[PT] NASSLLI Workshop on Inference from Text

Dear Friends,

The workshop below should be of interest to proof theorists working on proof
theoretic semantics,
and perhaps others as well.

Can you please forward it to the list as a whole?

Thanks,

      Larry Moss

CALL FOR PAPERS
NASSLLI 2010 WORKSHOP on Inference from Text

June 21-25, 2010

organized as part of the North American Summer School in Logic, Language,
and Information
www.indiana.edu/~nasslli <http://www.indiana.edu/%7Enasslli>
Bloomington, IN USA

Workshop Organizers:
Larry Moss, Indiana University
Annie Zaenen, Palo Alto Research Center


DESCRIPTION
This workshop investigates the intersection between two areas of work:
textual entailment (TE) as an area of natural language processing, and
natural logic as an area of logic and natural language semantics.

The TE task consists of deciding whether one text implies another.  The
notion of 'implication' here is a variable, and computational systems
differ as to whether they are aiming at strict logical entailment or a
looser notion that takes world knowledge and plausibility into account.
They also differ as to whether 'yes' and 'no' are the only possible answers,
or whether they allow an 'undecided' answer. For this workshop,
contributors can define the TE task in any way they see fit.

Textual entailment is a recognition task in many natural language
application areas, including question answering, information retrieval and
extraction, and document summarization.  This area is also the topic of the
PASCAL RTE Challenges.

The second area of our workshop is natural logic.  This is an ongoing
development which includes (a) the study of fragments of first-order logic
which are big enough to represent interesting linguistic phenomena and yet
small enough to be decidable; (b) logical systems for reasoning about
polarities in categorial grammar; (c) extended syllogistic logics; (d)
connections of the above to modeling in cognitive science of human
reasoning.

We envision a workshop with papers in or close to the intersection of the
two areas.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
The topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

  - theorem proving in RTE tasks
  - logics and algorithms for use in textual entailment
  - proof theoretic semantics
  - reasoning in controlled languages
  - formalizations of human inference tasks


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Johan Bos, Sapienza University of Rome
Nissim Francez, Technion
Bill MacCartney, Aardvark
Chris Manning, Stanford University
Larry Moss, Indiana University
Annie Zaenen, Palo Alto Research Center


SUBMISSION DETAILS
Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract describing recent,
completed research (published or unpublished) dealing with this theme.
Submissions should be formatted in PDF or plain ASCII text only, and should
not exceed 10 pages.

Please send your submission electronically to:

lsm at cs.indiana.edu

by the deadline listed below.  Submissions will be reviewed by the
workshop's program committee and additional reviewers.

Accepted abstracts will be published on the web prior to the workshop.  In
addition, the organizers are investigating the possibility of a
publication devoted to original papers on this topic.


WORKSHOP FORMAT
The workshop is part of NASSLLI and is open to all NASSLLI participants. It
will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days
during NASSLLI.  There will be 1-2 slots for paper presentation and
discussion per session. On the first day the workshop will consist of
introductory material on the topic.

IMPORTANT DATES:
Submissions: April 5, 2010
Notification: April 19, 2010