Workshops

Workshops will take place on the 23rd and 24th of May, 2018. Submissions should be done by using the IWCS easychair link and choosing the appropriate workshop: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwcs2019

ISA-15 - 15th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation

Organizers: Harry Bunt, Nancy Ide, Kiyong Lee, James Pustejovsky, Laurent Romary

Website: https://sigsem.uvt.nl/isa15/

Workshop email: iwcs2019-isa15@easychair.org

ISA-15 is the fifteenth edition of a series of joint workshops of the ACL Special Interest Group in Semantics (SIGSEM) and the International Organisation for Standardisation ISO. ISA-workshops bring together researchers and users interested in the annotation of semantic information as expressed in text, speech, gestures, graphics, video, images, and in communicative behaviour where multiple modalities are combined. Examples of semantic annotation include the markup of events, time, space, dialogue acts, discourse relations, semantic roles, coreference, and quantification phenomena, but also other aspects of meaning for which the ISO organisation pursues the establishment and promotion of standardised annotation methods and representation schemes, in order to support the creation of interoperable semantic and pragmatic resources.

RELATIONS - Workshop on meaning relations between phrases and sentences

Organizers: Darina Gold, Veneliv Kovatchev, Torsten Zesch

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/relations-2019

Workshop email: iwcs2019-relations@easychair.org

Linguistic expressions such as phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. We are interested in both: theoretical research on the nature of meaning relations and the empirical work on identifying, generating, and extracting them. Examples for meaning relations of interest are: Synonymy/Paraphrase (Phrases/sentences having approx. the same meaning), Entailment (One phrase/sentence being inferred from another), Specificity (One phrase/sentence being more general than another), and Similarity (Phrases/sentences with a partial meaning overlap).

CSTFRS - Computing Semantics with Types, Frames and Related Structures

The goal of this workshop is to bring together people interested in structured representations of semantic information, especially from a computational perspective. In recent years, there has been a growing body of research which aims to integrate structured entities into formal semantic accounts. Important developments in this direction are the introduction of rich type systems and the use of frame-based representations, among others. The workshop is open to both foundational issues of structured semantic representations and applications to specific linguistic phenomena.

Organizers: Rainer Osswald, Christian Retoré, Peter Sutton

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/cstfrsworkshop/

Workshop email: iwcs2019-cstfrs@easychair.org

VSDD - Vector Semantics for Dialogue and Discourse

Vector models of meaning---both strictly distributional models derived directly from co-occurrence statistics, and embeddings learned using representations such as those learnt by a neural network---have revolutionised computational linguistics via their ability to reflect semantic similarities and regularities while providing flexibility to model dynamics and change. However, while there has been much recent interest in extending these models from the level of words to that of larger phrases and sentences, with its own scalability and transparency problems, and there is relatively little progress in understanding how they might apply beyond the sentence: in the realm of discourse and dialogue.

This requires a shift in perspective, moving beyond the static word/sentence view of language as a jigsaw of pieces, to a dynamic perspective seeing language as a set of mechanisms for interaction in real time, encompassing a whole range of actions both sub- and supra-sentential. At a sub-sentential level, dialogue is highly incremental: individuals can interrupt, extend, correct, or request clarification mid-turn, in effect constructing joint utterances without any sense of breakdown in the dialogue exchange. And at the suprasentential level, we have the challenges not only of establishing coreference but of modelling the vast array of speech act effects in dialogue, and rhetorical effects in text discourse, and how they evolve.

This workshop hopes to bring together researchers using vector space methods for distributional semantics, word and sentence embeddings, and dialogue and discourse, to discuss these challenges and fill this gap. We are planning this event as an open discussion session, with three invited speakers, and otherwise individual participants having a ten minute slot to discuss a presented poster, with plenty of time allowed for free interactive exchange. We are very much hoping you will be interested in participating in this event.

Organizers: Arash Eshghi, Pat Healey, Julian Hough, Ruth Kempson, Matthew Purver, and Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/dialoguevector/

Workshop email: iwcs2019-vsdd@easychair.org

NLCS - Natural Language and Computer Science 6

Formal tools coming from logic and category theory are important in both natural language semantics and in computational semantics. Moreover, work on these tools borrows heavily from all areas of theoretical computer science. In the other direction, applications having to do with natural language has inspired developments on the formal side. The workshop invites papers on both topics. Specific topics includes, but are not limited to:

- logic for semantics of lexical items, sentences, discourse and dialog

- continuations in natural language semantics

- formal tools in textual inference, such as logics for natural language inference

- applications of category theory in semantics

- linear logic in semantics

- formal approaches to unifying data-driven and declarative approaches to semantics

Organizers: Robin Cooper, Valeria de Paiva and Larry Moss

Website: http://www.indiana.edu/~iulg/nlcs.html

Workshop email: iwcs2019-nlcs@easychair.org

IWCS2019 Shared Task on Semantic Parsing

DRS parsing is a semantic parsing task where meaning of natural language texts needs to be automatically converted into a Discourse Representation Structure (DRS), a semantic representation with a long history in studies on formal semantics. For more info click on the website link below.

Organizers: Lasha Abzianidze, Johan Bos, Hessel Haagsma, Rik van Noord

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/iwcs2019/shared-task

Workshop email: iwcs2019-shared-task@easychair.org