Message-Id: <9402101934.AA27385@CSLI.Stanford.EDU>
From: Sy Ali (by way of yarowsky@unagi.cis.upenn.edu (David Yarowsky)) <syali@cs.buffalo.edu>
Subject: AAAI 1994 Fall Symposium - Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing
To: empiricists@CSLI.Stanford.EDU
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 1994 11:34:51 -0800
Sender: roscheis@CSLI.Stanford.EDU


                    AAAI 1994 Fall Symposium 
    Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing 
                             in 
                     Implemented Systems

                     November 4-6, 1994
            The Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana


Call for Participation

This symposium is intended to be a meeting of researchers actively working 
on implemented knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) systems 
for general natural language processing (NLP) in order to assess the current 
state of that field. Specific topics of interest include the following:

Expressiveness and generality of the representation language with respect to 
natural language. For example, coverage of complex object descriptions and 
treatment of quantification. What are the trade-offs in increasing the 
expressiveness of the representation language to support natural language? 

Inference methods that parallel reasoning in natural language. Natural 
deduction systems, for example, are so called because of the apparent 
naturalness of the proof procedure. Another example is surface reasoning, 
based on the syntactic structure of the natural language.

Ability of the formalism or system to capture important semantic and 
pragmatic aspects of natural language. For example, the computational 
relationship between the representation language and the parser/generator.
Is it possible to define the representation language to facilitate this 
relationship? At what cost?

How many or kinds of representation languages are needed for general 
NLP? Many NLP systems actually use two representation languages: a 
semantic representation language that captures the semantics of a sentence, 
and a knowledge representation language that is used to do reasoning and 
represent the system's general knowledge about the domain. Typically these 
languages are quite different, with the former being a much more powerful 
language (including modalities, lambda expressions and other higher order 
constructs, generalized quantifiers, etc) and the latter being what the 
system's reasoning engine actually operates on, usually something more or 
less equivalent to first-order logic, (or an even more restricted vivid 
representation like a relational database) This raises the question of how 
these languages relate to each other, and if it is possible (or desirable) to 
have a semantic representation language that supports inference.

Stands on issues such as: 
-  What problems are solved, and how to use the solution(s).
-  What areas need work.
-  Defense or attacks of the standard design of morphology-syntax-
   semantics-pragmatics.

Submissions to the symposium should address these topics by showing 
some text that an actual implemented system can understand, how the 
information contained in that text is represented, what background 
information is used by the system, how that information is represented, 
how the system processes the knowledge to do interesting things (such as 
answering interesting questions about the text), and how the information is 
processed into answers. Reports on projects whose purpose is to simulate 
human understanding of texts will be preferred over projects whose purpose 
is to provide natural language interfaces to databases, planners, or to 
pragmatically oriented knowledge bases.

The format of this symposium will be designed to encourage interaction 
amongst the participants. To this end, new, previously unpublished work-
in-progress on the topics of the symposium is most desirable, as are stands 
on the issues outlined above.

Submission Information
Potential attendees should submit an extended abstract of no more than 10 
pages (exclusive of references), twelve point, double-spaced, with one inch 
margins. Submissions not conforming to these guidelines will not be 
reviewed. 

The symposium format will also include one or more panel discussions on 
the issues listed above. Attendees wishing to participate in panels, or 
wishing to suggest other panel topics, should indicate their interest and 
include a current vita along with their extended abstract.

Demonstrations of working NLP/KRR systems are also of interest, 
however attendees must provide their own hardware and software support. 
Attendees interested in this option should indicate what they are planning on 
demonstrating, and how they propose to do so. This information should be 
provided with their extended abstract in a cover letter that clearly
states their interest in this option.

Email submission is preferred, and should be directed to the Symposium 
Chair at

 ssa231f@csm560.smsu.edu and
 syali@cs.buffalo.edu

Preferred email submission formats are: stand-alone LaTeX, PostScript, or 
plain text (for abstracts without complex figures, etc). 

If email submission is not possible, then five copies of the paper should be 
mailed to the Symposium Chair: 

Syed S. Ali
Chair, AAAI Fall Symposium on Knowledge Representation 
  for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems
Department of Computer Science
Southwest Missouri State University
901 South National Avenue
Springfield, MO 65804
(417) 836-5773

Submission Dates
-  Submissions for the symposium are due on April 15, 1994.
-  Notification of acceptance will be given by May 17, 1994.
-  Material to be included in the working notes of the symposium must be 
   received by August 19, 1994. 


Organizing Committee
Syed S. Ali (chair), Southwest Missouri State University, 
ssa231f@csm560. smsu.edu or syali@cs.buffalo.edu; Douglas Appelt, 
SRI International; Lucja Iwanska, Wayne State University; Lenhart 
Schubert, University of Rochester; Stuart C. Shapiro, State University of 
New York at Buffalo.


Attendance
The symposium will be limited to between forty and sixty participants. 
Working notes will be prepared and distributed to participants in 
the symposium.

A general plenary session, in which the highlights of each symposium will 
be presented, will be held on November 5, and an informal reception will be 
held on November 4.

In addition to invited participants, a limited number of other interested 
parties will be able to register in each symposium on a first-come, first-
served basis. Registration will be available by mid-July 1994. To obtain 
registration information write to the AAAI at 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo 
Park, CA 94025 (fss@aaai.org).


Sponsored by the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025
(415) 328-3123
fss@aaai.org