to minimize the impact of the earthquake. Most economists didn't share this view and predicted a high economic impact of the earthquake. However, a recent study about the earthquake's effect has shown that, although the earthquake might have added further threats to the global economy, its negative impact can be controlled by applying the right measures.

While the area of EPAM comprises a broad range of phenomena, this workshop will focus mainly on the aspects related to modality understood in a general sense (modalities, hedging, certainty, factuality), negation, attitude, and irony/sarcasm. Since many of these phenomena cannot be adequately modeled without taking (discourse) context into account, the workshop also touches on discourse phenomena in so far as they relate to extra-propositional aspects of meaning.

The workshop is a follow-up to Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing (NeSp-NLP 2010) held in Uppsala, Sweden, in July 2010.

SCOPE AND TOPICS

In particular, the workshop will address the following topics, although it will be open to other related topics:

- Negation
- Modality
- Hedging
- Factuality
- Certainty
- Subjectivity, attitude
- Evidentiality
- Irony, sarcasm
- Modeling and annotating extra-propositional aspects of meaning
- Scope resolution
- Detection of non-factual information
- Changes of the factual status of events within a text/message and within collections of texts/messages
- Discourse phenomena related to extra-propositional aspects of meaning
- The impact of extra-propositional aspects of meaning in NLP tasks: sentiment analysis, text mining, textual entailment, information extraction, machine translation, paraphrasing
- Implicit expression of extra-propositional meaning
- Multimodal expression of extra-propositional meaning
- Author profiling based on extra-propositional aspects of meaning
- Extra-propositional aspects of meaning across domains and genres

LIST OF ACCEPTED PAPERS

Disfluencies as Extra-Propositional Indicators of Cognitive Processing
Kathryn Womack, Wilson McCoy, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Cara Calvelli, Jeff B. Pel, Pengcheng Shi, Anne Haake

How do Negation and Modality Impact on Opinions?
Farah Benamara, Baptiste Chardon, Yannick Yvettes Mathieu, Vladimir Popescu, Nicholas Asher

Linking Uncertainty in Physicians’ Narratives to Diagnostic Correctness
Wilson McCoy, Cecelia Ovesdotter Alm, Cara Calvelli, Jeff B. Pelz, Pengcheng Shi, Anne Haake

Hedge detection as a lens on framing in the GMO debates: A position paper
Eunsol Choi, Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jennifer Spindel

Factuality Detection on the Cheap: Inferring Factuality for Increased Precision in Detecting Negated Events
Erik Velldal and Jonathon Read

Recognizing Arguing Subjectivity and Argument Tags
Alexander Conrad, Janyce Wiebe, Rebecca Hwa

Improving Speculative Language Detection using Linguistic Knowledge
Guillermo Moncecchi, Jean-Luc Minel, Dina Wonsever

Statistical Modality Tagging from Rule-based Annotations and Crowdsourcing
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Michael Bloodgood, Mona Diab, Bonnie Dorr, Lori Levin, Christine D. Piatko, Owen Rambow, Benjamin Van Durme

Bridging the Gap Between Scope-based and Event-based Negation/Speculation Annotations: A Bridge Not Too Far
Pontus Stenetorp, Sampo Pyysalo, Tomoko Ohta, Sophia Ananiadou, Jun'ichi Tsujii

Annotating the Focus of Negation in terms of Questions Under Discussion
Pranav Anand and Craig Martell

ORGANISATION

Roser Morante, CLiPS, University of Antwerp
Caroline Sporleder, MMCI / Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University

With financial support of the PASCAL2 Network.