[DL] CALL FOR PAPERS : Journal of Logic and Computation - Special Issue on Natural Language and Knowledge Representation

[Jana Sukkarieh]

                                 CALL FOR PAPERS 

 Journal of Logic and Computation - Special Issue on Natural Language and
Knowledge Representation

We cordially invite submissions of articles for a special issue of the
journal of logic and computation <http://logcom.oxfordjournals.org/>  on
natural language and knowledge representation.

TOPICS

We believe that the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Knowledge
Representation (KR) communities have common goals. They are both concerned
with representing knowledge and with reasoning, since the best test for the
semantic capability of an NLP system is performing reasoning tasks. Having
these two essential common grounds, the two communities ought to have been
collaborating, to provide a well-suited representation language that covers
these grounds. However, the two communities also have difficult-to-meet
concerns. Mainly, the semantic representation (SR) should be expressive
enough and take the information in context into account, while the KR should
be equipped with a fast reasoning process.

The main objection against using an SR or a KR is that they need experts to
be understood. Non-experts communicate (usually) via a natural language
(NL), and more or less they understand each other while performing a lot of
reasoning. An essential practical value of representations is their attempt
to be transparent. This will particularly be useful when/if the system
provides a justification for a user or a knowledge engineer on its line of
reasoning using the underlying KR (i.e. without generating back to NL).

We all seem to believe that, compared to Natural Language, the existing
Knowledge Representation and reasoning systems are poor. Nevertheless, for a
long time, the KR community has dismissed the idea that NL can be a KR.
That's because NL can be very ambiguous and there are syntactic and semantic
processing complexities associated with it. However, researchers in both
communities have started looking at this issue again. Possibly, it has to do
with the NLP community making some progress in terms of processing and
handling ambiguity, the KR community realising that a lot of knowledge is
already 'coded' in NL and that one should reconsider the way they handle
expressivity and ambiguity.

For this special journal issue of logic and computation, we invite the
submission of original high quality articles.   Topics for this special
issue include but not limited to:

+ A novel NL-like KR or building on an existing one

+ Reasoning systems that benefit from properties of NL to reason with NL

+ Semantic representation used as a KR : compromise between expressivity and
efficiency? 

+ More Expressive KR for NL understanding (Any compromise?)

+ Any work exploring how existing representations fall short of 
+ addressing some problems involved in modelling, manipulating or 
+ reasoning (whether reasoning as used to get an interpretation for a 
+ certain utterance, exchange of utterances or what utterances follow 
+ from other utterances) with NL documents

+ Representations that show how classical logics are not as efficient,
transparent, expressive or where a one-step application of an inference rule
require more (complex) steps in a classical environment and vice-versa; i.e.
how classical logics are more powerful, etc. 

+ Building a reasoning test collection for natural language understanding
systems: any kind of reasoning (deductive, abductive, etc); for a deductive
test suite see for e.g. deliverable 16 of the FraCas project. Also, look at
textual entailment challenges 1 and 2. 

+ Comparative results (on a common test suite or a common task) of 
+ different representations or systems that reason with NL (again any 
+ kind of reasoning). The comparison could be either for efficiency, 
+ transparency or expressivity

+ Knowledge acquisition systems or techniques that benefit from 
+ properties of NL to acquire knowledge already "coded" in NL

+ Automated Reasoning, Theorem Proving and KR communities views on all 
+ this

+ Challenges in Natural Language and Reasoning

+ Where is the NLP or KR community going wrong/right in meeting the
challenges? 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE 

James ALLEN, University of Rochester, USA 

Patrick BLACKBURN, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique, France 

Johan BOS, University of Edinburgh, UK 

Richard CROUCH, Palo Alto Research Centre, USA 

Anette FRANK, DFKI, Germany 

Fernando GOMEZ, University of Central Florida, USA 

Sanda HARABAGIU, University of Texas at Dallas, USA 

John HARRISON, Intel Corporation, USA 

Jerry HOBBS, Information Sciences Institute, USA 

Chung Hee HWANG, Raytheon Co., USA 

Michael KOHLHASE, International University Bremen, Germany 

Shalom LAPPIN, King's College, UK 

Carsten LUTZ, Dresden University of Technology, Germany 

Inderjeet MANI,  George Town University, USA 

Jeff PELLETIER, Simon Fraser University, Canada 

Stephen PULMAN, University of Oxford, UK 

Lenhart SCHUBERT, University of Rochester, USA 

John SOWA, VivoMind Intelligence, Inc., USA 

Jana SUKKARIEH, Secerno Ltd, UK 

Geoff SUTCLIFFE, Miami University, USA 

For advice on topic, scope, suitability for the special issue please contact
Jana Sukkarieh @ <j.sukkarieh.94 at cantab.net>. 

Paper submission deadline is July 31st, 2006.  Send your electronic
submission (pdf) to <j.sukkarieh.94 at cantab.net> . Also submission process
will be soon available on <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady0641/Flairs06_NL_KR/>.
Please check the site.

The documents should not exceed more than 20 pages. The articles will be
peer reviewed and notification for authors will be sent as soon as possible
after the date of submission.