Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems

A Special Issue of the Journal Natural Language Engineering NOTE: This issue is in now in print!   Please check here for an online version, or to order copies. Guest Editors   Syed S. Ali Department of Mathematical Sciences University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA syali@cs.uwm.edu   Lucja Iwanska Department of Computer Science Wayne State University Detroit, MI 48202, USA lucja@cs.wayne.edu       NOTE: Deadline for submissions was December 31, 1996   http://tigger.cs.uwm.edu/~syali/jnle-kr-nlp/

Call for Papers

This special issue is intended to be a forum for the presentation of the state-of-the-art in implemented knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) systems for general natural language processing (NLP). We are interested in papers that address or describe implemented knowledge representation systems that facilitate natural language processing for implemented systems. This call is intended to be as broad as possible. To this end, topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Implemented systems that support ``interesting'' natural language processing tasks, such as the representation of collections, quantifiers, donkey phenomena, or contextual aspects of natural language. The paper should address how the representation has been used to support the task and include a sample interaction that was produced by the implemented system.
•  Theories of knowledge representation that are based on, or suitable for, the semantics of natural language. In addition to describing the formal theory, the paper should discuss how the theory has been used in the implementation of a system and should include a sample natural language text that the system processes.
•  Theories of representation for discourse-level language processing phenomena, such as anaphora, ellipsis, or rhetorical or intentional structure. The paper should discuss how the theory has been used in the implementation of a system and include a sample natural language text that the system handles.
•  Implemented theories of natural language as knowledge representation. For example, there are inference methods that parallel reasoning in natural language. Natural deduction systems are so called because of the apparent naturalness of the proof procedure. Another example is surface reasoning, which is based on the syntactic structure of natural language.
•  Practical results regarding the expressiveness and generality of a representation language with respect to some natural language processing task. For example, the paper might evaluate the coverage of an implemented KRR system for a particular classes of complex object descriptions or quantified expressions. It might also evaluate the performance trade-offs in increasing the expressiveness of the representation language to support natural language.
•  Empirical results regarding the representation requirements for a particular domain area or task; for example in a particular domain, it might be sufficient to identify quantifier ordering, without resolving scope ambiguities. Such papers must describe the work in sufficient detail for evaluation.
•  Methods for building knowledge representations on the basis of a statistical analysis of a natural language corpus.

Submissions to the special issue should address these topics by showing one or more sample texts that the described 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 are appropriate, as are descriptions of projects whose purpose is to provide natural language interfaces to databases, planners, or other knowledge-based systems. Such reports should provide specific implementation details (where applicable) such as: source of data (artificial or real), corpus statistics, scope, dictionary/grammar size and coverage, project size (estimate of person-years of development), scalability, and if part of a larger, possibly non-NLP system, describe interaction/interfacing Operational characteristics of implementations should also be provided, such as the input/output (modality, whether pre-processed, etc), translation (language to logic, for example), representation(s) (of a sample interaction), and how inferencing/processing works.

Submission Information

Submit full papers of no more than 25 pages (exclusive of references), twelve point, double-spaced, with one inch margins before the initial submission deadline. Submissions not conforming to these guidelines will not be reviewed.

Email submission is preferred, and should be directed to the special issue editor at the email address: jnle-sub@tigger.cs.uwm.edu. The subject line should read: JNLE KRR/NLP Submission. Preferred email submission formats are: stand-alone LaTeX, PostScript, or plain text (for papers without complex figures, etc).

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

Syed S. Ali 

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 

3200 N. Cramer Street 

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 

Milwaukee, WI  53211 

(414) 229-5375

Mailed submissions must arrive on or before the deadline for submission.

Submission Dates

• Submissions are due on December 31, 1996.
•  Notification of acceptance will be given by January 31, 1997.
•  Camera-ready copy due March 1, 1997.

Fri Aug 30 15:12:51 CDT 1996