LINGUIST List 6.1595

Sat Nov 11 1995

Calls: Southeastern conf on ling, Word sense disambiguation

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <dizdartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

  • Martin Matthew Jacobsen, Secol Conference
  • Nancy Ide, Call: Word Sense Disambiguation

    Message 1: Secol Conference

     Date: Sat, 11 Nov 1995 00:45:26 Secol Conference
    From: Martin Matthew Jacobsen <mmj3293TAM2000.TAMU.EDU>
    Subject: Secol Conference




    CALL FOR PAPERS: SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE ON LINGUISTICS

    March 15-16, 1996 College Station, TX

    Plenary speakers: Paul Hopper, Elizabeth Traugott

    Abstracts are invited for three special sessions, as well as for general sessions in all areas of linguistics and stylistics. Send 6 copies of a 300-word abstract for a paper or a poster to the appropriate address below (hard copies only, please). People whose papers are accepted must be or become SECOL members.

    SPECIAL SESSIONS

    On-line resources in linguistics. Abstracts to Anthony Aristar, Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4227 by Nov. 1, 1995. E-mail aristartam2000.tamu.edu

    Ethnography of communication. Abstracts to Kathleen Ferrara, Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4227 by Nov. 1, 1995. E-mail ferraratam2000.tamu.edu

    Etymology. Abstracts to J. Lawrence Mitchell, Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4227 by Nov. 1, 1995. E-mail larrymtam2000.tamu.edu

    GENERAL SESSIONS

    Abstracts to Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Department of English, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152 by Dec. 5, 1995. For guidelines, contact Joan Weatherly [Phone (901)678-4582; E-mail mjweatherlycc.memphis.edu] or Marvin Ching [Phone (901)678-4520; E-mail chingmklcc.memphis.edu].

    Message 2: Call: Word Sense Disambiguation

     Date: Sat, 11 Nov 1995 12:09:50 Call: Word Sense Disambiguation
    From: Nancy Ide <ideuniv-aix.fr>
    Subject: Call: Word Sense Disambiguation




    CALL FOR PAPERS ***** CALL FOR PAPERS ***** CALL FOR PAPERS

    COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS _________________________ Special issue on WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION

    Guest Editors Nancy Ide <idecs.vassar.edu> Jean Veronis <veronisuniv-aix.fr>

    The discrimination of word senses, word sense disambiguation (WSD), is of prime importance for all areas involving computerized language analysis, including corpus-based research, lexical studies, information retrieval, machine translation, natural language processing, studies of style and theme, authorship attribution, and applications such as hypertext browsing.

    As early as the late 1950's, WSD was recognized as a critical but extremely difficult task for automated language analysis. The intractability of the problem contributed to the abandoning of machine translation research programs in the early 1960's, when one of the pioneers in the field, Bar-Hillel, proclaimed that he could see no way computer programs could ever determine, for example, the proper sense of the word "pen" in the sentence "The box is in the pen". Nevertheless, in the past 30 years researchers have continued to work on the WSD problem, and although the problem is far from solved, considerable progress has been made.

    This special issue is intended to summarize the state of the art in WSD, identify the main areas of difficulty, and suggest solutions for improvement. Papers are invited on all areas of WSD, and especially on :

    o large-scale knowledge sources for WSD. Given the difficulty of building large-scale knowledge sources by hand, researchers have turned to "ready-made" resources such as machine-readable dictionaries and corpora. However, each of these kinds of resources poses problems, and none covers definitively the areas required to accomplish WSD.

    o the problem of sense division. The disambiguation of word senses involves, a priori, determining what the appropriate sense distinctions for a given word are. Many studies have shown that the kinds of sense distinctions made by most everyday dictionaries (and even some computer dictionary resources such as WordNet) are too finely-grained, and in some cases not even appropriate, to serve the purposes of language analysis.

    o combination of methods (statistical, rule-based) and knowledge sources (associative, collocational, phrasal, morphosyntactic, statistical, domain-related, etc.). It is now widely held that no single approach is complete enough for WSD, and that a combination of sources and methods is required. However, it remains to be determined how to most effectively combine methods and knowledge for WSD.

    o assessment of the knowledge "needs" for WSD. There is no precise quantitative study on what the knowledge "needs" are in order to disambiguate a given word in a given context. For example, in the sentences, "I write on the page", "I spoke to the page", "The front page says..." it is obvious that different kinds of knowledge contribute more or less to the proper (and/or easy) disambiguation of "page" in the various contexts--i.e., the strong association between "write" and "page", selectional restrictions on the verb "speak", and collocational information for "front" and "page", respectively.

    All papers will be peer reviewed. Priority will be given to papers that have a strong empirical background and report precise, quantitative results.

    SUBMISSIONS Hard copy submissions should be on letter-size paper (8.5 x 11 inches, or A4), double-spaced throughout, including footnotes and references. The paper should begin with an informative abstract of 150-250 words. Manuscripts must be written in English. Six copies should be sent to

    Julia Hirschberg, CL Editor AT&T Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Avenue, 2D-450 Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA (+1 908) 582-7496; aclresearch.att.com

    Submissions in electronic form (LaTeX) must conform to the Computational Linguistics specifications, which can retrieved from

    ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/acl-l/Styfiles/CLstyle/clsubmission.tar.Z or http://xxx.lanl.gov/ftp/cmp-lg/papers/macros/cl-style/

    Electronic submissions should be sent to <aclresearch.att.com>. All submissions must be received before April 1, 1996.

    Computational Linguistics is published quarterly by the MIT Press for the Association for Computational Linguistics.