17.065 call for papers: Journal of Computer Speech and Language

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 02:43:52 EDT

  • Next message: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty

                    Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 65.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 07:14:26 +0100
             From: Mark Stevenson <M.Stevenson@DCS.SHEF.AC.UK>
             Subject: Computer Speech and Language Special Issue on Word Sense
    Disambiguation

    Second Call for Papers:

    Journal of Computer Speech and Language
    Special Issue on WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION

    Guest editors:
    Judita Preiss, Judita.Preiss@cl.cam.ac.uk
    Mark Stevenson, M.Stevenson@dcs.shef.ac.uk

    The process of automatically determining the meanings of words, word
    sense disambiguation (WSD), is an important stage in language
    understanding. It has been shown to be useful for many natural language
    processing applications including machine translation, information
    retrieval (mono- and cross-lingual), corpus analysis, summarization and
    document navigation.

    The usefulness of WSD has been acknowledged since the 1950's and the
    field has recently enjoyed a resurgence of interest including the
    creation of SENSEVAL, an evaluation exercise allowing a basic
    precision/recall comparison of participating systems, which has been run
    twice to date. The current availability of large corpora and powerful
    computing resources has made the exploration of machine learning and
    statistical methods possible. This is in contrast to the majority of
    early approaches which relied on hand-crafted disambiguation rules.

    This special issue of Computer Speech and Language, due for publication
    in 2004, is intended to describe the current state of the
    art in word sense disambiguation. Papers are invited on all aspects of
    WSD research, and especially on:

    * Combinations of methods and knowledge sources.
    Which methods or knowledge sources complement each other and which
    provide similar disambiguation information? How should they be combined?
    Do better disambiguation results justify the extra cost of producing
    systems which combine multiple techniques or use multiple knowledge
    sources? Can any method or knowledge source be determined to be better
    or worse than another?

    * Evaluation of WSD systems.
    Which metrics are most informative and would new ones be useful? Can WSD
    be evaluated in terms of the effect it has on another language
    processing task, for example parsing? Can evaluations using different
    data sets (corpora and lexical resources) be compared? Can the cost of
    producing evaluation data be reduced through the use of automatic
    methods?

    * Sense distinctions and sense inventories.
    How do these affect WSD? How does the granularity of the lexicon affect
    the difficulty of the WSD task? Are some types of sense distinction
    difficult to distinguish in text? What can be gained from combining
    sense inventories and how can this be done?

    * The effect of WSD on applications.
    To what extent does WSD help applications such as machine translation or
    text retrieval? What kind of disambiguation is most useful for these
    applications? What is the effect when the disambiguation algorithm makes
    mistakes?

    * Minimising the need for hand-tagged data.
    Hand-tagged text is expensive and difficult to obtain while un-tagged
    text is plentiful and, effectively, limitless. What techniques can be
    used to make use of un-tagged text, would weakly/semi-supervised
    learning algorithms be useful? What use can be made of parallel text?
    Can un-tagged text be made as useful as disambiguated text?

    Submission Information

    Initial Submission Date: 1 October 2003

    All submissions will be subject to the normal peer review process for
    this journal.

    Submissions in electronic form (PDF) are strongly preferred and must
    conform to the Computer Speech and Language specifications, which are
    available at:
          http://authors.elsevier.com/journal/csl

    Any initial queries, should be addressed to
    Judita.Preiss@cl.cam.ac.uk



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Jun 07 2003 - 02:55:02 EDT