SemaNet'02: Building and Using Semantic Networks

Workshop in conjunction with COLING 2002, 31 August 2002, Taipei, Taiwan

Preface by Ken Church

Original Call for Papers

There has been a lot of interest over the past decade in WordNet (http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/), a thesaurus-like semantic network that has many NLP applications including (but not limited to) machine translation and multilingual (or cross-lingual) information retrieval.

Among the languages which have attracted higher interest recently are some of the "low-density" languages, in which very little research and resources exist. A semantic network in such a language would be a very useful resource; however, the amount of needed resources and the length of time needed to hand-construct such a network is often prohibitive. To add to the problem, some minority languages (especially the indigeneous languages) have very different language structures, which may become problematic when attempting to fit concepts in those languages to wordnet hierarchies which were constructed for languages such as English.

The goal of this one-day workshop is to explore issues surrounding the construction of semantic networks, including the construction of wordnets for minority languages and multilingual wordnets. In addition, we would like to invite papers and demos on industrial applications.

Schedule

9:00-9:45

OPENING SPEECH
Pascale Fung
"Semantic Networks: The Path to Profitability"

Section 1: Multilingual Ontology Construction
Chair: Grace Ngai

9:45-10:10

Chu-Ren Huang, I. Ju Elanna Tseng and Dylan Tsai
"Translating Lexical Semantic Relations: The first step towards Multilingual Wordnets"

10:10-10:35

Mathieu Mangeot-Lerebours, Gilles Sérasset and Frederic Andres
"Frameworks, Implementation and Open Problems for the Collaborative Building of a Multilingual Lexical Database"

10:35-11:00

BREAK

Section 2: Automatic Ontology Construction
Chair: Dekai Wu

11:00-11:25

Gideon Mann
"Building proper noun ontologies for question answering"

11:25-11:50

Takuya Sakaguchi and Shun Ishizaki
"A Japanese Semantic Network built on a Pulsed Neural Network with encoding Associative Concept Dictionaries"

11:50-12:15

Javier Farreres, Horacio Rodriguez and Karina Gibert
"Semiautomatic Creation of Taxonomies"

12:15-13:30

LUNCH

13:30-14:20

INVITED TALK
Eduard Hovy
"Building Semantic/Ontological Knowledge by Text Mining"

Section 3: Using Ontologies for Entity Extraction and Semantic Tagging
Chair: David Yarowsky

14:20-14:45

Bernardo Magnini, Matteo Negri, Roberto Prevete and Hristo Tanev
"A Wordnet-based Approach to Named-Entites Recognition"

14:45-15:10

Thierry Poibeau and Dominique Dutoit
"Generating extraction patterns from a large semantic network and an untagged corpora"

15:10-15:35

Anna Korhonen
"Assigning Verbs to Semantic Classes via Wordnet"

15:35-16:00

BREAK

Section 4: Lexical Disambiguation with Ontologies
Chair: Radu Florian

16:00-16:25

Josef Meyer and Robert Dale
"Using the Wordnet Hierarchy for Associative Anaphora Resolution"

16:25-16:50

Ping-Wai Wong and Yongsheng Yang
"A Maximum-Entropy Approach to HowNet-based Chinese Word-Sense Disambiguation"

16:30-17:30

PARALLEL POSTER SESSION AND DISCUSSION

POSTER PAPERS

R. Basili, R. Catizone, L. Padro, M.T. Pazienza, G. Rigau, A. Setzer, N. Webb and F. Zanzotto
"Knowledge-Based Multilingual Document Analysis"

Echa Chang, Chu-Ren Huang, Sue-Jin Ker, Chang-Hua Yang
"Induction of Classification from Lexicon Expansion: Assigning Domain Tags to WordNet Entries"

Kyoko Kanzaki, Qing Ma, Masaki Murata and Hitoshi Isahara
"Classification of Adjectival and Non-adjectival Nouns Based on their Semantic Behavior by Using a Self-Organizing Semantic Map"

Kyoji Umemura
"Selecting the Most Highly Correlated Pairs within a Large Vocabulary"

Lixin Zhou, Qun Liu
"A Character-net based Chinese Text Segmentation Method"

Michael Zock
"Sorry, but what was your name again, or, how to overcome the tip of the tongue problem with the help of a computer?"

Important dates:

Submission deadline: May 15th, 2002 passed
Notification of Acceptances: June 17th, 2002 passed
Camera-Ready Copies due: July 1st, 2002
Workshop: August 31

Program Committee

Eneko Agirre (Basque Country University, Spain)
Key-Sun Choi (NHK Labs, Japan)
Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA)
Radu Florian (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Marc Light (MITRE, USA)
Dekang Lin (University of Alberta, Canada)
Bernardo Magnini (ITC-irst, Italy)
Rada Mihalcea (UT-Dallas, USA)
Phil Resnik (University of Maryland, USA)
German Rigau (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain)
Charles Schafer (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Pavel Smrz (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Keh-Yih Su (Behaviour Design Corporation, Taiwan)
Benjamin Tsou (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
Piek Vossen (Irion Technologies, Netherlands)
Richard Wicentowski (Swarthmore College, USA)
Dekai Wu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong)

Organizing Committee:

Grace Ngai*
Intendi Inc.
Clear Water Bay
Hong Kong

csgngai@polyu.edu.hk

Pascale Fung
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Intendi Inc.
Clear Water Bay
Hong Kong
pascale@ee.ust.hk

Kenneth W. Church
AT&T Labs
Florham Park
NJ 07932
USA
kwc@research.att.com

*Currently at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Computing, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Grace Ngai

Last modified: Thu Sep 5 19:00:10 HKT 2002