Call for Paper: Special Issue on NLP in the Web Era

Call for paper

Special issue on
Natural Language Processing in the Web Era

Intelligenza Artificiale, Volume 6.2, scheduled for December 2012

Guest editors: Roberto Basili and Bernardo Magnini

THEMES

Natural Language is still the main carrier for the definition, synthesis and exchange of knowledge in the real world,
and this is entirely reflected in the Web contents. Although the growing levels of integration, multichannel and
modalities of the information made available in the current Web, thus including the Social Web bodies of resources,
the central role of language in e-mails, blogs, twits as well as multimedia pages cannot be denied.
Notice that even for pictures, videos or audio information (including news or artistic materials) natural language is
crucial in the annotation, explanation and delivery processes.

Unfortunately, the increase in volumes also corresponds to a growing complexity in terms of needs,
phenomena and applications. While social media often introduce specific sublanguages that are still largely
unexplored by current language processing tools, the pervasive noise and incompleteness that characterize
real documents in blogs, forums or SMS channels also amplify requirements such as coverage and robustness
of the NLP technology. On the other side, while knowledge representation technologies require massive amount
of Web data to be traced, linked and semantically harmonized, this enterprise is tightly bound by the quality
of the linguistic interpretation capabilities that the underlying integration systems can exhibit. Finally, the forms
of information retrieval, exchange and sharing used commonly by large communities of Social Web users
are such that the semantic management of smaller text units is crucially needed. Specific tasks, such as
personalized document management or context-aware search in mobile applications are strongly tight to the
interpretation of fine-grain phenomena, such as questions, short queries or twits. In these large scale distributed
scenarios multilinguality is also an issue for language processing technologies.

The above challenges and the topics related to research advances in this area are all central to this special issue.
Original research papers as well as surveys of on-going work in specific sectors are welcomed.
The aim is to provide to researchers both in the academic and industrial sectors a comprehensive picture of a
largely multidisciplinary field. We are soliciting contributions related to the following, not exhaustive, set of themes:

– Semantic Web. Language processing for open linked data. Linguistic approaches to Ontology Learning, Reconciliation
and Population. Language Processing for Ontology Engineering. Semantic Web applications with explicit language
processing components.
– Search. Question Answering. Lexical Semantic approaches to Intelligent Web Search. Semantic search.
Enterprise Search. The use of Lexical Resources for Knowledge Search in the Web.
– Language and Learning. Computational Natural Language Learning from Web data. Machine Learning methods,
models and algorithms for treating linguistic information implicit in Web data. Advanced Supervised learning for NLP.
Semi-supervised and Unsupervised approaches for NLP over the Web.
– Web, Linguistic Resources and Knowledge Acquisition. Wikipedia-based knowledge acquisition. Machine
Reading from Web sources. Web-scale Information Extraction.
– Multimodality. Human-Computer Interfaces. Speech and Language based interface. Multimodal Interaction.
Digital assistants. Language-based Mobile and Web applications.
– Social media. New languages of the Social Web. Linguistic Treatment of Social Web data. Special-purpose
lexical and grammatical models for Web 2.0 languages.
Folksonomies and Language Processing. Lexical knowledge and Cloud Tags.
– Sentiment Analysis, Emotion Modeling and Recommending. Language Processing approaches to
Opinion Analysis. Emotional computing. Digital Advertisement and Persuasion.

PRELIMINARY REVIEWING COMMITTEE

Marie Helene Candito, Universite Paris 7
Philipp Cimiano, University of Bielefeld
Rodolfo Delmonte, University of Venice
Gregory Grefenstette, 3DS Exalead, France
Iryna Gurevych, University of Darmstadt
Leonardo Lesmo, University of Turin
Rutu Mulkar-Mehta, University of California, San Diego
Guenter Neumann, DFKI, Germany
Sergei Nirenburg, University of Maryland
Massimo Poesio, University of Trento, Italy
German Rigau, University of the Basque Country
Frederique Segond, Viseo, France
Giovanni Semeraro, University of Bari
Anne Vilnat, Limsi, France
Yorick Wilks, Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition

IMPORTANT DATES

– Deadline for submission: June 15th, 2012
– List of papers selected: July 30th , 2012
– Deadline for camera ready papers: September 15th 2012
– Publication: December 2012

THE JOURNAL

Intelligenza Artificiale (http://www.iospress.nl/journal/intelligenza-artificiale/), edited by IOS Press, is the official
journal of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA). Intelligenza Artificiale publishes rigorously reviewed articles
(in English) in all areas of Artificial Intelligence, with a special attention to original contributions. It also publish assessments
of the state of the art in various areas of AI, and innovative system descriptions with appropriate evaluation.

PRACTICAL ISSUES

Contributions (around 15 pages, PDF format) should be sent by email to the two guest editors,
Bernardo Magnini (magnini@fbk.eu) and Roberto Basili (basili@info.uniroma2.it).

Detailed submission instructions are available on the Web site of the journal:
http://www.iospress.nl/journal/intelligenza-artificiale/.
The journal only publishes original contributions in English.

Web site: http://ai-nlp.info.uniroma2.it/basili/NLPiWE/SpecialIssueOnNLP_in_the_Web_era_CFP.html