The Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing:
Paraphrase Acquisition and Applications (IWP2003)
post-conference workshop(WS5) in conjunction with
ACL2003
Sapporo, Japan, July 11, 2003.
A common characteristic of human languages is the possibility to convey the same information in several ways. Paraphrases, which in the literature have also been referred to as variants, reformulations, or inference rules, span a wide range of variation:
| article | paper / publication |
| Oswald killed Kennedy. | Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald. |
| a plant in Alabama | the Alabama plant |
| Edison invented the light bulb. | Edison's invention of the light bulb |
| He plays better than everybody else in the team. | He's the best in the team. |
| The tree healed its wounds by growing new bark. | The tree healed its wounds. It grew new bark. |
| The stapler costs $10. | The price of the stapler is $10. |
| Where is Thimphu located? | Thimphu is the capital of what country? |
This diversity of expression presents a major challenge for many NLP applications. Thus, automatic paraphrase identification and generation can benefit a broad range of NLP tasks, including machine translation, summarization, information retrieval, question answering, generation, and authoring and reading assistance.
Previous workshops on paraphrasing:
The workshop will be open to any research topic related to paraphrases. More specifically, topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
The increased availability of parallel corpora and comparable corpora has opened up possibilities for automatic paraphrase acquisition. As we have recently witnessed, a number of new methods for paraphrase extraction have emerged.
The availability of appropriate evaluation techniques is a key part of a progress in the area. Is it possible to create a common benchmark for evaluating different paraphrase extraction approaches? On which terms should different acquisition approaches be compared? How can we define the notion of baseline?
Another important objective of the workshop is to take a first step towards a standardized paraphrase resource that could be shared among a large variety of researchers.
"SOMETHING_1 costs MONETARY_QUANTITY_2"Such a resource, with possibly tens of thousands of entries such as the one above (in one format or another), can be viewed as a valuable extension of WordNet and holds great promise to advance many areas of natural language processing.
:is-equivalent-to "the price of SOMETHING_1 is MONETARY_QUANTITY_2"
:can-be-inferred-from "to sell SOMETHING_1 for MONETARY_QUANTITY_2"
Paper submissions must be anonymous and are limited to at most 8 pages including references, figures etc. Authors are encouraged (but not required) to use the ACL style format of the main conference. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Please email your submission in pdf (preferred), postscript, or MS Word to the following address:
Each submission should also specify the author's name, affiliation, postal address, email address and title in the body of the email message. For more information, please make contact with the workshop co-chairs: Kentaro Inui (inui@is.aist-nara.ac.jp) and/or Ulf Hermjakob (ulf@isi.edu).
| Paper submission deadline: | April 21, 2003 |
| Notification of acceptance: | May 14, 2003 |
| Camera ready manuscripts due: | May 26, 2003 |
| Workshop date: | July 11, 2003 |
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