Call for papers (NEW DATES)

Textual inference and paraphrase have attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. Many NLP tasks, including question answering, information extraction, and text summarization, can be mapped at least partially onto the recognition of textual entailments and the detection of semantic equivalence between texts. Robust and accurate algorithms and resources for inference and paraphrasing can therefore be beneficial for

a broad range of NLP applications, and have generally stimulated research in the area of applied semantics.

TextInfer 2011 aims to bring together these empirical approaches (which have tended to dominate previous textual entailment events) with more formal approaches to inference (which are often presented at events like ICoS or IWCS). We feel that the time is ripe for researchers from both groups to join for this event, with the goal of establishing a discussion on how the two approaches relate to one another, and how to define interfaces between the two methodologies.

In this spirit, TextInfer 2011 invites both theoretical and applied research contributions on topics related to textual inference and paraphrasing. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Representation of lexical and phrasal meaning; syntax-semantics interface
• Modeling lexicon and context in semantic interpretation
• Representing and resolving semantic ambiguity
• Architectural questions: shallow and deep semantic processing and reasoning; rule-based and probabilistic methods
• Building and using ontologies to model inference
• Computational modeling of linguistic theories
• Learning textual inference rules and paraphrases from data
• Applications of textual inference
• Evaluation methodologies of textual inference and paraphrasing
• Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of methods, data, and errors
• Multilingual and language-independent techniques for textual inference and paraphrasing

TextInfer will be co-located with EMNLP 2011, at Edinburgh, Scotland and will take place on July 30, 2011.

IMPORTANT DATES

• May 19, 2011: Papers due (exact deadline: 23:59 Edinburgh time = British Summer Time, GMT+1)
• June 19, 2011: Notification of acceptance
• July 01, 2011: Camera-ready deadline
• July 30, 2011: Workshop

SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. We distinguish two types of papers:

• Long papers present completed work. Papers must not exceed 9 pages, plus references.
• Short papers present work in progress and should not exceed 4 pages (plus two additional pages of references)

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.

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL 2011 proceedings, see the official style files at http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml.

Authors may submit the same paper at several conferences. In this case they must notify the organisers in a separate mail to textinfer2011@nlpado.de, so we know that the paper might be withdrawn depending on the results at some other conference. Withdrawals must be notified by May 26th, 2011.