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First CALL for PAPERS

NAACL-HLT 2009 Workshop on

Semantic Evaluations: Recent Achievements and Future Directions
(SEW-2009)

June 4 or 5, 2009
Boulder, Colorado, USA

Paper Submission deadline: March 6, 2009

Endorsed by the following ACL Special Interest Groups:
SIGLEX, Special Interest Group on the Lexicon
SIGSEM, Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics
SIGANN, Special Interest Group for Annotation

http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~lluism/sew2009/

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Workshop Description

The main purpose of this workshop is to review, analyse and discuss
the latest developments in semantic analysis of text. The fact that
this workshop happens between the last Semantic Evaluation exercise
(SemEval-2007) and the preparation for the next SemEval in 2010,
presents an exciting opportunity to discuss practical and foundational
aspects of semantic processing of text. The workshop targets papers
describing both semantic processing systems and evaluation exercises,
with special attention to foundational issues in both lexical and
propositional semantics, including semantic representation and
semantic corpus construction problems.



Background

There are now many computer systems that do automatic semantic
analysis of text. The purpose of SemEval-2007 was to evaluate the
strengths and weaknesses of such systems with respect to different
words, relations, types of texts, different varieties of language, and
different languages. This workshop is a follow-up to the SemEval-2007
and Senseval series of workshops on semantic evaluation and a
preparation for the next SemEval workshop to be held in 2010.

Senseval-1 included semantic evaluation tasks in English, French and
Italian and culminating workshop held at Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex,
England in September, 1998. The Senseval-2 evaluations took place in
the summer of 2001, and was followed by a workshop held in July 2001
in Toulouse, in conjunction with ACL-2001. It included tasks for 12
languages. A follow-up workshop on the recent successes and future
directions of word sense disambiguation was held at ACL 2002. The
Senseval-3 evaluations took place in the spring of 2004, and was
followed by a workshop held in July 2004 in Barcelona, in conjunction
with ACL-2004. More than 55 teams participated with over 160 systems
in its 16 tasks. SemEval-2007 organized 18 tasks, with over 100 teams
and 125 systems participating. The results of the tasks and systems
were presented in a workshop held in conjunction with ACL-2007.

SemEval-2007 was motivated by a desire to broaden the spectrum of
accepted works to all aspects of computational semantic analysis of
language. It especially encouraged the proposal of tasks for different
languages, cross-lingual tasks, and tasks that are relevant to
particular NLP applications such as machine translation, information
retrieval and information extraction.

In recent years, the deployment of multiple semantic lexicons and
accordingly tagged corpora (WordNet-SemCor, VerbNet-PropBank, FrameNet
Prague Dependency Treebank and OntoNotes, to name a few) have
radically changed the way semantic analysis is performed, especially
at the disambiguation stage. Some of the tasks at SemEval-2007 tried
to take this one step further by proposing multiple layers of semantic
annotation of the same corpus (e.g., senses, roles, name-entity
classes), allowing for novel research to be performed.

SemEval-2007 had a tight schedule, and the results and systems were
usually not known until the workshop was held. This fact, and the
growing number of tasks and systems made it difficult to fully analyse
the tasks and systems. The Language Resources and Evaluation journal
devoted an special issue to SemEval-2007, attracting 20
submissions. This workshop will also serve as a complementary
follow-up analysis of that evaluation exercise, with special attention
to foundational issues in both lexical and propositional semantics,
including semantic representations and semantic corpus construction
problems.

In the meantime SemEval-2010 is already rolling, with a public call
for task proposals due last October 19, 2008. By the time of this
workshop the SemEval panel will have already defined the list of tasks
for SemEval-2010, and we expect many of those tasks to be presented in
this workshop.


Topics

The workshop invites original submissions of papers on systems for
semantic processing and evaluable evaluation exercises on semantic
processing in general, including, but not limited to, the following
topics:

* foundational issues in both lexical and propositional semantics
* semantic corpus construction problems
* shallow and deep semantic analysis
* word sense disambiguation
* semantic role labelling
* named-entity classification
* analysis and disambiguation of prepositions
* metonymy resolution
* lexical substitution and paraphrasing
* textual entailment
* semantics in applications: IR, IE, MT, Summarisation, etc.

We welcome papers on the above from all theoretical, practical,
algorithmic and corpus construction perspectives.


Submissions

Authors are invited to submit two kinds of papers:

* full: for papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of
this workshop.

* short: for papers on semantic evaluation tasks (especially those
from SemEval-2010) and papers describing ongoing work, possibly with
preliminary results.

Authors will be able to express their preference for short/long papers
but the final decision is on the program chairs. Short papers will be
presented in a poster session. Full papers should be up to 8 pages in
length, plus one page for references. Short papers should be up to 6
pages in length. Both kinds of papers will appear in the proceedings
indistinguishably.

As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...",
should be avoided.

All submissions must be electronic in PDF. Please see the conference
website for detailed typesetting specifications. Authors are strongly
encouraged to use the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files available at
the conference website (http://www.naaclhlt2009.org/).

Submission will be electronic, using the START paper submission
website. The START submission page will be available from
http://www.naaclhlt2009.org/.


Important Dates

March 6, 2009 Paper Submission due
March 30, 2009 Notification of acceptance
April 12, 2009 Camera ready papers due
June 4/5, 2009 SEW-2009 Workshop




Program chairs:

Eneko Agirre (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Basque Country)
Lluís Màrquez (Technical University of Catalonia, UPC, Spain)
Richard Wicentowski (Swarthmore College, USA)


Address any queries regarding the workshop to:

mailto://sew2009org@googlegroups.com


Programme Committee

* Timothy Baldwin, Melbourne University, Australia
* Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy
* Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
* Katrin Erk, University of Texas, USA
* Roxana Girju, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
* Veronique Hoste, University of Antwerp, Belgium
* Eduard Hovy, Information Science Institute, USA
* Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
* Kenneth Litkowski, CL Research, USA
* Bernardo Magnini, FBC, Italy
* Katja Markert, Leeds University, UK
* David Martínez, University of Melbourne, Australia
* Diana McCarthy, University of Sussex, UK
* Roberto Navigli, University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy
* Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
* Martha Palmer, University of Colorado, USA
* Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota in Duluth, USA
* German Rigau, Basque Country University, Basque Country
* Mark Stevenson, University of Sheffield, UK
* Carlo Strapparava, FBK-irst, Italy
* Mihai Surdeanu, Yahoo Research, Spain
* Stan Szpakowicz, University of Ottawa, Canada
* Dekai Wu, The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, China
* Deniz Yuret, Koc University, Turkey


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SIGLEX Special Interest Group on the Lexicon SIGLEX

Homepage: www.aclweb.org/siglex E-mail: siglex@aclweb.org

SIGLEX Message Center: www.clres.com/siglex/messctr.php

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