CREOL aims at gathering together researchers from different communities (Applied Ontology, NLP, AI, Semantic Web) to investigate the relationship between representations of objects and events in ontological and linguistic resources, and their interpretation in their context of occurrence.
Dealing with context is a key factor in the conceptualization of human experience, and thus a major issue for understanding natural language. It is well known that some properties of objects and events may be activated according to the context of occurrence, thus determining access to partial salient information rather than to all information. One typical case involving objects is that of an orange being passed between two children, or the same orange peeled on a table: in the former case the roundness prevails over other traits, and the orange is being used to play; in the latter one, the edible features are those mostly conveyed by the scene.
Similar and higher plasticity associated to contextual features also characterizes events. Events are complex entities by nature, and representing and extracting them from textual documents is not a trivial task. Existing lexical resources encode very basic information on events: their linguistic realisation, roles of participants, and types. Additional properties of events are currently missing: duration of events, event internal substructure, event pre- and post- situations, relations to other events in terms of explanatory/causal and temporal relations. These properties which are essential to promote reasoning on events and their participants may vary according to the specific context of occurrence in a text/document.
Contextual access to objects and events needs to be investigated at its interface with language. The design of ontological and linguistic resources that account for the mentioned semantic phenomena involves collecting contextual information and devising context-aware procedures.
Presentation Mode
- Regular papers (up to ten pages of content and two pages for references): oral presentation.
- Short papers (up to six pages of content and two pages for references): either oral presentation or as poster presentation.
- Extended abstracts (up to four pages of content and two pages for references): they will be presented in a 3 minute pitch. The presentations will be followed by a multi-centric panel session where authors will meet and discuss with other researchers and stakeholders from industry. Follow-up discussions will be organized to promote project networking, cross-contamination on methodological prospective approaches and techniques, and discussions over practical, individuated applications.
All sorts of contributions will appear in the CREOL proceedings, which will be published by the CEUR publisher. Top-ranked papers will be considered for an extended version for a special journal issue.
Application Areas
Contributions will be solicited that cover a variety of topics including but not limited to:
- theoretical foundations for the use of AI techniques to deal with context and with changing/evolving objects and events;
- KR frameworks to represent mutable/evolving objects and events, including formal ontologies, conceptual spaces and distributed representations;
- formal methods for reasoning in evolving scenarios;
- theoretical, methodological, experimental, and application-oriented aspects of knowledge engineering and knowledge management centered on events and evolving objects;
- use cases and application scenarios (e.g., in law, medicine) where contextual information impacts on concepts/events representation and processing;
- linguistic approaches to context analysis;
- context-aware lexical resources to describe events;
- context-aware topic and event detection and tracking, knowledge discovery;
- context-aware frame semantics;
- entity linking, keyword linking, word sense disambiguation.