Special Track at the 18th International FLAIRS Conference In cooperation with the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

Goal

We define Natural Language based Knowledge Representation as a representation that is closer to NL as opposed to being more artificial. The intuition is that such representations will be more expressive, or at least borrow as much as possible from the expressiveness of NL. 

The goal of this Special Track is to re-assess the status of Natural Language (NL) based Knowledge Representations (KR) and systems. It was believed that NL-based KR systems would deliver representational and inferential properties of natural language but the hard issues in NL such as ambiguity, context-dependency and the complexity of syntax, semantics and pragmatics limited in the past the progress of building promising knowledge processing systems. 

Among the advantages of building NL-based KR systems are:

1. NL-based systems would be user friendly
2. Most human knowledge is encoded and transmitted via natural language and thus NL-based KR are a natural development 
3. searching on the Internet has become a necessity and a daily task for most of us; natural language is heavily used in this task since more than 90% of the web information is textual
4. NL-based knowledge processing sytems would provide a uniform symbolic representation for encoding knowledge and processing it
5. it is hard to match expressiveness and precision of natural language, particularly in not (well) formalized domains

Topics

We invite highly original papers that describe:

1. novel, expressive NL-based representations
2. multi-level representations
3. NL-based inference methods and reasoning engines
4. evaluation techniques for NL-based KR
5. challenges in NL-based representations and in deriving such representations from NL texts, especially how recent advances in NL technologies provide new opportunities for knowledge aquisition and processing
6. techniques for coreference resolution, word sense disambiguation, information extraction, predicate-argument structure, frame semantics, preposition semantics, syntactic parsing, named entity recognition, etc. and their impact on NL-based KR
7. NL-based KR in dialogue management
8. NL-based KR in Question/Query Answering
9. NL-based KR in auto tutoring systems 
10. NL-based KR in Information Retrieval
11. large knowledge bases construction using NL-based KR
12. scalability issues of systems built using NL-based KR
13. other related issues

Interested authors should format their papers according to AAAI formatting guidelines. The papers should not exceed 6 pages and are due by October 22, 2004. Please note the change from 5 to 6 pages from the first CFP. Additional pages (7 and more) have to be cleared by the program chairs and will be $100 each. The papers should not identify the author(s) in any manner. Authors should indicate the special track if one exists that closely matches the topic of their paper. All submissions will be done electronically via the FLAIRS web submission system available through the paper submission site at http://earth.cs.ccsu.edu/~flairs/submission.html. 

Conference Proceedings

Papers will be refereed and all accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings which will be published by AAAI Press.  Selected authors will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to a special issue of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT) to be published in 2006. 

Organizing Committee

Vasile Rus, The University of Memphis
Vivi Nastase, University of Ottawa

Programme Committee

Jerry Hobbs, USC/ISI
Andrew Gordon, USC/ICT
Art Graesser, University of Memphis
Bob Givan, Purdue University
Lucja Iwanska, Georgia Southwestern State University
Fernando Gomez, University of Central Florida
Susan Haller, University of Wisconsin - Parkside
Tudor Muresan, Technical University of Cluj
Stephen Anthony, University of Sydney
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University
Diana Inkpen, University of Ottawa
Zdravko Markov, Central Connecticut State University
Vasile Rus, The University of Memphis
Vivi Nastase, University of Ottawa
Boris Galitsky, University of London
David Ahn, University of Amsterdam
Valentin Jijkoun, University of Amsterdam
Max Louwerse, University of Memphis
Paul Morarescu, University of Texas at Dallas
Andrew Olney, Fedex Institute of Technology
Zygmunt Vetulani, Adam Mickiewicz University

Further Information

       Questions regarding the NL-based KR track should be addressed to the track co-chairs: 
       Vasile  Rus at  vrus@memphis.edu 
       Viviana Nastase at  vnastase@csi.uottawa.ca

       Questions regarding paper submission should be addressed to the FLAIRS-2005 program co-chairs: 
       Ingrid Russell, irussell@hartford.edu, University of Hartford 
       Zdravko Markov, markovz@ccsu.edu, Central Connecticut State University 

       General questions concerning the conference should be addressed to the FLAIRS-2005 conference co-chairs: 
       Diane Cook, University of Texas at Arlington
       Lawrence Holder, University of Texas at Arlington

       Special Tracks Coordinator
       Todd Neller, Gettysburg College

Invited Speakers

Lawrence Hunter, University of Colorado
Martha Pollack, University of Michigan
Ted Senator, DARPA
David Stork, Ricoh and Stanford University

Conference Web Sites

       Paper submission site: http://earth.cs.ccsu.edu/~flairs/submission.html 
       NL-based KR special track web page: http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~vrus/flairs05.html
       FLAIRS-2005 conference web page: http://www.flairs.com 
       Florida AI Research Society (FLAIRS): http://www.flairs.com