Subject: lexical semantics in context : corpus , inference and discourse

esslli-98 workshop on lexical semantics in context : corpus , inference and discourse august 17 - 21 , 1998 a workshop held as part of the 10th european summer school in logic , language and information ( esslli-98 ) august 17 - 28 , 1998 , saarbruecken , germany * * second call for papers * * organizers : johan bos ( saarbruecken ) and paul buitelaar ( brandeis university ) the workshop aims at bringing together research in two complementary fields of semantic analysis that are still too far apart . in order to achieve both a broad and a deep understanding of any given text document , a system needs both advanced acquisition of corpus specific lexical semantic knowledge and powerful inference mechanisms that utilize that knowledge in discourse analysis . given the still relatively limited results within both areas there has been little impetus to combine them . corpus - based extraction of lexical semantic knowledge has only recently become a more feasible task , because of the growing availibility of on-line text documents ; robust corpus processing technologies , such as broad coverage part-of - speech tagging and shallow parsing ; and readily available statistical methods . the various approaches to discourse analysis , originating in such diverse fields as formal semantics , psychology and ai , are in the process of converging into a unified approach to the analysis and representation of the cohesive structure of natural language documents . the intersection between these two fields lies in the application of lexical semantic knowledge to such problems in discourse analysis as anaphora resolution and discourse segmentation . in fact , the benefit will be mutual , because knowledge of discourse structure is helpful to lexical knowledge extraction as well . in summary , large scale domain specific lexical semantic knowledge acquisition can assist in analyzing discourse structures , which in turn can assist in acquiring even more accurate lexical semantic representations for the relevant terms in the domain . further information : to obtain further information please visit the workshop home page at http : / / www . cs . brandeis . edu / ~ paulb / esslli98 . html
