Call for Papers: the First International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations (DMR 2019)
While deep learning methods have led to many breakthroughs in practical natural language applications, most notably in Machine Translation, Machine Reading/Question Answering, etc., there is still a sense among many NLP researchers that we have a long way to go before we can develop systems that can actually “understand” human language. “Understanding” natural language entails many different human-like capabilities, and they include but are not limited to the ability to track entities in a text, understand the relations between these entities, track events and their participants described in a text, understand how events unfold over time, and distinguish events that have actually happened from events that are planned or intended, are uncertain, or did not happen at all. We believe a critical step in achieving natural language understanding is to design meaning representations for text that have the necessary meaning “ingredients” that help us achieve these capabilities. Such meaning representations also need to be easy to produce in order to generate sufficient amounts of data to allow the training of accurate meaning representation parsers.
This workshop intends to bring together researchers who are producers and consumers of meaning representations and through their interaction gain a deeper understanding of the key elements that are the most valuable to the NLP community. The workshop will also provide an opportunity for researchers to critically examine existing meaning representations with the goal of using their findings to inform the design of the next-generation. A third goal of the workshop is to explore opportunities and identify challenges in the design and use of meaning representations in multilingual settings. A final goal of the workshop is to understand the relationship between distributed meaning representations trained on large data sets using neural network models and the symbolic meaning representations that are carefully designed and annotated by CL researchers and gain a deeper understanding of areas where each type of meaning representation is the most effective. The workshop will solicit papers that address any one or combination of the following topics:
--The design and annotation of meaning representations
--Cross-framework comparison of meaning representations
--Challenges in automatic parsing of meaning representations
-Metrics for evaluation of meaning representation systems
--Strengths and weaknesses of existing meaning representations exposed as a result of using them in natural language applications or natural language understanding systems
--Issues in applying meaning representations to multilingual settings
--The relationship between symbolic meaning representations and distributed semantic representations
--Any other topics that address the design, processing, and use of meaning representations
Submission Information:
Important Dates
Submission deadline: Friday April 26, 2019 11:59 PM Eastern US
Notification of acceptance: Friday, May 24, 2019
Camera-ready copy due from authors: Monday, June 3, 2019
Submission Instructions
Two types of submissions are invited: full papers and short papers.
Full papers should not exceed eight (8) pages of text, plus unlimited references. Final versions of full papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account. Full papers are intended to be reports of original research.
Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given up to five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Appropriate short paper topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc.
Electronic Submission
Submissions must be electronic and in PDF format, using the Softconf START conference management system at https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/dmr
We strongly recommend consulting the ACL Policies for Submission, Review, and Citation and using ACL LaTeX style files tailored for this year's conference. Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines. Please see information about paper formatting requirements and style at http://www.acl2019.org/EN/call-for-papers.xhtml. Scroll down to “Paper Submission and Templates.”
Submissions need to be anonymous.
Dual submission policy: papers may NOT be submitted to the DMR workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted to another meeting or publication.
More information about the workshop can be found on the workshop website: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~clp/dmr/
Co-Organizers:
Nianwen Xue, Brandeis University
William Croft, University of New Mexico
Jan Hajič, Charles University
Chu-Ren Huang, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo
Martha Palmer, University of Colorado
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University