Joint Second Workshop on Language and Ontology &
Terminology and Knowledge Structures (LangOnto2 + TermiKS)

In conjunction with the 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 23-28 May 2016, Portorož (Slovenia)
Location: Grand Hotel Bernardin Conference Center
Date: 23rd May, 2016

Description

This joint workshop proposes to bring together two different but closely related strands of research. On the one hand it will look at the overlap between ontologies and computational linguistics and on the other it will explore the relationship between knowledge modelling and terminologies.

A significant amount of human knowledge can be found in texts. This knowledge is encoded at the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels and so to a certain degree language can be regarded as mirroring underlying cognitive structures. It is not surprising then that formal ontologies in languages such as OWL have become more and more popular both in linguistics and in automated language processing. For instance, knowledge models and ontologies are now of core interest to many NLP fields including Machine Translation, Question Answering, Text Summarization, Information Retrieval, and Word Sense Disambiguation. And at a more abstract level ontologies can also help us to model and reason about phenomena in natural language semantics. In addition they can also be used in 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 limited to no background in formal logic has led to a growing interest in developing accessible front ends that allow for easy querying and summarisation of ontologies. It has also led to work in developing natural language interfaces for authoring ontologies and evaluating their design.

In recent years there has also been a renewed interest in the linguistic aspects of accessing, extracting, representing, modelling 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 NLP applications (including cross-language, cross-domain, cross-device, multi-modal, multi-platform applications), on the other, still remains a challenge.

The workshop will take place one day before the main conference (14th April 2015) at Grand Hotel Bernardin Conference Center in Portorož. See here for information about registration.

Motivation

Building on the success of the 1st LangOnto workshop (co-located with the 11th International Conference on Computational Semantics - IWCS 2015) and extending the scope to terminology and linguistic approaches to knowledge modelling, this workshop proposes to create a forum to explore the many ways in which results from the fields of ontology modelling, terminology and (computational) linguistics relate together. It aims to bring together researchers from different communities as well as other interested stakeholders from industry and the public sector in order to identify common interests, exploit synergies, and share methods, tools and resources.

We are particularly interested in submissions that discuss how best to carry out the generation and inference of new ontological datasets using NLP based methods as well as having input from businesses that are dependent on ontologies and linguistic resources. We want to create an open discussion that will provide use cases and requirements for academic researchers, so that we can build or generate such resources and tools. At the same time we want to showcase research that brings theoretical advances in formal ontologies and in ontology based reasoning to bear on the study of languages.

Furthermore, we invite researchers from terminology, linguistics, NLP, cognitive studies, psycholinguistics and related fields to present theoretical and applied studies in terminology and knowledge structures, whereby knowledge is understood not only at the macrostructural level, as a complex network of interrelated concepts , but also at the microstructural level, as individual multi-faceted nodes of meaning with cognitive, linguistic, contextual, and socio-cultural layers. Consequently, we particularly welcome approaches with a cross-language, cross-domain and/or interdisciplinary scope.

Organisers:

You can contact us on langandonto@gmail.com.

  • Fahad Khan, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" - CNR, Italy (fahad.khan@ilc.cnr.it)
  • Špela Vintar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (spela.vintar@ff.uni-lj.si)
  • Pilar León Arauz, University of Granada, Spain (pleon@ugr.es)
  • Pamela Faber, University of Granada, Spain (pfaber@ugr.es)
  • Francesca Frontini, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" - CNR, Italy ( francesca.frontini@ilc.cnr.it)
  • Artemis Parvizi, Oxford University Press, UK (Artemis.Parvizi@oup.com)
  • Larisa Grčić Simeunović, University of Zadar, Croatia (lgrcic@unizd.hr)
  • Christina Unger, University of Bielefeld, Germany (cunger@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de)

Registration:

Please register at the LREC 2016 website.