CALL FOR PAPERS : Special Issue on Natural Language and Knowledge Representation
I'm forwarding the following announcement, which may be
of interest to readers of these mailing lists.
John Sowa
-------- Original Message --------
CALL FOR PAPERS
Journal of Logic and Computation - Special Issue on Natural Language
and Knowledge Representation
We cordially invite submissions of articles for a special issue of the
journal of logic and computation <http://logcom.oxfordjournals.org/>
on natural language and knowledge representation.
TOPICS
We believe that the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Knowledge
Representation (KR) communities have common goals. They are both
concerned with representing knowledge and with reasoning, since the
best test for the semantic capability of an NLP system is performing
reasoning tasks. Having these two essential common grounds, the two
communities ought to have been collaborating, to provide a well-suited
representation language that covers these grounds. However, the two
communities also have difficult-to-meet concerns. Mainly, the semantic
representation (SR) should be expressive enough and take the information
in context into account, while the KR should be equipped with a fast
reasoning process.
The main objection against using an SR or a KR is that they need
experts to be understood. Non-experts communicate (usually) via a
natural language (NL), and more or less they understand each other
while performing a lot of reasoning. An essential practical value
of representations is their attempt to be transparent. This will
particularly be useful when/if the system provides a justification
for a user or a knowledge engineer on its line of reasoning using
the underlying KR (i.e. without generating back to NL).
We all seem to believe that, compared to Natural Language, the
existing Knowledge Representation and reasoning systems are poor.
Nevertheless, for a long time, the KR community has dismissed the
idea that NL can be a KR. That's because NL can be very ambiguous
and there are syntactic and semantic processing complexities associated
with it. However, researchers in both communities have started looking
at this issue again. Possibly, it has to do with the NLP community
making some progress in terms of processing and handling ambiguity,
the KR community realising that a lot of knowledge is already 'coded'
in NL and that one should reconsider the way they handle expressivity
and ambiguity.
For this special journal issue of logic and computation, we invite the
submission of original high quality articles. Topics for this special
issue include but not limited to:
+ A novel NL-like KR or building on an existing one
+ Reasoning systems that benefit from properties of NL to reason with NL
+ Semantic representation used as a KR: compromise between expressivity
and efficiency?
+ More Expressive KR for NL understanding (Any compromise?)
+ Any work exploring how existing representations fall short of
addressing some problems involved in modelling, manipulating or
reasoning (whether reasoning as used to get an interpretation for
a certain utterance, exchange of utterances or what utterances
follow from other utterances) with NL documents
+ Representations that show how classical logics are not as efficient,
transparent, expressive or where a one-step application of an
inference rule require more (complex) steps in a classical environment
and vice-versa; i.e. how classical logics are more powerful, etc.
+ Building a reasoning test collection for natural language
understanding systems: any kind of reasoning (deductive, abductive,
etc); for a deductive test suite see for e.g. deliverable 16 of the
FraCas project. Also, look at textual entailment challenges 1 and 2.
+ Comparative results (on a common test suite or a common task) of
different representations or systems that reason with NL (again any
kind of reasoning). The comparison could be either for efficiency,
transparency or expressivity
+ Knowledge acquisition systems or techniques that benefit from
properties of NL to acquire knowledge already "coded" in NL
+ Automated Reasoning, Theorem Proving and KR communities views on
all this
+ Challenges in Natural Language and Reasoning
+ Where is the NLP or KR community going wrong/right in meeting the
challenges?
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
James ALLEN, University of Rochester, USA
Patrick BLACKBURN, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique, France
Johan BOS, University of Edinburgh, UK
Richard CROUCH, Palo Alto Research Centre, USA
Anette FRANK, DFKI, Germany
Fernando GOMEZ, University of Central Florida, USA
Sanda HARABAGIU, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
John HARRISON, Intel Corporation, USA
Jerry HOBBS, Information Sciences Institute, USA
Chung Hee HWANG, Raytheon Co., USA
Michael KOHLHASE, International University Bremen, Germany
Shalom LAPPIN, King's College, UK
Carsten LUTZ, Dresden University of Technology, Germany
Inderjeet MANI, George Town University, USA
Jeff PELLETIER, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Stephen PULMAN, University of Oxford, UK
Lenhart SCHUBERT, University of Rochester, USA
John SOWA, VivoMind Intelligence, Inc., USA
Jana SUKKARIEH, University of Oxford, UK
Geoff SUTCLIFFE, Miami University, USA
For advice on topic, scope, suitability for the special issue
please contact Jana Sukkarieh @ <j.sukkarieh.94@cantab.net>.
Paper submission deadline is July 31st, 2006. Send your electronic
submission (pdf) to <j.sukkarieh.94@cantab.net> . Also submission
process will be soon available on
<http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady0641/Flairs06_NL_KR/>.
Please check the site.
The documents should not exceed more than 20 pages. The articles
will be peer reviewed and notification for authors will be sent
as soon as possible after the date of submission.