EACL 2006 Workshop

Third ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions

3 April, 2006

Trento, Italy

Workshop Description

The Third ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions was hosted in conjunction with the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on April 3, 2006, in Trento, Italy.

Background

Prepositions have received a considerable amount of attention in recent years, due to their importance in computational tasks. For instance, in NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have attracted a lot of attention, and different machine learning techniques have been employed with varying degrees of success. Researchers from various perspectives have also looked at spatial or temporal aspects of prepositions, and their cross-linguistic differences, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts or the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations. Moreover, in languages like English and German, phrasal verbs have also been the subject of considerable effort, ranging from techniques for their automatic extraction from corpora, to methods for the determination of their semantics. In other languages, like Romance languages or Hindi, the focus has been either on the incorporation of the preposition or its inclusion in the prepositional phrase. All these configurations are of much interest semantically as well as syntactically.

Topics

Papers were invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

Descriptions:
prepositions in lexical resources (WordNet, Framenet), productive versus collocation uses, multilingual descriptions (mismatches, incorporation, divergences), prepositions and thematic roles.
Applications:
dealing with prepositions in applications e.g. for Machine Translation, Information extraction or Language Generation.
Representation of Prepositions:
prepositions in knowledge bases, cognitive or logic-based formalisms for the description of the semantics of prepositions (in isolation, and in composition/confrontation with the verb and the NP), compositional semantics; implications for AI and KR.
Prepositions in reasoning procedures:
how different kinds of preposition provide distinct challenges to a reasoning system and how they can be handled.
Cognitive dimensions of prepositions:
how different kinds of prepositions are acquired/interpreted/represented, in terms of human and/or computational processing.

Programme


08.55 - 09.00	Opening

09.00 - 09.30	Spatial Prepositions in Context: The Semantics of 'near' in the Presence of Distractor Objects Fintan J. Costello and John D. Kelleher

09.30 - 10.00	Polish Equivalents of Spatial 'at' Iwona Knas

10.00 - 10.20	A Quantitative Approach to Preposition-Pronoun Contraction in Polish Beata Trawinski

10.20 - 10.40	Marked Adpositions Sander Lestrade

10.40 - 11.00	Coffee Break

11.00 - 11.30	Semantic Interpretation of Prepositions for NLP Applications Sven Hartrumpf, Hermann Helbig and Rainer Osswald

11.30 - 12.00	Coverage and Inheritance in The Preposition Project Kenneth C. Litkowski and Orin Hargraves

12.00 - 12.20	An Ontology Based View on Prepositional Senses Tine Lassen

12.20 - 12.40	A Conceptual Analysis of the Notion of Instrumentality via a Multilingual Analysis Asanee Kawtrakul, Mukda Suktarachan, Bali Ranaivo-Malancon, Pek Kuan, Achla Raina, Sudeshna Sarkar, Alda Mari, Sina Zarriess, Elixabete Murguia, Patrick Saint-Dizier

12.40 - 14.00	Lunch

14.00 - 15.00	Panel Discussion: Prepositions and Multiword Expression Compositionality
	The Syntax-Semantics Interface for German Particle Verbs Sabine Schulte im Walde (Saarland University)
	Representing and Modelling the Lexical Semantics of English Verb Particle Constructions Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne)
	PPs as Verbal Arguments: From a Computational Semantics Perspective Valia Kordoni (Saarland University)

15.00 - 15.30	German Particle Verbs and Pleonastic Prepositions Ines Rehbein

15.30 - 16.00	Automatic Identification of English Verb Particle Constructions using Linguistic Features Su Nam Kim and Timothy Baldwin

16.00 - 16.20	Coffee break

16.20 -16.50	On the Prepositions which Introduce an Adjunct of Duration Frank Van Eynde

16.50 - 17.20	How Bad is the Problem of PP-Attachment? A Comparison of English, German and Swedish Martin Volk

17.20 - 17.40	Handling of Prepositions in English to Bengali Machine Translation Sudip Kumar Naskar and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

17.40 - 18.10	Closing Remarks and Business Meeting

Important Dates

Workshop date: April 3, 2006

Organising Committee

Boban Arsenijevic

University of Leiden, Netherlands

Timothy Baldwin

University of Melbourne, Australia

Beata Trawinski

University of Tübingen, Germany

Programme Committee

Boban Arsenijevic (University of Leiden, Netherlands)

Doug Arnold (University of Essex, UK)

Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia)

John Beavers (Stanford University, USA)

Bob Borsley (University of Essex, UK)

Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy)

Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge, UK)

Markus Egg (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)

Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA)

Anette Frank (DFKI, Germany)

Julia Hockenmaier (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

Tracy Holloway King (PARC, USA)

Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany)

Ken Litkowski (CL Research, USA)

Alda Mari (CNRS / ENST Infres, France)

Paola Merlo (University of Geneva, Switzerland)

Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)

Stephen Pulman (University of Oxford, UK)

Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, France)

Beata Trawinski (University of Tübingen, Germany)

Jesse Tseng (Loria, France)

Hans Uszkoreit (Saarland University and DFKI)

Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)

Martin Volk (Stockholms Universitet, Sweden)

Joost Zwarts (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)