ACL/IJCNLP-2009 Workshop

"The People's Web meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources"

Co-located with Joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing

Singapore August 7th, 2009 http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/acl-ijcnlp-2009-workshop/

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, online resources collaboratively constructed by ordinary users on the Web have considerably influenced the NLP community. In many works, they have been used as a substitute for conventional semantic resources and as semantically structured corpora with great success. While conventional resources such as WordNet are developed by trained linguists [1], online semantic resources can now be automatically extracted from the content collaboratively created by the users [2]. Thereby, the knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and coverage problems pertinent to conventional lexical semantic resources can be overcome.

The resource that has gained the greatest popularity in this respect so far is Wikipedia. However, other resources recently discovered in NLP, such as folksonomies, the multilingual collaboratively constructed dictionary Wiktionary, or Q&A sites like WikiAnswers or Yahoo! Answers are also very promising. Moreover, new wiki-based platforms such as Citizendium or Knol have recently emerged that offer features distinct from Wikipedia and are of high potential in terms of their use in NLP.

The benefits of using Web-based resources come along with new challenges, such as the interoperability with existing resources and the quality of the knowledge represented. As collaboratively created resources lack editorial control, they are typically incomplete. For the interoperability with conventional resources, the mappings have to be investigated. The quality of collaboratively constructed resources is questioned in many cases, and the information extraction remains a complicated task due to the incompleteness and semi- structuredness of the content. Therefore, the research community has begun to develop and provide tools for accessing collaboratively constructed resources [2,5].

The above listed challenges actually present a chance for NLP techniques to improve the quality of Web-based semantic resources. Researchers have therefore proposed techniques for link prediction [3] or information extraction [4] that can be used to guide the "crowds" to construct resources that are better suited for being used in NLP in return.

[1] Christiane Fellbaum WordNet An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT press, 1998. [2] Torsten Zesch, Christof Mueller and Iryna Gurevych Extracting Lexical Semantic Knowledge from Wikipedia and Wiktionary Proceedings of the Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2008. http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/jwpl/ http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/jwktl/ [3] Rada Mihalcea and Andras Csomai Wikify!: Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge. Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2007. [4] Daniel S. Weld et al. Intelligence in Wikipedia. Twenty-Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2008. [5] Kotaro Nakayama et al. Wikipedia Mining - Wikipedia as a Corpus for Knowledge Extraction. Proceedings of the Annual Wikipedia Conference (Wikimania), 2008. http://wikipedia-lab.org/en/index.php

TOPICS

The workshop will bring together researchers from both worlds: those using collaboratively created resources in NLP applications such as information retrieval, named entity recognition, or keyword extraction, and those using NLP applications for improving the resources or extracting different types of semantic information from them. Hopefully, this will turn into a feedback loop, where NLP techniques improved by collaboratively constructed resources are used to improve the resources in exchange.

Specific topics include but are not limited to: * Different types of collaboratively constructed resources, such as wiki-based platforms, Q&A sites or folksonomies; * Using collaboratively constructed resources in NLP such as information retrieval, text categorization, information extraction, etc.; * Analyzing the properties of collaboratively constructed resources related to their use in NLP; * Interoperability of collaboratively constructed resources with conventional semantic resources and between themselves; * Converting unstructured information into structured lexical semantic information; tools for mining social and collaborative content; * Quality issues with respect to collaboratively constructed resources.

We also encourage the submission of short papers describing publicly available tools for accessing or analyzing collaboratively created resources. During the breaks, tables can be provided for demonstrations.

INVITED SPEAKER

Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Full paper submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL-IJCNLP 2009 proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus one extra page for references. Short paper submissions should also follow the two-column format of ACL-IJCNLP 2009 proceedings, and should not exceed four (4) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files tailored for this year's conference, which will be available on the conference website. All submissions must conform to the official ACL-IJCNLP 2009 style guidelines available at: http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/main/authors/stylefiles/

As the reviewing will be blind, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

All accepted papers will be presented orally and published in the workshop proceedings. The deadline for all papers is May 1st, 2009 (GMT-12).

Submission is electronic using paper submission software at: https://www.softconf.com/acl-ijcnlp09/CCSR/

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline (full and short): May 1, 2009 Notification of acceptance of papers: June 1, 2009 Camera-ready copy of papers due: June 7, 2009 ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop: Aug 7, 2009

ORGANIZERS

Iryna Gurevych Torsten Zesch

Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Delphine Bernhard Technische Universiaet Darmstadt Paul Buitelaar DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway Razvan Bunescu University of Texas at Austin Pablo Castells Universidad Autononoma de Madrid Philipp Cimiano Karlsruhe University Irene Cramer Dortmund University of Technology Andras Csomai Google Inc. Ernesto De Luca University of Magdeburg Roxana Girju University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Andreas Hotho University of Kassel Graeme Hirst University of Toronto Ed Hovy University of Southern California Jussi Karlgren Swedish Institute of Computer Science Boris Katz Massachusetts Institute of Technology Adam Kilgarriff Lexical Computing Ltd Chin-Yew Lin Microsoft Research James Martin University of Colorado Boulder Olena Medelyan University of Waikato David Milne University of Waikato Saif Mohammad University of Maryland Dan Moldovan University of Texas at Dallas Kotaro Nakayama University of Tokyo Ani Nenkova University of Pennsylvania Guenter Neumann DFKI Saarbruecken Maarten de Rijke University of Amsterdam Magnus Sahlgren Swedish Institute of Computer Science Manfred Stede Potsdam University Benno Stein Bauhaus University Weimar Tonio Wandmacher University of Osnabrueck Rene Witte Concordia University Montreal Hans-Peter Zorn European Media Lab, Heidelberg