Research on Language and Computation
Ambiguity and semantic judgments
Special issue edited by Massimo Poesio and Ron Artstein
Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2006
Scope
We invite articles for a special issue on ambiguity and semantic
judgments from a computational, theoretical and psychological
perspective. Much research in computational linguistics assumes
that tasks have a single answer: word sense disambiguation looks
for an unambiguous sense in context, anaphora resolution algorithms
look for a unique antecedent, question-answering systems look for
the best answer, semantic role labeling identifies the most
appropriate role, and so on. Yet theoretical and psychological
evidence show that ambiguity is abundant, and semantic annotation
tasks often display disagreements between coders which are the
result of genuine ambiguity rather than annotation error.
We are interested in ambiguity, broadly defined. On the one hand,
there are cases where ambiguities constitute clearly distinct
interpretations, preserved despite the context. On the other hand,
there are instances of underspecification which may or may not be
construed as ambiguous given a context. And in between there may be
cases where different modes of processing give rise to differences
of emphasis which may or may not warrant classifying as
ambiguities. All these shades of variation, and the disputes they
give rise to, call for more empirical study of matters of
ambiguity, especially as they pertain to semantic judgments used in
corpus annotation and computational implementation.
For this special issue we are looking for high-quality, original,
full-length journal articles on any aspect pertaining to ambiguity
and semantic judgment. We especially welcome articles on the
following topics:
- Computational implementations which take ambiguity into account
- Empirical research on ambiguity and annotator agreement
- Psychologically motivated research on semantic ambiguity
Submission instructions
Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2006
Late submissions will only be considered if time and space allow.
It would be helpful if authors who intend to submit an article
could let us know by 1 August 2006, or as soon as possible
thereafter, by sending an email to ambiguity@essex.ac.uk.
Length: There is no formal length restriction, but please try to
keep the length of the articles moderate (around 25-30 pages). If
an article is so long as to exclude other articles from the issue,
we may ask the authors to shorten it.
Blind review: Please do not include any information identifying the
author in the manuscript submitted for review.
Submission method: For review purposes, please submit your article
as a PDF attachment to ambiguity@essex.ac.uk. Include contact
information in the body of the email.
Further information: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/ambiguity/
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