Subject: Extended Deadline!  LEXICAL SEMANTICS IN CONTEXT: CORPUS, INFERENCE AND DISCOURSE
From: Paul Buitelaar <paulb@cs.brandeis.edu>
To: elsnet-list@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Cc: paulb@mail.cs.brandeis.edu, bos@coli.uni-sb.de,
        news-announce-conferences@uunet.uu.net
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 11:36:08 -0500



                          ESSLLI-98 Workshop on 
      LEXICAL SEMANTICS IN CONTEXT: CORPUS, INFERENCE AND DISCOURSE
                           August 17 - 21, 1998

                       A workshop held as part of the 
        10th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information 
                               (ESSLLI-98) 
                August 17 - 28, 1998, Saarbruecken, Germany

                        ** LAST CALL FOR PAPERS **

                   ** EXTENDED DEADLINE : March 2, 1998 **


ORGANIZERS: Johan Bos (Saarbruecken) and Paul Buitelaar (Brandeis University)


The workshop aims at bringing together research in two complementary fields of 
semantic analysis that are still too far apart. In order to achieve both a 
broad and a deep understanding of any given text document, a system needs both 
advanced acquisition of corpus specific lexical semantic knowledge and powerful 
inference mechanisms that utilize that knowledge in discourse analysis.

Given the still relatively limited results within both areas there has been 
little impetus to combine them. Corpus-based extraction of lexical semantic 
knowledge has only recently become a more feasible task, because of the growing
availibility of on-line text documents; robust corpus processing technologies, 
such as broad coverage part-of-speech tagging and shallow parsing; and readily 
available statistical methods. The various approaches to discourse analysis, 
originating in such diverse fields as formal semantics, psychology and AI, are 
in the process of converging into a unified approach to the analysis and 
representation of the cohesive structure of natural language documents.

The intersection between these two fields lies in the application of lexical 
semantic knowledge to such problems in discourse analysis as anaphora 
resolution and discourse segmentation. In fact, the benefit will be mutual, 
because knowledge of discourse structure is helpful to lexical knowledge 
extraction as well. 

In summary, large scale domain specific lexical semantic knowledge acquisition 
can assist in analyzing discourse structures, which in turn can assist in 
acquiring even more accurate lexical semantic representations for the relevant 
terms in the domain.



FURTHER INFORMATION:

To obtain further information please visit the workshop home page at 

       http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~paulb/esslli98.html