Final CFP -- ACL/COLING Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population (OLP2)

(with apologies for multiple postings)

Final Call for Papers

** Deadline Extension: April 20th, 2006 (12 pm GMT) **
** Electronic Submission: 
http://www.softconf.com/acl/W5-COLINGACL2006/submit.html **

2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population: Bridging the Gap 
between Text and Knowledge (OLP2)

Workshop at COLING/ACL 2006

http://olp.dfki.de/olp2/olp2_cfp.htm

July 22nd, 2006
Sydney, Australia


Supported By SmartWeb (http://www.smartweb-projekt.de/)

Topic and Motivation

An ontology is an explicit and formal specification of a shared 
conceptualization of a domain of interest. Ontologies formalize the 
intensional aspects of a domain, whereas the extensional part is 
provided by a knowledge base that contains assertions about instances of 
concepts and relations as defined by the ontology. The process of 
defining and instantiating a knowledge base is referred to as knowledge 
markup or ontology population, whereas (semi-)automatic support in 
ontology development is usually referred to as ontology learning.

Ontologies have been broadly used in knowledge management applications, 
including Semantic Web applications and research. In recent years, 
ontologies have regained interest also within the NLP community, 
specifically in such applications as information extraction, text mining 
and question answering. However, as ontology development is a tedious 
and costly process there has been an equally growing interest in the 
automatic learning of ontologies. Much of this work has been focused on 
textual data as human language is a primary mode of knowledge transfer. 
In this way, textual data provide both a resource for the ontology 
learning process as well as an application medium for developed ontologies.

Automatic methods for text-based ontology learning and population have 
developed over recent years, but it is difficult to compare approaches 
and results. In the 1st Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population (at 
ECAI 2004, Spain: http://olp.dfki.de/ecai04/cfp.htm) we addressed this 
issue through an emphasis on the evaluation aspects of the reported 
work. In the context of the 2nd workshop we intend to continue this 
emphasis by providing a common data set for participants to work with, 
consisting of an ontology and document collection in the football 
(soccer) domain and a corresponding automatically extracted knowledge 
base. Participants will be free to use this or other data, but are 
encouraged to (also) use the OLP2 data set 
(http://www.dfki.de/sw-lt/olp2_dataset/) for their experiments in order 
to better compare results with other participants.

An additional topic we intend to address at this workshop is the 
relation between NLP and ontology development, the communities of which 
are working on similar topics but using different terminology. As this 
leads to a confound communication, the potential for interdisciplinary 
work becomes much less pronounced. We therefore intend the workshop to 
contribute to an enhanced interdisciplinary understanding of tasks, 
methods and evaluations.

Areas of Interest

To provide a clear focus we request novel work on:

- Concept formation on the basis of text
- Learning concept hierarchies / non-taxonomic relations / rules / 
axioms from text
- Named-Entity Recognition with respect to an ontology
- Ontology-based information extraction
- Ontology learning for IE, IR, MT, QA
- Gold standard and task-based evaluation of ontology learning, e.g. in 
IE, IR, MT, QA

Important Dates

April 20th      Submission Deadline
May 17th      Notification
June 2nd       Camera-ready Version
July 22nd      Workshop

Submission

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and 
should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. Submission will 
be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe 
PDF. Papers must be submitted no later than April 20, 2006 (12 pm GMT) 
under: <>http://www.softconf.com/acl/W5-COLINGACL2006/submit.html

Organizing Committee

Paul Buitelaar - DFKI, Germany
Philipp Cimiano - AIFB, Univ. of Karlsruhe, Germany
Berenike Loos - European Media Lab, Germany

Program Committee

Eneko Agirre - Basque Country University, Spain
Enrique Alfonseca - Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles - IRIT-CNRS Toulouse, France
Timothy Baldwin - University of Melbourne, Australia
Roberto Basili - Universita di Roma "Tor Vergata", Italy
Johan Bos - Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
Christopher Brewster - University of Sheffield, UK
Massimiliano Ciaramita - LOA-ISTC, Italy
Nigel Collier - National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Ido Dagan - Bar Ilan University, Israel
Eric Gausier - XEROX XRCE, France
Asuncion Gomez-Perez - Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Marko Grobelnik - Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Siegfried Handschuh - DERI Galway, Ireland
Andreas Hotho - University of Kassel, Germany
Eduard Hovy - USC, Information Sciences Institute, USA
Vipul Kashyap - Partners HealthCare System, USA
Bernardo Magnini - ITC-IRST, Italy
Diana Maynard - University of Sheffield, UK
Adeline Nazarenko - LIPN-Universite Paris-Nord, France
Claire Nedellec - MIG, INRA, France
George Paliouras - NCSR "Demokritos", Greece
Patrick Pantel - USC, Information Sciences Institute, USA
Robert Porzel - European Media Lab, Germany
Marie-Laure Reinberger - Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
Marta Sabou - Knowledge Media Institute, UK
Michael Sintek - DFKI, Germany
Peter Spyns - Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Steffen Staab - University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Vojtech Svatek - University of Economics, Prague, Czech Rep.
Paola Velardi - Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
Dominic Widdows - MAYA Design, USA

Workshop Registration

All workshop participants must register for COLING/ACL 2006 
(http://www.acl2006.mq.edu.au/)

Received on Wednesday, 12 April 2006 10:33:41 UTC