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     Human Language Technology for the Semantic Web and Web Services
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			 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

			  Workshop at ISWC 2003
		  International Semantic Web Conference
			 Sanibel Island, Florida
		           20th October 2003

			   Hamish Cunningham
			    Atanas Kiryakov
			       Ying Ding


This workshop will cover a wide range of hot-off-the-press work in the
application of language processing technology to the Semantic Web and to
Semantic Web Services. The programme ranges from commercial systems to
leading-edge research and offers an opportunity for researchers in this
field to discuss recent ideas and results.

The workshop is organised as part of ISWC 2003, and will be held in the
attractive resort of Sanibel Island, Florida, on the 20th October.

The fee for the workshop will be $50. Participants will be required to
register for the main ISWC2003 conference.
REGISTER HERE.

Endorsed by...

GATE




---------- PROGRAMME ------------------------------------------------------

 9.15 Introduction: H. Cunningham
 9.30 Towards Semantic Web Information Extraction; B. Popov...
10.15 Axiomatizing WordNet Glosses in the OntoWordNet Project; A. Gangemi...
11.00 Coffee		
11.30 A Natural Language Mediation System for E-commerce; J. Heinecke...
12.05 Multi-strategy Definition of Annotation Services in Melita; F.Ciravegna...
12.40 Towards a Language Infrastructure for the Semantic Web: P. Buitelaar...
 1.00 Lunch		
14.00 Making Explicit the Semantics Hidden in Schema Models; B. Magnini...
14.45 Poster session (incorporating coffee, 15.00 to 15.30)		
15.30 Automatic Extraction of Knowledge from Web Documents; H. Alani...
16.10 The Semantic Web: A New Opportunity and Challenge for HLT; K. Bontcheva...
16.50 Talking OWLs: Towards an Ontology Verbalizer: G. Wilcock
17.15 Discussion (chair: P. Buitelaar)
18.00 Close		

Posters:		
Combining Data Integration with Natural Language Technology for the
  Semantic Web: D. Williams et al.
OntoGenie: Extracting Ontology Instances from the WWW: C. Patel et al.


---------- CALL FOR PAPERS ------------------------------------------------

The Semantic Web aims to add a machine tractable, re-purposeable layer to 
compliment the existing web of natural language hypertext. In order to 
realise this vision, the creation of semantic annotation, the linking of 
web pages to ontologies, and the creation, evolution and interrelation of 
ontologies must become automatic or semi-automatic processes.
 
In the context of new work on distributed computation, Semantic Web 
Services (SWSs) go beyond current services by adding ontologies and 
formal knowledge to support description, discovery, negotiation, mediation 
and composition. This formal knowledge is often strongly related to 
informal materials. For example, a service for multi-media content 
delivery over broadband networks might incorporate conceptual indices of 
the content, so that a smart VCR (such as next generation TiVO) can reason 
about programmes to suggest to its owner. Alternatively, a service for B2B 
catalogue publication has to translate between existing semi-structured 
catalogues and the more formal catalogues required for SWS purposes. To 
make these types of services cost-effective we need automatic knowledge 
harvesting from all forms of content that contain natural language text or 
spoken data.
 
Other services do not have this close connection with informal content, or 
will be created from scratch using Semantic Web authoring tools. For 
example, printing or compute cycle or storage services. In these cases the 
opposite need is present: to document services for the human reader using 
natural language generation.
 
This workshop will provide a forum for workers in the field of human 
language technology for the Semantic Web and for Semantic Web Services to 
present their latest results. The aim is to provide a snapshot of the 
state of the art, dealing with a wide range of issues, including but not 
limited to:

  * automatic and semi-automatic annotation of web pages;
  * semantic indexing and retrieval of documents, combining the strengths 
    of IE and IR;
  * integration of data about language in language processing components 
    with ontological data;
  * robustness across genres and domains;
  * ease of embedding in Semantic Web applications;
  * ontology learning, evolving and merging;
  * automatic web service description augmentation;
  * automatic semantic structure documentation;
  * language technology for automatic Web service discovery;
  * adaptation of generation techniques to SWS applications.

The themes of the workshop have partly emerged from the Special Interest 
Group on Language Technologies and the Semantic Web (SIG5), part of the 
OntoWeb thematic network (http://ontoweb-lt.dfki.de/). 
 

---------- AUDIENCE -------------------------------------------------------


The issues addressed by the workshop are at the core of the Semantic Web 
enterprise. The killer applications that demonstrate the potential of this 
technology to a mass market have yet to emerge, and will likely not do so 
until a much larger amount of data is available. The techniques covered by 
this workshop are one of the most important routes to generating this 
data. The workshop is relevant to:
  * researchers from the Human Language Technology areas;
  * researchers from the Ontology and Knowledge Acquisition and Management 
    areas;
  * industrial technology providers involved in Knowledge Management, 
    Information Integration, Information and Library Science, Web Services.


---------- ORGANIZING COMMITTEE -------------------------------------------
 
Hamish Cunningham - http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish
Atanas Kiryakov - http://www.sirma.bg/ak.htm
Ying Ding - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ying


---------- PROGRAMME COMMITTEE --------------------------------------------

Alexander Maedche, Robert Bosch Gmbh, Germany
Aldo Gangemi, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Italy
Asun Gomez-Perez, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Christopher A. Welty, IBM Watson Research Center, USA
David Harper, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK
Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, UK
Dieter Fensel, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Dieter Merkl, TU Vienna, Austria
Fabio Crestani, University of Strathclyde, UK
Jan Paralic, Technical University Kosice, Slovakia
John Davies, British Telecom, UK
Valentin Tablan, University of Sheffield, UK
John Tait, University of Sunderland, UK
Jon Patrick, Univeristy of Sydney, Australia
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
Maria Vargas-Vera, Open University, UK
Marin Dimitrov, OntoText Lab, Bulgaria
Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, GE
Robert Engels, CognIT, Norway
Steffen Staab, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Vojtech Svatek, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Wim Peters, University of Sheffield, UK
York Sure, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, UK

NLP group