Textual Inference and Structures in Corpora

We are pleased to announce the Joint Symposium on Semantic Processing, which will be held at FBK, in Trento, Italy, on 20-22 November 2013 for two and a half days. 

This symposium aims at bringing together researchers from different strands of semantic processing research, with a focus on two aspects. The first is the textual inference paradigm, proposed as a unifying generic framework capturing major semantic processing needs in different application areas. Textual entailment research has yielded so far a range of inference algorithms, which were mostly developed within individual "in-house" systems. The symposium aims at addressing current bottlenecks by discussing future research directions and perspectives for consolidation and unification of textual inference technology. The second aspect concerns linguistic structures, as identified by empirical work within corpus linguistics, whose benefit for Computational Linguistics has not yet been fully realized. We are interested in corpus investigation methods which identify the properties of natural anguages that can be efficiently computed and used to improve the actual state of the art on NLP tasks involving meaning. The workshop aims at contributing  to the common ground needed to create language models that allow the computational linguistic community to take the next step forward in developing natural language applications that process semantic knowledge successfully.

During the symposium two tutorials will be given, on Textual Entailment and Corpus Pattern respectively. These tutorials are intend for a large audience, their motivation come from the fact that the new techniques of semantic analysis, which are well founded into corpus investigation, are best understood in a "hands-on" manner.

Our goal is to make the symposium a stimulating and intriguing forum for mutual update and discussion of these research directions in semantic processing, and we hope to attract a substantial number of involved senior and junior researchers worldwide.

We are fortunate to have the participation of people whose research shaped the actual state of the art of language understanding from a computational perspective and not only.

Keynote Speakers and Panelists

• Eneko Agirre, University of Basque Country
• Marco Baroni, University of Trento, CIMeC, Italy
• Johan Bos, University of Groeningen, The Netherlands
• Philipp Cimiano, University of Bielefeld, Germany
• Peter Clark, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, USA
• Ido Dagan, Bar Ilan University, Israel
• Mona Diab, George Washington University, USA
• Patrick Hanks, University of Wolverhampton, UK
• Elisabetta Jezek, University of Pavia
• Mirella Lapata, University of Edinburgh, UK
  
• Bernardo Magnini, FBK, Italy
• Günter Neumann, DFKI, Germany
• Sebastian Pado, University of Stuttgart, Germany
  
• Octavian Popescu, FBK, Italy
• Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Roberto Zamparelli, University of Trento, CIMeC, Italy
• Sabine Schulte im Walde, University of Stuttgart, Germany
• Torsten Zesch, TU Darmstadt, Germany

Program Committee

• Enrique Alfonseca, Google Research (CH)
• Luisa Bentivogli, FBK (IT)
• Antonio Horta Branco, Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa (PT)
• Elena Cabrio, INRIA Sophia Antipolis (FR)
• Dan Cristea, University of Iasi (RO)
• Ido Dagan, Bar Ilan University (IL)
  
• Rodolfo Delmonte, University "Ca' Foscari", Venice (IT)
• Liviu Dinu, University of Bucharest (RO)
• Eduard Hovy, Carnegie Mellon University (US)
• Elisabetta Jezek, Pavia University (IT)
• Alberto Lavelli, FBK (IT)
  
• Alessandro Lenci,  University of Pisa (IT)
• Bernardo Magnini, FBK (IT)
  
• Simonetta Montemagni, Istituto Linguistica Computazionale (IT)
• Alessandro Moschitti, University of Trento, (IT)
• Günter Neumann, DFKI, (DE)
• Rodney D. Nielsen, University of Colorado (US)
• Tae-Gil Noh, Heidelberg University, (DE) 
  
• Jan Odijk,  Institute of Linguistics OTS (NL)
• Constantin Orasan, University of Wolverhampton (UK)
• Sebastian Pado, Heidelberg University, (DE) 
  
• Octavian Popescu, FBK (IT)
  
• German Rigau,  Facultad de Informatica de San Sebastian UPV/EHU (ES)
• Anne Vilnat, Universite Paris-Sud (FR)
• Rui Wang, DFKI, (DE)
• Annie Zaenen, Stanford University (US)
• Fabio Massimo Zanzotto,Tor Vergata University, Rome (IT)

Organizers

• Ido Dagan, Bar Ilan University, Israel
• Elisabetta Jezek, Pavia University, Italy
• Alberto Lavelli, FBK, Italy
• Bernardo Magnini, FBK, Italy
• Günter Neumann, DFKI, Germany
• Sebastian Pado, University of Stuttgart, Germany 
• Octavian Popescu, FBK, Italy