NASSLLI 2010 workshop on Inference from Text

June 21-25, 2010

organized as part of the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information held in Bloomington, IN USA.

Endorsed by the ACL's Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics

SIGSEM

Workshop Organizers

Workshop Schedule

Class 1, June 21

Larry Moss: Overview, history, and the basics of natural logic.

Class 2, June 22

Larry Moss: more on natural logic, and also this handout.

Class 3, June 23

Koji Mineshima: Generalized Syllogistic Inference System based on Inclusion and Exclusion Relations. The paper is here.

Larry Moss presents Bill MacCartney and Christopher Manning's paper An Extended Model of Natural Logic.

Class 4, June 24

Cleo Condoravdi: Computing Textual Inference (slides).

Class 5, June 25

Mehwish Riaz: Another Look at Textual Entailment: Discovering Scenario-Speciļ¬c Causal Relationships with No Supervision (joint work with Roxana Girju).

Catherine Legg speaks on the Cyc inference engine.

The group as a whole: problems and prospects for combining textual entailment and natural logic.

Description

This workshop investigates the intersection between two areas of work: textual entailment (TE) as an area of natural language processing, and natural logic as an area of logic and natural language semantics.

The TE task consists of deciding whether one text implies another. The notion of 'implication' here is a variable, and computational systems differ as to whether they are aiming at strict logical entailment or a looser notion that takes world knowledge and plausibility into account. They also differ as to whether 'yes' and 'no' are the only possible answers, or whether they allow an 'undecided' answer. For this workshop, contributors can define the TE task in any way they see fit.

Textual entailment is a recognition task in many natural language application areas, including question answering, information retrieval and extraction, and document summarization. This area is also the topic of the PASCAL RTE Challenges.

The second area of our workshop is natural logic. This is an ongoing development which includes (a) the study of fragments of first-order logic which are big enough to represent interesting linguistic phenomena and yet small enough to be decidable; (b) logical systems for reasoning about polarities in categorial grammar; (c) extended syllogistic logics; (d) connections of the above to modeling in cognitive science of human reasoning.

We envision a workshop with papers in or close to the intersection of the two areas.

Topics of Interest

The topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

Program Committee

Johan Bos Sapienza University of Rome
Nissim Francez Technion
Bill MacCartney Aardvark
Chris Manning Stanford University
Larry Moss Indiana University
Annie Zaenen Palo Alto Research Center

Submission Details

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract describing recent, completed research (published or unpublished) dealing with this theme. Submissions should be formatted in PDF or plain ASCII text only, and should not exceed 10 pages.

Please send your submission electronically to:

lsm at cs.indiana.edu

by April 5, 2010. Submissions will be reviewed by the workshop's program committee and additional reviewers.

Accepted abstracts will be published on the web prior to the workshop. In addition, the organizers are investigating the possibility of a publication devoted to original papers on this topic.

Workshop Format

The workshop is part of NASSLLI and is open to all NASSLLI participants. It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days during NASSLLI. There will be 1-2 slots for paper presentation and discussion per session. On the first day the workshop will consist of introductory material on the topic.

Important Dates: