CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION _______________________________________ Ontologies and texts Workshop during the EKAW'2000 conference Juans-Les-Pins (France), October 2nd 2000 http://www.irit.fr/wsontologies2000 Ontology design remains a difficult and challenging problem. Most of the current research studies and papers focus on the technical problems raised by the representation and structuring of knowledge in the ontology. Many works are also devoted to the problem of formalization and reusability of ontologies. More recently, new interests bore on the influence of the target application on the task of designing an ontology. In this workshop, we concentrate on ontology design considered as a process stemming from knowledge sources to a structured conceptual model. Among all knowledge sources (human experts, existing ontologies and texts), we pay special interest to texts (technical documentation, interview transcripts, handbooks and so on). We claim that texts are an important source of knowledge for any kind of application, in particular because most of the texts contain shared and stabilized knowledge among a community of specialists. Moreover, NLP tools are mature enough to be worth being integrated in knowledge engineering methods. Available linguistics results (principles and techniques) are also relevant for building semantic networks and ontologies from texts. In spite of such potential values, knowledge acquisition from texts for ontology design is hardly studied. We assert that text analysis could significantly improve the efficiency of the process of ontology building, as well as the quality and the relevance of the resulting ontologies. We wish to stress that knowledge engineering is ready to face a major evolution by integrating texts as knowledge sources and mainly by giving a new status to concepts and linguistic data. Our aim is to discuss these assertions within the community as long as several teams have been experiencing practical work in ontology design and theoritical reflexions on the topic for many years. Technical and theoretical issues to be discussed at the workshop include, but are not limited to: Texts as knowledge sources - What kind of knowledge can be acquired from which class of texts ? shared and stabilized domain knowledge versus individual know-how - Complementarity of analysing texts, interviewing domain experts and reusing existing ontologies - The expert's role in a text centered view : from experts' knowledge elicitation to model validation by domain specialists. - Typology of data that can be acquired from these knowledge sources, their status and role in a domain model or an ontology. Linguistic resources for ontology design - Mixing textual or linguistic information and conceptual information in ontologies : should a conceptual model always include a linguistic dimension ? - Connections between texts and conceptual models, texts and ontologies - The nature of the term-concept relation ; justifications of a concept definition. - The status of linguistics in knowledge engineering. - What kind of linguistics is needed ? Conceptual semantics vs. textual semantics. Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools - What kinds of NLP tools can prove useful ? - How much should they be adapted to match the needs of knowledge acquisition and ontology design ? How is the use of these tools influenced by the target application ? - How to define and select the data they should apply on ? - How to combine their use with the purpose of conceptual modelling and ontology design ? - Role and limitations of general lexical resources (like WordNet) vs. specific terminological resources (like Terminological Knowledge Bases, thesaurus and so on) Call for papers --------------- Papers should be no longer than 2500 words. They can either report research works, practical experiments or discuss more theoretical questions. Papers will be published in paper-back proceedings distributed to the workshop participants and available on-line the week before the worskhop. Please use the same format as the one suggested for the conference. Send papers by email (html AND ps files) to Brigitte BIEBOW (bb@lipn.univ-paris13.fr) and Sylvie SZULMAN (ss@lipn.univ-paris13.fr) before July 7th Participation conditions ------------------------- Anyone wishing to take part in this workshop should send a one page abstract about its motivations to attend the workshop and/or its recent works related to the workshop topic. This page should also contain a question-issue to be debated during the workshop. Send your text to Nathalie AUSSENAC-GILLES (aussenac@irit.fr) before September 18th. Calendar ------------- Paper submissions : July, 7th Acceptance information : August, 28th Motivation texts : Sept, 18th Final paper : Sept, 21st Scientific Organisation -------------------------------- This workshop is promoted by the French working group on Terminology and Artificial Intelligence (TIA) (web site : http://www.biomath.jussieu.fr/TIA) to which the chairwomen belong. Most of the issues mentionned as topics reflect the group scientific debates and orientations. Workshop chairs : Sylvie SZULMAN (LIPN, Paris) Brigitte BIEBOW (LIPN, Paris) Nathalie AUSSENAC-GILLES (IRIT - CNRS, Toulouse) Local organisation -------------------------- Rose DIENG (INRIA Sophia Antipolis) Olivier CORBY (INRIA Sophia Antipolis) http://sophia.inria.fr/EKAW2000 Program Committee (provisional list) ----------------------------- Nathalie AUSSENAC-GILLES (IRIT - CNRS, Toulouse, F) Richard BENJAMINS (Univ. Amsterdam, NL) Brigitte BIEBOW (LIPN, Paris, F) Rose DIENG (INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, F) Dieter FENSEL (Vrije Universiteit, NL) Asuncion GOMEZ PEREZ (UPM, Madrid, S) Gregory GREFENSTETTE (Xerox Research Center Europe, Meylan, F) (to be confirmed) Nicola GUARINO (Italian National Research Council, I) Udo HAN (Frieburg University, G) Adeline NAZARENKO (LIPN, Paris, F) Roberto BASILI (University Tor Vergata, Roma, I) (to be confirmed) François ROUSSELOT (LIIA, Strasbourg, F) Douglas SKUCE (Univ. of Ottawa, Can) (to be confirmed) Sylvie SZULMAN (LIPN - CNRS, Paris) Michael USCHOLD (Boeing, USA) Gertjan Van HEIJST (Kenniscentrum CIBIT, Utrecht, NL) Bernard VICTORRI (ENS , Paris, F) Registration information ---------------------------------- -- Sylvie Szulman | tel : +33/(0) 1 49 40 36 09 LIPN - Universite Paris 13 | fax : +33/(0) 1 48 26 07 12 av. J.-B. Clement | email : sylvie.szulman@lipn.univ-paris13.fr F-93430 Villetaneuse | http : //www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/membres/~szulman