[CUNY2010] Announcement: Interdisciplinary Workshop on Verbs: The Identification and Representation of Verb Features

[Alissa Melinger]

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Verbs
The Identification and Representation of Verb Features

Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa 4-5 November 2010

http://linguistica.sns.it/Workshop_verb/

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1.    Workshop Description

Verbs and their features have always received wide attention in various
disciplines concerned with linguistic research, since their contribution is
essential to the structure and the interpretation of language. In recent
years, the availability of new lexical resources and increasingly large
corpora, the application of empirical methods and statistical algorithms and
the development of technical devices such as eye-trackers and magnetic
resonance imaging has led to advances in several linguistic areas.

Their great interest and relevance notwithstanding, verbs still defy
attempts by linguists and cognitive scientists to achieve a clear
understanding of their organisational principles, as well as of the features
entering into their constitution. Verb complexity derives not only from
their notoriously high polysemy, but also and especially from the fact that
verbs are crucially the cornerstone of the syntax-semantics interface. The
semantic behaviour of verbs is therefore strongly intertwined with the
syntagmatic constraints governing their distributions. As a consequence,
while there is a consensus on the multifarious nature of verb semantic
representations, the different types of verb features analysed in the
literature (e.g., event properties, argument structure, aspect, etc.) still
lie as separate pieces of a puzzle which is far from complete.

Success in this type of research is brought about by close collaboration
between (computational) linguists and cognitive scientists. To this end,
interdisciplinary workshops can play a key role in advancing existing and
initiating new research. This was demonstrated by the interest generated by
the Verb Workshop 2005, which received 33 submissions and was held as a
standalone event at Saarland University over 2 days. A more clear
understanding of the (computational) linguistic and cognitive properties of
verbs will bring a positive reflection on the results of the research done
within these communities. Therefore there is a real need to provide a forum
where researchers can meet across disciplines.

The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to bring together researchers
from linguistic domains such as linguistics, computational linguistics,
computational lexicography, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and
neuroscience, in order to discuss their perspectives on verb senses and verb
features, exchanging new ideas and methods. Such an event can help to bridge
the gap between the linguistic, computational and cognitive communities,
promote knowledge and resource sharing, and help initiate interdisciplinary
research projects.

The focus of the workshop is on the identification and representation of
verb features at the syntax-semantics interface. Papers are invited on, but
not limited to, the following topics:

•    Empirical studies and formal descriptions of verb features and verb
senses: these are some of the key fundamental factors in verb treatment, and
are relevant for representing and distinguishing verbs across disciplines.

•    Representation of verbs by verb classes: generalisation is crucial to
the acquisition of verbs and categorisation in cognitive linguistics, and
for many computational linguistic tasks; computational learning of verb
classes and properties provides insights into argument alternations, verb
polysemy, selectional preferences, etc.

•    Cognitively motivated models of verbs: the definition of verb semantics
according to human perception, the collection of human judgements on verb
senses and verb properties, and psycholinguistic studies and experiments on
verbs are important interdisciplinary contributions to verb
characterisation.

•    Evidence from cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology on verb
features and corpus-based methods to extract empirical features: the
distributional account of verb senses and verb features provides essential
contributions to verb analysis. We also welcome contributions on the use of
distributional data to model (neuro)cognitive evidence on verb
representation.

•    Data resources and tools: the definition of verb senses and verb
properties are important for basic and task-oriented research; especially
the annotation of lexical verb information provides valuable data to
computational learning procedures and evaluation methods.

•    Language-specific and cross-linguistic aspects of verbs: which verb
features are specific to a language, and which are universal?

2.    Workshop Organizers

Pier Marco Bertinetto (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy)
Anna Korhonen (University of Cambridge, UK)
Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)
Alissa Melinger (University of Dundee, UK)
Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and
University of Bath, UK)


3.    Program Committee

Afra Alishashi (Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics,
Saarland University, Germany)
Tim Baldwin (Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering,
University of Melbourne, Australia)
Colin Bannard (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig,
Germany)
Roberto Basili (Department of Computer Science, University of Roma Tor
Vergata, Italy)
Nuria Bel (University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain)
Gemma Boleda (Technical University of Barcelona, Spain)
Chris Brew (Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, USA)
Miriam Butt (Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Germany)
Amit Dubey (School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK)
Sonja Eisenbeiß (Department of Language and Linguistics, University of
Essex, UK)
Katrin Erk (Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Afsaneh Fazly (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shiraz
University, Iran)
Pablo Gamallo (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Tracy King (Microsoft, USA)
Jean-Pierre Koenig (Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, USA)
Beth Levin (Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, USA)
Bernardo Magnini (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy)
Daniela Marzo (Department of Linguistics, University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Diana McCarthy (Lexical Computing Ltd., Brighton, UK)
Ken McRae (Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Canada)
Sebastian Padó (Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of
Stuttgart, Germany)
Martha Palmer (Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado at Boulder,
USA)
Massimo Poesio (Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy)
James Pustejovsky (Department of Computer Science, Brandeis University, USA)
Anna Rumshisky (Department of Computer Science, Brandeis University, USA)
Ekaterina Shutova (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK)
Gabriella Vigliocco (Department of Psychology, University College London,
UK)
David Vinson (Deafness Cognition and Language Research Center, University
College London, UK)


4.    Submission

Authors are invited to submit a 3-page PDF abstract (including references
and figures) formatted according to the ACL stylesheet (Latex and Word
stylesheets can be downloaded from the workshop website). Abstracts must be
anonymous and submitted using the Easychair interface available through
http://linguistica.sns.it/Workshop_verb/Submission.html. The submissions
will be reviewed by the workshop Program Committee.

Accepted abstracts can be extended up to 5 pages (using the same
stylesheet), and will be printed in the workshop proceedings.


5.    Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: Jun 20, 2010
Notification of acceptance: Aug 1, 2010
Camera ready papers due: Sep 15, 2010
Workshop dates: Nov 4-5, 2010


6.    Contact

You can contact the workshop organisers via email: verb2010 at easychair.org.

Detailed  and up-to-date information on the workshop can be found on the
workshop homepage:
http://linguistica.sns.it/Workshop_verb/.
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