Eighth International Conference on Computational Semantics
IWCS-8

Tilburg University will host the 8th International Conference on Computational Semantics on 7-9 January 2009. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in any aspect of the computation, annotation, extraction, and representation of meaning in natural language, in multimedia objects, or in multimodal messages.

Topics

Areas of special interest for IWCS-8 will be computational aspects of semantic theories; theoretical aspects of the design and implementation of language understanding systems and systems for multimodal communication; and semantic annotation of natural language and multimodal utterances. Papers are invited that are concerned with topics in these and related areas, including but not limited to the following:

• construction of representations of meaning in natural language
• methodologies and practices for semantic annotation
• modelling and using context in semantic interpretation
• machine learning of semantic structures
• informal and formal semantic methods and their combination
• the semantics of semantic annotation
• computing meaning in multimodal interaction
• construction and use of underspecified representations of meaning
• semantic concepts and ontologies
• approaches to textual entailment
• the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue acts
• the semantic web and natural language processing
• semantic aspects of language generation
• the semantics-pragmatics interface in computational perspective
• semantic relations in discourse and dialogue
• shallow and deep semantic processing and reasoning

Invited speakers

• Martha Palmer (University of Colorado, Boulder, Co., USA): Knowing a word (sense) by its company
• Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel): It's time for a semantic engine
• Massimo Poesio (University of Trento, Povo, Italy): Play your way to an annotated corpus: Games with a purpose and anaphoric annotation

Special Event: Joint SIGSEM/ISO meeting

Immediately preceding IWCS-8, on 5-6 January 2009, a joint 2-day workshop will be held of the ongoing ISO projects on semantic annotation, the ISO TC 37/SC 4 Thematic Domain Group on Semantic Content, and the ACL SIGSEM Working Group on the Representation of Multimodal Semantic Information. In this workshop, the 4th Joint ISO-ACL/SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-4), ongoing and possible future efforts will be discussed that are aimed at defining interoperable concepts for semantic annotation and interpretation.

This meeting will be open to (a restricted number of) IWCS-8 participants. For more information see the ISO Thematic Domain Group website and the SIGSEM Working Group website.

Program committee

James Allen	Anette Frank	Reinhard Muskens
Ron Artstein	Dafydd Gibbon	Martha Palmer
Patrick Blackburn	Jerry Hobbs	Manfred Pinkal
Johan Bos	Daniel Kayser	Massimo Poesio
Harry Bunt (chair)	Alexander Koller	Steve Pulman
Nicoletta Calzolari	Emiel Krahmer	Allan Ramsay
Jae-Woong Choe	Alex Lascarides	Laurent Romary
Robin Cooper	Kiyong Lee	Patrick Saint Dizier
Kees van Deemter	Paul Mc Kevitt	Carl Vogel
Jan van Eijck	Dan Moldovan

Organizing committee

Harry Bunt (chair)
Johan Bos
Marieke van Erp
Jeroen Geertzen
Reinhard Muskens
Olga Petukhova
Stephen Pulman
Sander Wubben
Lauraine Sinay

Submission requirements

Three types of submission are solicited: full papers, short papers, and project abstracts.

Full papers are original papers of maximally 12 pages, that will be published in the workshop proceedings and will have a full oral presentation of about 30 minutes at the workshop.

Short papers are mini-papers of maximally 4 pages, that will be published in the workshop proceedings and have a very brief ('flash') oral presentation at the workshop. Authors of short papers are invited to also put up a poster and participate in a poster session.

Project abstracts are brief descriptions of 2 pages of ongoing, recently completed, or starting projects. They will be published in the workshop proceedings and will be presented in a poster session.

Submission must be done through the online submission system. All submissions should be marked as being a full paper, a short paper, or a project abstract, by adding to the paper title the postfix (FP), (SP) or (PA) when entering the title in the online submission system.

Proceedings

Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings, which will be available at the time of the conference. We also aim at publishing a selection of the accepted papers in book form.

A selection of papers from IWCS-2 has been published as Computing Meaning, Vol. 1, Harry Bunt and Reinhard Muskens, editors (Kluwer, Dordrecht 1999), while papers from IWCS-3 have been published as Computing Meaning, Vol. 2, Harry Bunt, Reinhard Muskens and Elias Thijsse, editors (Kluwer, Dordrecht 2001). The book Computing Meaning, Volume 3 (Harry Bunt and Reinhard Muskens, editors), with revised selected papers from IWCS-4 and IWCS-5, was published in 2007 by Springer, Dordrecht.

Important dates

Venue

Contact information

Lauraine Sinay
Department of Language and Information Science, Tilburg University
PO Box 90153
5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
Fax: +31-13-466 2892
Phone: +31-13-466 3060 or ..8118 or ..2668
Email: computational.semantics@uvt.nl

IWCS is endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics and by SIGLEX, the ACL Special Interest Group on the Lexicon.