Background:
After a successful inaugural workshop in 2019 in Florence Italy, the
Second International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations (DMR 2020) will
be held on December 13, 2020, in Barcelona, Spain, in conjunction with COLING
2020.
While deep learning methods have led to many breakthroughs in practical natural
language applications, most notably in Machine Translation, Machine Reading,
Question Answering, Recognizing Textual Entailment, and so on, there is still a
sense among many NLP researchers that we have a long way to go before we can
develop systems that can actually “understand” human language and explain the
decisions they make. Indeed, “understanding” natural language entails many different
human-like capabilities, and they include but are not limited to the ability to
track entities in a text, understand the relations between these entities, track
events and their participants, understand how events unfold in time, and distinguish
events that have actually happened from events that are planned or intended,
are uncertain, or did not happen at all. “Understanding” also entails human-like
ability to perform qualitative and quantitative reasoning, possibly with knowledge
acquired about the real world. We
believe a critical step in achieving natural language understanding is to
design meaning representations for text that have the necessary meaning “ingredients”
that help us achieve these capabilities.
There
has been a growing body of research devoted to the design, annotation, and
parsing of meaning representations in recent years. The meaning representations
that have been used for semantic parsing research are developed with different
linguistic perspectives and practical goals in mind and have different formal properties.
Formal meaning representation frameworks such as Minimal Recursion Semantics
(MRS) and
Discourse Representation Theory (as exemplified in the Groningen Meaning Bank and the
Parallel Meaning Bank) are developed with the goal of supporting logical
inference in reasoning-based AI systems
and are therefore easily translatable into first-order logic, requiring proper
representation of semantic components such as quantification, negation, tense,
and modality. Other meaning representation frameworks such as Abstract
Meaning Representation, Tectogrammatical Representation (TR)
in Prague Dependency Treebanks and the Universal Conceptual Cognitive
Annotation (UCCA), put more emphasis on the representation of core
predicate-argument structure, lexical semantic information such as semantic
roles and word senses, or named entities and relations. The automatic parsing
of natural language text into these meaning representations
and to a lesser degree the generation of natural language text from these meaning
representations are also very active areas of research, and a wide range of
technical approaches and learning methods have been applied to these problems.
In addition, there have also been early attempts to use these meaning representations
in natural language applications.
This
workshop intends to bring together researchers who are producers and consumers
of meaning representations and through their interaction gain a deeper
understanding of the key elements of meaning representations that are the most
valuable to the NLP community. The workshop will also provide an opportunity for
meaning representation researchers to critically examine existing frameworks
with the goal of using their findings to inform the design of next-generation
meaning representations. A third goal of the workshop
is to explore opportunities and identify challenges in the design and use of
meaning representations in multilingual settings. A final goal of the workshop
is to understand the relationship between distributed meaning representations
trained on large data sets using network models and the symbolic meaning
representations that are carefully designed and annotated by CL researchers and
gain a deeper understanding of areas where each type of meaning representation
is the most effective, and how they can be linked.
Solicitation: We solicit papers that address one or more of the following
topics: New: List of Accepted papers
New: Workshop program
New: Workshop proceedings
Confirmed Invited Speakers:
Daniel Gildea: Slides
Important dates:
Submission Site:
http://softconf.com/coling2020/dmr2020
Submissions should report original and unpublished research on topics of interest to the workshop. Accepted papers are expected to be presented at the workshop and will be published in the workshop proceedings. They should emphasize obtained results rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. A paper accepted for presentation at the workshop must not be or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings.
Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system. Here is the link to the DMR submission site.
Long/short paper submissions must use the official templates (which can be found here). Long papers must not exceed nine (9) pages of content. Short papers and demonstration papers must not exceed five (5) pages of content. References do not count against these limits.
Note: The supplementary material does not count towards the page limit and should not be included in the paper, but should be submitted separately using the appropriate field on the submission website. All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in the template files.
Reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations or self-references that reveal the author's identity--e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." should be replaced with citations such as "Smith (1991) previously showed ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.
Authors of papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information to the workshop organizers (dmr2020-chairs@googlegroups.com). Authors of accepted papers must notify the program chairs within 10 days of acceptance if the paper is withdrawn for any reason.
Co-organizers
Lori Levin: Slides
Mark Steedman: Slides
May 20 August 24, 2020 [extended deadline]
Jun 24 October 7, 2020
Jul 11 November 1, 2020
Sep 14 December 13, 2020