Workshop on Roles for Knowledge Representation
in Natural Language

CANCELLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

TRENTO, ITALY, June 6 - June 7, 1998

Aims of the workshop

This workshop is aimed at reinvigorating the historical connection
between research in Natural Language Processing and Knowledge
Representation.  The goal is to encourage communication between the
two fields, in hopes of stimulating KR research on problems of
interest to the NLP community, communication of KR discoveries from
the NLP community to KR researchers, and identification of existing KR
techniques that may help solve problems faced by NLP researchers.


List of topics

In view of the "big picture" orientation of the workshop, submissions
are sought which specifically address issues of relevance to both
communities.  These might include, but are not limited to:
* Identification of linguistic knowledge representation problems
                for which good solutions are not known
        * Evaluation of existing knowledge representation techniques
                on linguistic problems, including insightful negative 
                evaluations
        * Identification of challenge problems that would tax existing
                algorithms and methodologies, including scalability
                issues.
        * Discussion of knowledge representation issues inherent in 
                defined classes of natural language processing problems

As an example of what we have in mind, and with the goal of encouraging a
lively discussion, we will have a keynote address by Graeme Hirst. 
Graeme will be speaking on whether or not the AI formalizations of
context as an undefined primitive has any relevance natural language
processing.  He argues that "any theory of context in natural language must
take the special nature of natural language into account and cannot regard
context simply as an undefined primitive. I show that there is no such thing as
a coherent theory of context simpliciter -- context pure and simple -- and that
context in natural language is not the same kind of thing as context in KR. In
natural language, context is constructed by the speaker and the interpreter,
and both have considerable discretion in so doing. Therefore, a formalization
based on pre-defined contexts and pre-defined `lifting axioms' cannot account
for how context is used in real-world language."

Submissions discussing the current state of the art in broad areas of
knowledge representation technology (e.g., constraint satisfaction,
uncertainty, defaults) are also encouraged; these should avoid the
temptation to focus on the authors' work, and should keep the
"interdisciplinary" nature of the target audience firmly in mind.


Requirements for submission

Submitted papers must be unpublished, but may overlap with papers
currently under review for conferences that will occur after the
workshop (including KR'98). Papers that have been or will be presented at
small workshops/symposia whose proceedings are available only to
attendees may be submitted.


Format for submission.

Each submission will undergo multiple reviews. Each submission should
include a title page containing the title, author(s), affiliation(s),
submitting author's mailing address, telephone number, fax number and e-mail
address, as well as an abstract (no more than 200 words) and keywords
indicating the topic areas listed above that best describe the
contribution. Submissions must be at most 10 pages, excluding the title page
and the bibliography, with a maximum of 38 lines per page and an average of
75 characters per line (corresponding to the LaTeX article-style, 12pt)
using LaTeX or Microsoft Word.  Any correspondence will be addressed to the
first author (unless otherwise specified).

For hardcopy submission, please send 5 copies of the paper, to the following
address:
 
				Martha Palmer
				IFIP KR/NLP-98
				Institute for Research in Cognitive Science,
				3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A
				Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228,
				USA.


For electronic submission, please send postscript files to
mpalmer@cis.upenn.edu

Authors will be responsible for preparation of camera-ready copies of final
versions of accepted papers, conforming to a uniform format to be specified
later.


SCHEDULE


February 16, 1998                       Papers due

March 16, 1998                          Results sent to the authors

April 23, 1998                          Camera ready copy due

Saturday, 6 June-Sunday, 7 June,1998    Workshop  




ORGANISING COMMITTEE


Martha Palmer				Harry Bunt			
IRCS, University of Pennsylvania	ITK, Tilburg University
3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A		P.O. Box 90153
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228,		5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands
USA				
                                        

David Etherington			Fabio Pianesi
University of Oregon			IRST,
Eugene, OR, USA				Trento, Italy

Program Committee:

James Allen, University of Rochester, USA
Claire Gardent, Universitaet des Saarlandes, Germany
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario,Canada
Bob Mercer, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
Bernard Nebel, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet,Freiburg, Germany
Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, Boston, Mass, USA
Patrick St Dizier, Universite' Paul Sabatier, Toulouse,France
Len Schubert, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA
Mark Steedman, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Rich Thomason, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Bonnie Webber, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA