CFP: Models of Scientific Discourse Annotation (MSDA 2011)

Call for Papers: 

Models of Scientific Discourse Annotation (MSDA2011)
Portland, Oregon, June 25, 2011 (collocated with ACL/HLT 2011)
http://msda2011.wordpress.com/

Motivation:

The detection of discourse structure of scientific documents is important for a number of tasks, including biocuration efforts, text summarisation, and the creation of improved formats for scientific publishing. Currently, many parallel efforts exist to detect a range of discourse elements at different levels of granularity, and for different purposes. Discourse elements detected include facts, problems, hypotheses, experimental results, and analyses of results; the differentiation between new and existing work, and the difference between the author’s own contribution and that of cited sources. A plethora of feature classes is used to identify these elements, including verb tense/mood/voice, semantic verb class, speculative language or negation, and various classes of stance markers, as well as text-structural components and the location of references. The linguistics behind this work involves topics such as the detection of subjectivity, opinion, entailment, and inference; detecting author stance and author disagreement, and inferring differences between the given text and the state of knowledge in a particular field. 

Several workshops have been focused on the detection of some of these features in scientific text, such as speculation and negation in the 2010 workshop on Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing and hedging in the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task Learning to detect hedges and their scope in natural language text. There have also been several efforts to produce large-scale corpora, such as BioScope, where negation and speculation information were annotated, and the GENIA Event corpus. 

To perform this analysis, a wide range of annotation schemes have been produced, that vary along a number of different axes, including: 
•	Annotation viewpoint (e.g. argumentative zones, scientific investigation structure, type of knowledge conveyed)
•	Unit of annotation (e.g. zone, sentence, segment, event, etc)
•	Type of text (abstracts or full papers)
•	Domain of application
•	Granularity of the annotation categories (coarse or fine-grained)
•	Whether other types/levels of information are also annotated (e.g. certainty level, knowledge source, manner etc.)

Scope:

The goal of 'Models of Scientific Discourse Annotation' is to compare and contrast the motivation behind these different efforts, the techniques and principles applied in the various approaches, and discuss ways in which they can complement each other and collaborate to form standards for an optimal method of annotating appropriate levels of discourse, with enhanced accuracy and usefulness. 

The workshop aims to compare, contrast and evaluate different scientific discourse annotation schemes and tools, in order to answer questions such as:  
•	What motivates a certain level, method, viewpoint for annotating scientific text?
•	What is the annotation level for a unit of argumentation: an event, a sentence, a segment? What are advantages and disadvantages of all three?
•	How easily can different schemes to be applied to texts? Are they easily trainable?
•	Which schemes are the most portable? Can they be applied to both full papers and abstracts? Can they be applied to texts in different domains?
•	How granular should annotation schemes be? What are the advantages/disadvantages of fine and coarse grained annotation categories?
•	Can different schemes complement each other to provide different levels of information? Can different schemes be combined to give better results?
•	How can we compare annotations, how do we decide which features, approaches, techniques work best?
•	How do we exchange and evaluate each other’s annotations?
•	How applicable are these efforts towards improved methods of publishing or summarizing science?

We invite two types of submissions:
1) Research papers by participants who are currently conducting scientific discourse analysis are invited to present their work, augmented by a clear motivation for the granularity, discourse elements and goal of their annotation procedure
2) Vision papers, by participants who wish to either compare and contrast existing efforts, or present a vision of annotation as it pertains to specific user goals or a particular view of scientific discourse as a textual genre of study.

In inviting both categories, we hope to stimulate a discussion between the Computational Linguistics community and linguists, genre specialists and sociologists of science, to come to a common understanding regarding the needs and possibilities of scientific discourse analysis. 

Keynote lecture: 

We are proud to announce a keynote lecture by Eduard H. Hovy of ISI/USC, tentatively entitled: ‘Towards a systematic approach for annotating scientific discourse’

Submission details:

Submission deadline is FEBRUARY 25, 2011.

Two types of papers are solicited: 
?	8-page (+ 2 pp references) research papers reporting to original and unpublished research in scientific discourse annotation 
?	4-page (+ 2 pp references) vision papers pertaining to models, concepts, critiques or comparisons of systems of annotation of scientific discourse. 

Accepted papers are expected to be presented at the workshop and will be published in the workshop proceedings. A selection of the presented papers will be published as a special issue of PLoS One (http://www.plosone.org/). 

Submissions must be formatted using ACL 2011 style files, available at 
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml

Contributions should be submitted via the MSDA2011 submission site:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msda2011

Organising committee:

Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester
Ágnes Sándor, Xerox Research Europe, Grenoble
Hagit Shatkay, University of Delaware
Anita de Waard, Elsevier Labs, University of Toronto

Program Committee: 

Gully Burns – ISI/USC
Tim Clark – Harvard/MGH
Kevin Cohen - University of Colorado
Nigel Collier - National Institute of Informatics
Walter Daelemans -University of Antwerp
Kjersti Flottum – Bergen
Roxana Girju - University of Illinois
Sanda Harabagiu - University of Texas Dallas
Lynette Hirschman - MITRE corporation
Halil Kilicoglu - Concordia University
Jin-Dong Kim - DBCLS, University of Tokyo
Anna Korhonen - University of Cambridge
Maria Liakata - Aberystwyth University
Roser Morante - University of Antwerp
Raheel Nawaz -University of Manchester
Caroline Sporleder -  Saarland University
Andrey Rzhetsky - University of Chicago
Gyorgy Szarvas - Technical University Darmstadt
Paul Thompson - University of Manchester
Junichi Tsujii – University of Tokyo
Antal van den Bosch - Tilburg University
Karin Verspoor - University of Colorado
Theresa Wilson - University of Edinburgh
Elsevier B.V. Registered Office: Radarweg 29, 1043 NX Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Registration No. 33156677 (The Netherlands)

Received on Friday, 24 December 2010 00:21:17 UTC