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Draft of the Expression of Interest Call:
Corpus-based distributional semantic models (such as LSA or HAL) capture many aspects of word meaning and they have been proposed as plausible simulations of some properties of how human semantic representation works.
However, evaluation of these models tend to focus on large scale quantitative tasks, often more oriented towards engineering applications (see, e.g., the recent SEMEVAL evaluation campaign) than towards the challenges from formal semantics, linguistic theory, philosophy and cognitive science.
Moreover, whereas human lexical semantic competence is obviously multi-faceted, ranging from free association to taxonomic judgments to relational effects, tests of distributional models tend to focus on a single aspect, and few if any models have been tuned to tackle different facets of semantics in an integrated manner.
Our workshop purports to fill these gaps by inviting single developers and research teams to test their models on a variety of small but carefully designed datasets, that aim to bring out linguistically and cognitively interesting aspects of semantics, including categorization tasks (e.g., classifying nouns into abstract and concrete or finding relational adjectives), extraction of salient properties, XXX ADD MORE TASK DESCRIPTIONS XXX
The focus is not on competition, but on understanding how different models highlight different semantic aspects, and how far we are from integrated models of all such aspects. To this effect, the annotated datasets will be distributed to the participants, that will be encouraged to explore them and highlight interesting aspects of their models' performance, perform error analysis, etc.
Theoretical and experimental papers related to the task datasets and simulation results are also invited.
Through collaborative preparatory work on the Word Space wiki (http://wordspace.collocations.de) and thanks to the ESSLLI multiple-day workshop format, we hope that this initiative will foster collaboration among the nascent community of researchers interested in computational semantics from a theoretical rather than applicative point of view.
We ask for expressions of interest from researchers and teams that might take part in the initiative and might want to have a say in test set design (a subsequent mail will provide deadlines for data-set creation and workshop submission.)
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