Extra-propositional aspects of meaning in computational linguistics (ACL 2012)
Papers are invited for the one-day workshop to be held in Jeju Island, Korea, in July 2012 (12, 13, or 14 - to be determined).
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:
- Subjectivity, attitude
- 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
Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. All submissions must conform to the official ACL 2012 style guidelines and should not exceed 8 pages. Formatting instructions and the ACL 2012 Style Files can be found at http://www.acl2012.org/call/sub01.asp .
The reviewing of the papers will be blind and the papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.
Papers should be submitted no later than March 18, 2012, via the following submission site:
March 18, 2012 - Submission deadline
April 15, 2012 - Notification of acceptance
April 30, 2012 - Camera-ready papers due
July 12, 13, or 14, 2012 - Workshop
Roser Morante, CLiPS-LTG, University of Antwerp
Caroline Sporleder, MMCI / Computational Linguistics & Phonetics, Saarland University
Johan Bos - University of Groningen
Gosse Bouma - University of Groningen
Walter Daelemans - University of Antwerp
Roxana Girju - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Iris Hendrickx - University of Lisbon
Halil Kilicoglu - Concordia University
Maria Liakata - University of Wales
Katja Markert - University of Leeds
Erwin Marsi - Norwegian University of Science and Technology
David Martínez - Melbourne University
Malvina Nissim - University of Bologna
Sebastian Padó - University of Heidelberg
Sampo Pyysalo - University of Tokyo
Owen Rambow - Columbia University
Paolo Rosso - Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Josef Ruppenhofer - Saarland University
Roser Saurí - Barcelona Media Innovation Center
Carlo Strapparava - Fondazione Bruno Kessler
György Szarvas - TU Darmstadt
Erik Velldal - University of Oslo
Annita de Waard - Elsevier Labs
Bonnie Webber - University of Edinburgh
Michael Wiegand - Saarland University