Annotating and Reasoning about Time and Events (ARTE)
ACL-COLING Workshop
July 23, 2006
Chairs:
Branimir Boguraev, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
bran@us.ibm.com
Rafael Munoz, University of Alicante, Spain
rafael@dlsi.ua.es
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA
jamesp@cs.brandeis.edu
1. Workshop Description
The computational analysis of time is a challenging and very topical
problem, as
the needs of applications based on information extraction techniques
expand to
include varying degrees of time stamping and temporal ordering of
events and/or
relations within a narrative. The challenges derive from the combined
requirements of a mapping process (text to a rich representation of
temporal
entities), representational framework (ontologically-grounded temporal
graph),
and reasoning capability (combining common-sense inference with
temporal
axioms).
Usually contextualized in question-answering applications (with
obvious
dependencies of answers on time), temporal awareness directly impacts
numerous
areas of NLP and AI: text summarization over events and their
participants;
making inferences from events in a text; overlaying timelines on
document
collections; commonsense reasoning in narrative and story
understanding.
Interest in temporal analysis and event-based reasoning has spawned a
number of
important meetings, particularly as applied to IE and QA tasks (cf. at
COLING
2000; ACL 2001; LREC 2002; TERQAS 2002; TANGO 2003, Dagstuhl
2005). Significant
progress has been made in these meetings, leading to developing a
standard for a
specification language for events and temporal expressions and their
orderings
(TimeML). While recent research in the broader community (as
indicated, for
instance, in the most recent symposium on Annotating and Reasoning
about Time
and Events) highlights TimeML's status as an interchange format, this
workshop,
however, is not intended to focus on TimeML exclusively. Likewise,
while the
ultimate goal of temporal analysis is to facilitate reasoning about
time and
events, the formal aspects of this problem are being addressed by
other meetings
(see, for instance, the TIME 2006 Symposium). Instead, the workshop
will
explore largely the linguistic implications for temporal-analytical
frameworks.
The goal of the meeting, therefore, is to address issues already
raised, but not
fully explored---including but not limited to the following:
= infrastructure questions: temporal annotation methodology, tools;
reliable
measures of inter-annotator agreement; community resources.
= analytical frameworks: temporal information extraction; approaches
to
temporal expression normalization; relationship between named
entity
recognition and temporal entities analysis; dependency (or not)
upon
syntactic and discourse structure.
= mapping to time ontology(ies): completeness of the representation
framework; formalization of the process; additional temporal
reasoning
capabilities required.
= reasoning over time: in particular, (robust) reasoning within
representational schemes demonstrably derivable with current
IE/analytical
frameworks.
= applications of temporal analytics and reasoning: in addition to NL
tasks,
of particular interest are studies of temporal information as it
manifests
in, and impacts, different domains: beyond news, time is
intrinsically
essential in eg. legal, health-care, intelligence, financial
contexts.
= national language: relationship between language characteristics and
representational frameworks; generalizations of temporal analytics
across
multiple languages; multi-/cross-lingual resource development.
2. Target Audience and Participants
This workshop will be of interest to those creating or exploiting
temporally
annotated corpora; those developing information extraction, question
answering,
and summarization systems relying on temporal and event ordering
information;
researchers involved in creating chronicles and timelines from textual
data
(legal, health-care, intelligence); semantic web designers and
developers
wanting to link web ontologies and standards to temporal markup from
natural
language; researchers interested in temporal properties of discourse
and
narrative structure; and those interested in annotation environments
and
development tools.
3. Important Dates and Other Information
Papers due: March 31, 2006.
Acceptance/rejection notification: April 29, 2006.
Final version due: May 20, 2006.
Conference: July 23, 2006.
For more details, refer to http://www.acl2006time.org.
4. Program Committee
David Ahn, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Nicholas Asher, University of Texas, Austin, TX USA
Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, Saarbruecken, Germany
Harry Bunt, Faculty of Arts, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Corina Forascu, University of Iasi, Romania
Robert Gaizauskas, University of Sheffield, England
Jerry Hobbs, ISI/USC, Marina del Ray, CA USA
Graham Katz, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
Bernardo Magnini, ITC-IRST Trento, Italy
Inderjeet Mani, MITRE, Bedford, MA USA
Patricio Martinez-Barco, University of Alicante, Spain
Matteo Negri, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
Frank Schilder, Thomson Legal and Regulatory Co., Eagan, MN USA
Andrea Setzer, University of Sheffield, England
Marc Verhagen, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA USA
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