Workshop on Language, Ontology, Terminology and
Knowledge Structures - LOTKS 2017

In conjunction with the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS), 19-22 September 2017 Montpellier (France)
Location: Hôtel Oceania Le Métropole - Montpellier city centre
Date: 19th September, 2017

Description

This workshop, the second of a joint series, will bring together two closely related strands of research. On the one hand it will look at the overlap between ontologies and computational linguistics; and on the other the relationship between knowledge modelling and terminologies -- as well as the many points of intersection between these two topics.

Formal ontologies are taking on an increasingly important role in computational linguistics and automated language processing. Knowledge models and ontologies are of interest to several areas of NLP including, but not limited to, Machine Translation, Question Answering, and Word Sense Disambiguation. At a more abstract level ontologies can help us to model and reason about natural language semantics. They can be also used for the organisation and formalisation of linguistically relevant categories such as those used in tagsets for corpus annotation. At the same time, the fact that formal ontologies are being increasingly accessed by users with a limited or with no background in formal logic has led to a growing interest in the development of front ends that allow for the easy editing, querying and summarisation of such resources; it has also led to work in developing natural language interfaces for authoring and for evaluating ontologies. Another area that is now beginning to receive more attention is the application of ontologies and taxonomies to the annotation and study of literary texts, as well as of texts more generally in the humanities. This is closely related to the ontology-enhanced modelling of lexicographic resources, another topic which is gaining in popular.

This brings us to the field of terminology as a linguistic field, where in recent years there has been a shift from merely compiling specialized lexicographic resources to exploring terminology as a tool for structuring knowledge in a given domain. As such, this has led to more intelligent ways of accessing, extracting, representing, modelling, visualising and transferring knowledge. Numerous tools for the automatic extraction of terms, term variants, knowledge-rich contexts, definitions, semantic relations, and taxonomies from specialized corpora have been developed for a number of languages and new theoretical approaches have emerged as potential frameworks for the study of specialized communication. However, the building of adequate knowledge models for practitioners (e.g. experts, researchers, translators, teachers etc.), on the one hand, and for use by NLP applications (including cross-language, cross-domain, cross-device, multimodal, multi-platform applications) on the other, still remains a challenge. LOTKS will provide a forum for discussion on how to best bridge these two sets of requirements.

Motivation

This workshop welcomes contributions from researchers in fields such as linguistics, terminologies, and knowledge engineering, whose work fits in with our topics of interest as well as interested industry professionals. Building on the success both of the 1st LangandOnto workshop (co-located with ICWS 2015) as well as last year’s joint LangandOnto/TermiKS workshop (co-located with LREC 2016), this workshop aims to create a forum for open discussion that will help to highlight the common areas of interest in the different fields concerned, as well as fostering dialogue between the various different approaches taken by each discipline. And therefore we particularly welcome approaches with a cross-language, cross-domain and/or cross-interdisciplinary scope.

Topics of Interest

  • NLP-driven ontology modelling
  • The use of ontologies to structure linguistic tagsets
  • Natural language interfaces to ontologies
  • Ontologies for NLP tasks (e.g. textual entailment, summarisation, word sense disambiguation) and Information Retrieval
  • Lexical Ontologies
  • The use of ontologies in analysing/studying literary texts
  • Ontology-driven natural language generation
  • Linguistic, cognitive, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, computational and hybrid approaches to knowledge modelling
  • Construction of terminological knowledge bases
  • Terminology modelling for MT
  • Knowledge extraction from user-generated content
  • Frame-based approaches to knowledge extraction and representation
  • Building knowledge resources for less-resourced domains and languages
  • Visual components of specialized knowledge bases
  • Visualisation techniques for knowledge representations
  • Term variation and knowledge representations
  • NLP applications for terminology management
  • Terminologies in the Digital Humanities

Organisers:

You can contact us on langandonto@gmail.com.

  • Francesca Frontini, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 - Praxiling (francesca.frontini@univ-montp3.fr)
  • Larisa Grčić Simeunović, University of Zadar (lgrcic@unizd.hr)
  • Fahad Khan, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" - CNR, Italy (fahad.khan@ilc.cnr.it)
  • Artemis Parvizi, Oxford University Press, UK (Artemis.Parvizi@oup.com)
  • Špela Vintar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (spela.vintar@ff.uni-lj.si)

Registration:

Please register at the IWCS 2017 website.