ESSLLI-98 Workshop on 
      LEXICAL SEMANTICS IN CONTEXT: CORPUS, INFERENCE AND DISCOURSE
                           August 17 - 21, 1998

                       A workshop held as part of the 
        10th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information 
                               (ESSLLI-98) 
                August 17 - 28, 1998, Saarbruecken, Germany

                   ** EXTENDED DEADLINE : March 2, 1998 **


ORGANIZERS: Johan Bos (Saarbruecken) and Paul Buitelaar (Brandeis University)

Web site: http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~esslli98/workshops.html

BACKGROUND:
The workshop aims at bringing together research in two complementary fields of 
semantic analysis that are still too far apart. In order to achieve both a 
broad and a deep understanding of any given text document, a system needs both 
advanced acquisition of corpus specific lexical semantic knowledge and powerful 
inference mechanisms that utilize that knowledge in discourse analysis.

Given the still relatively limited results within both areas there has been 
little impetus to combine them. Corpus-based extraction of lexical semantic 
knowledge has only recently become a more feasible task, because of the growing
availibility of on-line text documents; robust corpus processing technologies, 
such as broad coverage part-of-speech tagging and shallow parsing; and readily 
available statistical methods. The various approaches to discourse analysis, 
originating in such diverse fields as formal semantics, psychology and AI, are 
in the process of converging into a unified approach to the analysis and 
representation of the cohesive structure of natural language documents.

The intersection between these two fields lies in the application of lexical 
semantic knowledge to such problems in discourse analysis as anaphora 
resolution and discourse segmentation. In fact, the benefit will be mutual, 
because knowledge of discourse structure is helpful to lexical knowledge 
extraction as well. 

In summary, large scale domain specific lexical semantic knowledge acquisition 
can assist in analyzing discourse structures, which in turn can assist in 
acquiring even more accurate lexical semantic representations for the relevant 
terms in the domain.

WORKSHOP FORMAT:
The workshop will consist of five sessions, with two or three 20+10-minute 
presentations in each session. Additionally, a number of invited talks will be
given by members of the program committee, while also some time will be set 
aside for general discussion of the topic of the workshop.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Submitted papers will be reviewed by the organizers and the following program 
committee:

	Bran Boguraev
	Ann Copestake
	Daniel Kayser
	Alex Lascarides
	Manfred Pinkal
	Massimo Poesio
	James Pustejovsky

SUBMISSION:
It should be stressed that we especially encourage those contributions that
address aspects of the integration of all three areas of research mentioned 
above (lexical semantics, discourse analysis and corpus-based approaches to 
both of these).

The accepted papers will be made available in a summer school reader. 
Publication in an edited volume is under discussion.

All researchers in the area, but especially Ph.D. students and young 
researchers, are encouraged to submit an extended abstract (4 to 5 pages), 
preferably by email and in postscript. 

Submissions should be sent before February 15, 1998 to one of the following 
two organizers:

   Johan Bos                            Paul Buitelaar
   University of the Saarland           Brandeis University
   Dept. of Computational Linguistics 	Department of Computer Science
   Postfach 15 11 50                    Waltham, MA 02254
   D-66041 Saarbruecken                 USA
   Germany
				
   bos@coli.uni-sb.de                   paulb@cs.brandeis.edu

REGISTRATION:
Workshop contributors will be required to register for ESSLLI-98, but they 
will be eligible for a reduced registration fee.

IMPORTANT DATES:
        Mar  2, 98: Deadline for submissions
        Apr 15, 98: Notification of acceptance
        May 15, 98: Deadline for final copy
        Aug 17, 98: Start of workshop

FURTHER INFORMATION:
To obtain further information about ESSLLI-98 please visit the ESSLLI-98
home page at http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/esslli