******************************************************************************* 2nd CALL FOR PAPERS EACL 2009 Workshop GEMS : GEometrical Models of Natural Language Semantics Athens, Greece; March 31, 2009 URL: http://art.uniroma2.it/gems/ **** Submission Deadline: December 19, 2008 **** ******************************************************************************* Distributional models and semantic spaces represent a core topic in contemporary computational linguistics for their impact on advanced tasks and on other knowledge fields (such as social science and the humanities). The goal of the GEMS workshop is to further stimulate research on semantic spaces and distributional methods for NLP, by adopting an interdisciplinary approach to allow a proper exchange of ideas, results and resources among often independent communities. In particular, the workshop will provide a common ground for a fruitful discussion among experts of distributional approaches, collocational corpus analysis and machine learning; researchers interested in the use of statistical models in NLP applications (e.g. question answering, summarization and textual entailment) and in other fields of science; and experts in formal computational semantics. The workshop aims at gathering contemporary contributions to large scale problems in meaning representation, acquisition and use, based on distributional and vector space models. The workshop aims also to shed new light on the use of such techniques on complex linguistic tasks, such as linguistic knowledge acquisition, semantic role labeling, textual entailment recognition, question answering, document understanding/summarization and ontology learning. TOPICS OF INTEREST We invite submissions on any topic of current interest related to the application of semantic spaces to NLP and related disciplines, such as: - Document-based, Collocational and Syntagmatic spaces - Eigenvector methods (e.g. Singular Value and Tucker Decomposition) - Higher order tensors and Quantum Logic extensions - Feature engineering in machine learning models - Computational complexity and evaluation issues - Graph-based models over semantic spaces - Logic and inference in semantic spaces - Psychological and cognitive theories of semantic space models - Applications in the humanities and social sciences We also especially encourage submissions on the empirical evaluation of the above computational models within the following NLP tasks: - Word sense disambiguation and discrimination - Selectional preference induction - Acquisition of lexicons and linguistic patterns - Conceptual clustering - Kernels methods for NLP (e.g. relation extraction and textual entailment) - Quantitative extensions of Formal Concept Analysis - Modeling of linguistic theories and ontological knowledge SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS Authors are invited to submit papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. In addition to long papers presenting completed work, we also invite short papers and demos: - Long papers should present completed work and should not exceed 8 pages. - Short papers/demos can present work in progress or the description of a system, and should not exceed 5 pages. One more page is eventually allowed for bibliographic references only. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. The papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations or any references to web sites, project names etc. revealing the authors' identity. Self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. All submissions are to be formatted using the EACL 2009 stylefiles (see EACL 2009 page at: http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/authors). Submission will be electronic, via the Web-service at: http://art.uniroma2.it/gems/submission.html Please consult the Workshop web page for more details. IMPORTANT DATES Submission deadline: December 19, 2008 Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2009 Camera-ready papers due: February 13, 2009 Workshop: March 31, 2009 WORKSHOP CHAIRS - Roberto Basili, University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy - Marco Pennacchiotti, Saarland University, Germany PROGRAM COMMITTEE - Marco Baroni, University of Trento, Italy - Johan Bos, University of Roma La Sapienza, Italy - Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, Germany - John A. Bullinaria, University of Birmingham, UK - Rodolfo Dal Monte, University of Venice, Italy - Katrin Erk, University of Texas, US - Stefan Evert, University of Osnabruck, Germany - Alfio Massimiliano Gliozzo, STLab - ISTC - CNR, Italy - Jerry Hobbs, University of Southern California, US - Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa, Italy - Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden - Will Lowe, University of Nottingham, UK - Diana McCarthy, University of Sussex, UK - Alessandro Moschitti, University of Trento, Italy - Saif Mohammad, University of Maryland, US - Sebastian Pado, Stanford University, US - Patrick Pantel, Yahoo! Inc., US - Massimo Poesio, University of Trento, Italy - Magnus Sahlgren, Swedish institute of Computer Science, Sweden - Fabrizio Sebastiani, CNR, Italy - Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto, Canada - Sabine Schulte imWalde, University of Stuttgart, Germany - Peter D. Turney, National Research Council Canada, Canada - Dominic Widdows, Google Research, US - Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, UK - Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy CONTACTS Roberto Basili (principal contact) Department of Computer Science University of Roma Tor Vergata Italy basili@info.uniroma2.it Marco Pennacchiotti Yahoo! Inc. Santa Clara, CA US pennac@yahoo-inc.com