IJCAI-97 Workshop on Ontologies and Multilingual NLP

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                     IJCAI-97 Workshop on

              Ontologies and Multilingual NLP

              Nagoya, Japan, August 23-25, 1997

(Web page: <a ref="http://crl.nmsu.edu/Events/IJCAI/">
           Workshop on Ontologies and Multilingual NLP</a>)

Background
==========

 A number of ontology-related workshops have been held in the past
years (e.g., 1993 in Padua, 1995 IJCAI, 1996 ECAI, 1997 AAAI Spring
Symposium, etc.). However, none of them concentrated centrally on
applications of world modeling to multilingual Natural Language
Processing (NLP).

 Ontologies for knowledge-based computing and especially for Natural
Language Processing are steadily reaching a level of sophistication
and size which make them increasingly useful to the resolution of
problems in real-world NLP applications. The recent creation of an ad
hoc ANSI working group on standardization of ontologies is an
indication of the maturity of the field. More and more ontology-based
systems are being built for multilingual applications (e.g.,
multilingual machine translation, multilingual information
retrieval). However, most of the language-processing oriented
ontologies that have been built so far have English or another
language (e.g., Japanese or Spanish) as the basis (e.g., WordNet, EDR,
Pangloss, etc.). Since there is a growing need for multilingual
applications of these ontologies, it is natural to ask the following
questions: Are any of these ontologies actually used in a multilingual
setting? Can we characterize the degree of independence of an ontology
from the natural language it is based on? What are the necessary
properties of a truly multilingual (or universal) ontology? Is it
possible to obtain a language-neutral ontology from a
language-dependent ontology? What applications truly need multilingual
(or language-neutral) ontologies? How do we separate language-specific
(or lexical) information from ontological knowledge?  How can the
depth of knowledge in the ontology be balanced with the needs of an
application? What are the prospects of automating ontology
acquisition? What is the relationship between an ontology as the
repository of general knowledge about the world and knowledge about
particular individuals &#45 people, places, organizations, events,
etc.?

 These and many more questions must be discussed much more widely than
they have been till now. Many of the previous workshops were devoted
to more formal issues in ontology building, such as the knowledge
representation schemata, closures, formal properties of ontologies,
and so on. Moreover, they included the discussion of small ontologies
that cover a very narrow domain of problem solving; NLP typically
requires a broad-coverage ontology.  The hypothesis of using
interlingual representations based on an ontology is at least 50 years
old. It was originally formulated in the framework of machine
translation. However, few systems to date have tested this hypothesis,
for MT or other applications, by implementing a large-scale
interlingua-based system using a language-independent ontology. This
workshop will debate the benefits, costs and competitiveness of such
an approach to solving semantic and cross-language problems for MT,
IR, and other NLP applications.

Audience
========

 The workshop is open to all members of the AI and NLP community. The
workshop is intended for researchers and practitioners in
knowledge-based NLP, artificial intelligence and computational
linguistics who have been working on large scale knowledge-based
resources, ontologies, multilingual lexical semantics, interlinguas,
and their applications. Reports of actual work including problems and
solutions in the design, construction and use of ontologies are
strongly encouraged but more theoretical work (grounded on actual work
on ontologies) aimed at defining the limits, constraints and
directions for large-scale practical language-neutral ontologies is
welcome as well.


Issues
======

 Issues to be addressed include but are not limited to:
 -  Design of language-neutral ontologies.
 -  Acquisition problems in multilingual ontologies.
 -  Multilingual applications of ontologies.
 -  Multilingual ontologies and terminological knowledge bases.
 -  Ontologies and interlinguas.
 -  Standardization of ontologies: issues of multilinguality.
 -  Ontologies and Lexicons.
 -  Sharing and standardization of language-independent ontologies for NLP.
 -  Costs and competitiveness of ontology-based solutions vis-a-vis
    corpus-based and transfer-based methods for multilingual NLP.


Format of the Workshop
======================

 The workshop will include twelve presentation periods which will be
divided into ten-minute presentations of positions followed by
20-minute discussions.

 The attendance will be limited to 20 active participants. Papers will
be circulated among participants several weeks before the
workshop. Presentation will be short, under 15 minutes (10 minutes
preferably) with 20 minutes reserved for exchanges.

 We encourage the authors to focus on the salient points of their
presentation and identify possible controversial positions. We
encourage authors not to repeat as is what has been already written in
the paper. There will be ample time set aside for informal and panel
discussions and audience participation.

 Please note that workshop participants are required to register at
the main IJCAI-97 conference.


Submission Information
======================

Timetable
---------
 -  March 15, 1997: Deadline for reception of submissions.
 -  May 1, 1997:  Notification of acceptance.
 -  July 1, 1997:  Deadline for reception of camera-ready copy.

Format
------
 Submissions must not exceed 6 pages in camera-ready
format. Submissions in electronic form are prefered. Authors should
follow the IJCAI format.  <http://www.ijcai.org/ijcai-97/CfX/cfp.html>

Review Process
--------------
 Papers will be subject to peer review. Selection criteria include
accuracy and originality of ideas, clarity and significance of results
and the quality of the presentation.

The decision of the Program Committee, taking into consideration the
individual reviews, will be final and cannot be appealed. Papers
selected will be scheduled for presentation. Authors of accepted
papers, or their representatives, are expected to present their papers
at the conference.

Submission
----------
 Electronic submission should be sent at zajac@crl.nmsu.edu.  The
subject line should contain "IJCAI97 workshop submission". Papers
should be sent at the following address:

	Rémi Zajac / IJCAI-97 
	Computing Research Laboratory 
	New-Mexico State University 
	PO Box 30001 / 3CRL 
	Las Cruces NM 88003 
	USA
	Fax: +1-505-646-6218

Schedule
========

 -  March 15, 1997: Deadline for reception of submissions.
 -  May 1, 1997: Notification of acceptance.
 -  July 1, 1997: Deadline for reception of camera-ready copy.
 -  July  21, 1997: Publication of final list of workshop participants.
 -  August 23-25, 1997: IJCAI-97 Workshop.

Organizing Committee
====================

Rémi Zajac, CRL, New-Mexico State University, USA (Chair): zajac@crl.nmsu.edu
Lynn Carlson, US Department of Defense: lmcarls@afterlife.ncsc.mil
Kavi Mahesh, CRL, New-Mexico State University, USA: mahesh@crl.nmsu.edu
Kazunori Muraki, NEC, Japan: k-muraki@hum.cl.nec.co.jp
Nicholas Ostler, Linguacubun, Ltd., UK: nostler@chibcha.demon.co.uk

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Received on Tuesday, 4 March 1997 14:48:44 UTC