CALL FOR PAPERS

Methodologies and Resources for Processing Spatial Language
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/IMG/ws/Spatial.pdf

(Workshop at LRECâ??2008)

RATIONALE
The time is ripe for the development and standardization of computational resources for processing spatial language: the ubiquitous use of digital geographic resources (e.g., Mapquest and Google Earth) has resulted in a surge of practical interest in location-based services; spoken-language interfaces for navigation systems are becoming widespread; the publishing of geographically-relevant information in Google Earthâ??s Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and other formats is now common; several commercial products for geo-coding text in different languages are now available and have a growing user base. Many of the technologies and resources used are, however, proprietary and task-specific.

There is a need for versatile and comprehensive methodologies for mapping natural language expressions that describe locations, orientations and paths to the geospatial entities they refer to and for encoding the spatial relationships among the entities described. This workshop aims to address this need and to focus research on the development of standardized resources to support the understanding and generation of spatial language on a large scale. These resources include spatial annotation schemes and systems for spatial reasoning as well as spatial ontologies, and might be applied to applications in information retrieval, visualization, data mining, etc. In addition, research into spatial processing may be informed by results from psycholinguistics, particularly the acquisition and processing of spatial language, as well as theoretical perspectives such as those offered by cognitive linguistics, artificial intelligence, and usage-based approaches. The goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for researchers to share ongoing research on spatial language processing, with the aim of moving towards a set of community standards.

TOPICS
We invite submissions of papers and demonstrations related to the development of or evaluation of resources, tools, and frameworks for understanding and generating spatial expressions in natural language. Topics of interest include:

resources for linguistic analysis of spatial descriptions
gazetteers and databases for geospatial annotation and natural language interpretation
mining of resources like wikipedia to build resources for processing spatial expressions
spatial ontologies for natural language
annotating topological, distance, and orientation relations
tools to support spatial annotation
tools for interpreting and generating spatial descriptions
disambiguation of spatial descriptions
generating textual descriptions of spatial locations, entities, and paths from geospatial data
cognitive and artificial intelligence perspectives on spatial language
linking natural language with other areas of spatial reasoning.

Assuming there are sufficient high quality papers, the prospect of an edited volume or journal special issue will be discussed at the workshop.

RELATED LINKS
SpatialML http://sourceforge.net/projects/spatialml
CIKM workshop series http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~rsp/gir07/
GeoCLEF evaluation http://ir.shef.ac.uk/geoclef/

TIMELINE
Submissions: 15 February 2008
Notification to author: 15 March 2008
Final copies due: 2 April 2008
Workshop: 31 May 2008

SUBMISSION FORMAT
Technical papers should be no more than 8 pages in length and should follow the style for submissions to the main LREC conference.

We also invite submissions of short papers (3 pages in length) describing demonstrations (in the same LREC style). Demo papers must include a concise abstract that describes what the demo is intended to convey, and should also include screen shots. As the computing facilities in the workshop room are limited, demonstrations are possible only if no additional facilities are needed. Please contact tenbrink@uni-bremen.de for details.

All submissions, in pdf format only, should be sent to tenbrink@uni-bremen.de .

ORGANIZERS
Graham Katz (Georgetown)
Inderjeet Mani (MITRE)
Thora Tenbrink (Bremen)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Nicholas Asher (IRIT/CNRS)
Janet Hitzeman (MITRE)
Alexander Klippel (Penn State)
Andras Kornai (MetaCarta)
Jochen Leidner (Edinburgh)
Amit Mukerjee (IIT Kanpur)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis)
Ehud Reiter (Aberdeen)
Frank Schilder (Thomson)
Nicola Stokes (Melbourne)
Andrea Tyler (Georgetown)
Peter Viechnicki (Board on Geographic Names)
Laure Vieu (IRIT/CNRS)
Stephan Winter (Melbourne)