From radicion at di.unito.it Fri Feb 9 16:35:33 2018 From: radicion at di.unito.it (daniele radicioni) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2018 16:35:33 +0100 Subject: [iaoa-general] Special Issue of the Journal of Applied Ontology "Meaning in Context: ontologically and linguistically motivated representations of objects and events." Message-ID: <3FBF4209-BF12-4AFE-8ABF-1F783010DCC5@di.unito.it> (Apologies for cross posting) Special Issue of the Journal of Applied Ontology "Meaning in Context: ontologically and linguistically motivated representations of objects and events." https://submissions.iospress.com/applied-ontology/CIM Overview Dealing with context is a key factor in the conceptualization of human experience, and a major issue for understanding natural language. It is well known that some properties of objects and events may have different cognitive salience according to their context of occurrence, thus determining access to partial relevant information rather than to all information. One typical example 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. Interpreting events poses contextual challenges as well: (in how far) does a given event allow for different interpretations, like it might happen for revenge/self defense? Similar selectional mechanisms underlie figurative uses of word meanings, such as metonymy and metaphors among others, that intrinsically characterize the interface between knowledge and language. Contextual access to objects and events needs to be further investigated, shared conceptualizations and terminologies are needed, as well as more robust approaches, including connections to domain and formal ontologies. The design of ontological and linguistic resources that account for the semantic phenomena involved in the contextual interpretation of objects and events requires collecting information and devising context-aware procedures. In an era where most research is committed to statistical approaches, e.g. vector representations of the linguistic context and neural architectures, pairing the natural language semantic interpretation process and formal ontology may improve the inferential capacities of artificial agents with the explanatory power that is less relevant in those mainstream approaches. Methods traditionally adopted to elaborate text documents exhibit limitations in representing and processing objects and events. Many efforts are being put in grasping text documents? semantics based on semantically shallow approaches, whilst natural language inference demands for deep interpretation models, allowing to handle properties, functions, and roles, among others, to deal with commonsense and to produce explanations. A different approach relies on lexical information: several large-scale lexical resources, such as WordNet (https://wordnet.princeton.edu), BabelNet (http://babelnet.org), FrameNet (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/), and ImagAct (http://imagact.lablita.it/index.php?lang=en), among others, have been proposed in the last few years and have been successfully employed to bridge the gap between knowledge representations and natural language. However, to cope with contextual access to objects and events involves many additional features still lacking in such resources. Neither shallow representations of NL semantics nor lexical resources alone provide sufficient ground to account for contextual phenomena. Relevant areas include, but are not limited to: events representation and retrieval, event sequences, contextual features representation, trend detection, knowledge discovery, word sense disambiguation, ontology alignment, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, and conceptual similarity, among others. All proposed approaches must address the issue of representation of context, and suitable procedures to use context and context aware meaning representations of objects and events. The ideal submission should provide evidence that context improves the performance of systems on real-world applications and/or provides useful insights and explanations on systems? output. Topics of Interest Research works submitted to the special issue should foster scientific advances whether and to what extent objects and events representation and processing can be linked to the context where they occur. The following is a tentative list of relevant topics: - 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 objects/events representation and processing; - linguistic approaches to context analysis; - context-aware lexical resources to describe objects and events; - context-aware topic and event detection and tracking, knowledge discovery; - context-aware frame semantics; - entity linking and word sense disambiguation; - representation of context in the Semantic Web; - surveys on the adoption of contextual information in Cognitive Science, NLP and Ontological Modeling; - context-based explainable Artificial Intelligence. Timeline - Manuscript Submission Deadline: July 23rd 2018; - Acceptance Notification: November 26th 2018; - Final Manuscript Due: February 26th 2019. Submission Guidelines Submission guidelines can be found on the Journal Site, https://www.iospress.nl/journal/applied-ontology/?tab=submission-of-manuscripts This special issue welcomes original high-quality contributions that have been neither published in nor submitted to any journals or refereed conferences. Extended versions of (properly referenced) conference papers should include at least 30% of new material. Please, clearly specify in the cover letter that the paper is to be considered for the special issue on "Meaning in Context: ontologically and linguistically motivated representations of objects and events." Guest Editors Valerio Basile, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, basile at di.uniroma1.it Tommaso Caselli, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, t.caselli at rug.nl Daniele P. Radicioni, University of Turin, Italy, radicion at di.unito.it : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : Daniele Radicioni, PhD Department of Computer Science University of Turin Corso Svizzera, 185 10149 - Torino phone: +39 011 6706802 fax: +39 011 751603 http://www.di.unito.it/~radicion From Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it Sat Feb 17 11:16:46 2018 From: Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it (Kutz Oliver) Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 10:16:46 +0000 Subject: [iaoa-general] CFP: 10th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2018), September 17-21, 2018, Cape Town, South Africa Message-ID: 10th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) 2018, September 17-21, 2018, Cape Town, South Africa http://fois2018.cs.uct.ac.za/ http://www.iaoa.org/fois/2018.html ----------------------------------- DEFINITION AND SCOPE ----------------------------------- The advent of complex information systems which rely on robust, coherent and formal representations of their subject matter, led in the last 25 years to the exploitation of ontological analysis and ontology-based representation. The systematic study of such representations, their axiomatics, their corresponding reasoning techniques and their relations to cognition and reality, are at the center of the modern discipline of formal ontology. Formal ontology is now a research focus in such diverse domains as conceptual modeling, database design, knowledge engineering, software engineering, organizational modeling, artificial intelligence, robotics, computational linguistics, the life sciences, bioinformatics, geographic information science, information retrieval, and the Semantic Web. Researchers in all these areas increasingly recognize the need for serious engagement with ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations making up their respective domains of enquiry, to provide a solid foundation for their work. The FOIS conference is a meeting point for researchers from all disciplines with an interest in formal ontology. The conference encourages submission of new and high quality articles on both theoretical issues and concrete applications. As in previous years, FOIS 2018 is intended as a nexus of interdisciplinary research and communication. FOIS is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA, website: http://iaoa.org/), which is a non-profit organization aiming to promote interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information-systems development, library and information science, scientific research, and semantic technologies in general. ------------------------------ SATELLITE ACTIVITIES ------------------------------ FOIS 2018 includes a number of additional activities: http://fois2018.cs.uct.ac.za/?page_id=54 + a call for workshops (deadline: March 2, see link above) + a call for tutorials (deadline: March 2, see link above) + a young researchers symposium, + a demo and industry track + an ontology competition FOIS is preceded by the 4th Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology: http://isao2018.cs.uct.ac.za/ ------------------------------ SCOPE OF FOIS - TOPICS OF INTEREST ------------------------------ We seek high-quality papers on a wide range of topics. Concerning scope, an ideal FOIS paper will address both content-related ontological issues and their formal modeling, as well as their impact and relevance for some aspects of information systems. Areas of particular interest to the conference include the following: Foundational Issues * Kinds of entities: particulars/universals, continuants/occurrents, abstracta/concreta, dependent entities/independent entities, natural objects/artifacts * Formal relations: parthood, identity, connection, dependence, constitution, causality, subsumption, instantiation * Vagueness and granularity * Space, time, and change Methodological issues * Top-level vs. domain-specific ontologies * Role of reference ontologies * Ontology integration and alignment * Formal comparison among ontologies * Relationship with cognition, language, semantics, context Domain-specific ontologies * Ontology of physical reality (matter, space, time, motion etc.) * Ontology of biological reality (organisms, genes, proteins, cells etc.) * Ontology of mental reality and agency (beliefs, intentions, emotions, perceptions etc.) * Ontology of artifacts, functions, capacities and roles * Ontology of social reality (institutions, organizations, norms, social relationships, artistic expressions etc.) Applications: * Ontology-driven information systems design * Ontological foundations for conceptual modeling * Knowledge management * Qualitative modeling * Computational linguistics * Information retrieval * Semantic Web, Web services * Business modeling * Ontologies for particular scientific disciplines (biology, chemistry, geography, physics, cognitive sciences, linguistics etc.) * Ontologies for engineering: shape, form and function, artifacts, manufacturing, design, architecture etc. * Ontologies for the humanities: arts, cultural studies, history, law, literature, philosophy etc. ----------------------------- FORMAT ----------------------------- Submitted papers must not exceed 14 pages (including the bibliography) and must include an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers should be submitted non-anonymously in PDF format (template from the FOIS website). The Easychair submission page can be found at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fois2018 The proceedings will be published by IOS Press in electronic format with permanent open access. ----------------------------- IMPORTANT DATES ----------------------------- *Call for papers Paper Submission Deadline: 13 April 2018 Notification: 30 May 2018 Camera-ready papers: 24 June 2018 Conference Dates: 17-21 September 2018 *Call for workshops/tutorials Proposal Submission: 2 March 2018 Notification: 15 March 2018 -------------------------------------------- CONFERENCE ORGANISATION -------------------------------------------- General Chair: Oliver Kutz (KRDB, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy) Program Chairs: Stefano Borgo (Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC CNR Trento IT) Pascal Hitzler (Data Semantics (DaSe) Laboratory, Wright State University, USA) Local Organization: Maria Keet (University of Cape Town, South Africa) From Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it Sat Feb 17 11:29:00 2018 From: Oliver.Kutz at unibz.it (Kutz Oliver) Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 10:29:00 +0000 Subject: [iaoa-general] Call for Workshop and Tutorial Proposals, JOWO @ FOIS 2018 Cape Town Message-ID: <5663C862-64D4-4E94-9028-FDC89DD2FC30@unibz.it> JOWO @ FOIS 2018 Cape Town Call for Workshop and Tutorial Proposals http://www.iaoa.org/jowo2018/ * JOWO at FOIS Workshop and Tutorials proposals deadline: March 2, 2018 * * Reminder: FOIS paper submission deadline: April 13, 2018 * The International Association for Ontology and its Applications, IAOA, invites proposals for workshops and tutorials for the 4th Joint Ontology Workshops, JOWO 2018, to be held in conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Formal Ontology and Information Systems (FOIS 2018) in Cape Town, South Africa, on September 17-21, 2018 (http://fois2018.cs.uct.ac.za/). Workshops and tutorials at JOWO 2018 are events whose scientific program is independently established by the workshop organizer. The workshop organizers will be responsible for advertising the workshop and reviewing and selecting the contributions. Workshops can be events that provide a forum for the discussion of topics that may complement the main conference or focus on specialized sub-topics related to formal ontology and its application in information systems. We specifically invite proposals by IAOA Special Interest Groups and Technical Committees. Previous JOWO editions were held in 2017 in Bolzano (Italy), in conjunction with FOIS 2016 in Annecy (France), and at IJCAI 2015 in Buenos Aires (Argentina). As in earlier years, all contributions to JOWO workshops will be published in a joint CEUR proceedings volume, together with the contributions to the Early Career Symposium. JOWO 2015: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1517/ JOWO 2016: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1660/ JOWO 2017: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2050/ Together, the JOWO workshops address a wide spectrum of topics related to ontology research, ranging from Cognitive Science to Knowledge Representation, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Logic, Philosophy, and Linguistics. JOWO is especially suitable for interdisciplinary and innovative formats. Researchers and practitioners interested in the theory, practice, development and/or application of ontologies are invited to submit workshop proposals for review. We encourage several forms and length of workshops (the list is non-exhaustive): - workshops that focus on an established research area, including continuations of workshops that were already held in the past; - workshops that focus on emerging topics and applications, or on open research questions and challenges; - workshops that aim to create cross-disciplinary research fostering exchange of ideas between groups otherwise mostly disconnected. SUBMISSION Proposals for workshops and tutorials should be no more than 2 pages in length, and must contain the following information: - title of the workshop/tutorial; - names of the workshop/tutorial organizers; - brief description of experience in workshop/tutorial organization; - description of the workshop/tutorial topic; - brief statement on the relation and relevance of the workshop to FOIS; - intended duration of the workshop (half-day, full-day); - timeline for the workshop (submission dates, notification dates), taking into account the notification date of FOIS and the proposed Workshop Submission Deadline. Workshop proposals should be sent to jowoworkshops2018 at gmail.com by March 2, 2018. EVALUATION Submissions for workshop proposals will be evaluated by members of the FOIS organizing and program committee, using the following criteria: - Scientific relevance and utility to attendees; - Quality of the proposal; - Likelihood of success of the workshop; - Complementarity with FOIS and overlap with other workshops. IMPORTANT DATES - March 2, 2018 - Proposal submission deadline - March 19, 2018 - Acceptance notification - March 26, 2018 - JOWO at FOIS workshops and events announced - April 13, 2018 - FOIS paper submission deadline - May 30, 2018 - Notification for submissions to FOIS main conference - June 18, 2018 - Recommended submission deadline for workshop contributions (after notification for FOIS submissions) - Sept 17-21, 2018 - FOIS 2018 in Cape Town - Sept 17-18, 2018 - JOWO 2018 @ FOIS - Sept 19-21, 2018 - FOIS 2018 main conference FURTHER INQUIRIES In case of further questions please contact the JOWO chairs via: jowoworkshops2018 at gmail.com CONFERENCE ORGANISATION JOWO 2018 Chairs: Ludger Jansen, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany Daniele P. Radicioni, University of Torino, Italy FOIS General Chair: Oliver Kutz, University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy FOIS Program Chairs: Stefano Borgo Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento, Italy Pascal Hitzler, Data Semantics Laboratory, Wright State University, USA Proceedings Chair: Dagmar Gromann, Technical University Dresden, Germany FOIS Local Organization: Maria Keet, University of Cape Town, South Africa FOIS Publicity: Karl Hammar, J?nk?ping University, Sweden FOIS Early Career Symposium: Emilio Sanfilippo, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento, Italy Maria Hedblom, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany Zubeida Khan, University of Cape Town, South Africa