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8th International Conference on Terminology and Artificial Intelligence - Toulouse (France), November 18-20, 2009

 

 

 


Foreword

Rose Dieng, former Director of Research at INRIA and organizer of TIA'07 in Nice, was an active and dynamic member of the TIA group from its early days and a driving force behind the continuation of the TIA conference series. Rose passed away on June 30, 2008, and will be sadly missed. We would like to dedicate the 8th TIA conference in Toulouse to her memory.

Since 1995, the Terminology and Artificial Intelligence (TIA) Conferences have focused on issues situated at the crossroads of terminology and knowledge engineering. This has led to consider problems related to knowledge acquisition from text and modelling of knowledge on various information media and to reflect on the theoretical and methodological consequences of the tasks these approaches imply as well as on the applications derived from them. By focusing on corpora and the different ways knowledge is expressed in running text, the TIA Conference quickly managed to distinguish itself from other events that address similar topics.

In all specialized fields, knowledge is stored and disseminated in the form of documents. In some cases, document management (ranking according to relevance to a query, for instance) and acquisition and extraction of knowledge for indexing, modelling and conceptualization rely on terminological and linguistic studies. Hence, terminology and linguistics supply key concepts to other disciplines such as natural language processing, information science and knowledge engineering. Conversely, these disciplines bring to light new problems and issues and present new challenges and perspectives for terminology and linguistics. For nearly 15 years, TIA conferences have provided a forum for researchers working in these various fields to come together.

The TIA Conferences were first organized by a research group with the same name (TIA group: http://tia.loria.fr/). The first edition took place in Paris (TIA’95, Villetaneuse), and subsequent events have been held in a variety of French cities (TIA’97 (Toulouse), TIA’99 (Nantes), TIA’01 (Nancy), TIA’03 (Strasbourg), TIA’05 (Rouen), and TIA ’07 (Nice)). Created under the auspices of AFIA (l’Association française pour l’intelligence artificielle; French Association for Artificial Intelligence) – which has since become the AFIA/GdR-I3 group – TIA brings together researchers in linguistics, natural language processing and knowledge engineering. Although TIA Conferences have always taken place in France, quickly, many researchers in other parts of the world became interested in discussing the topics that were debated. The TIA group as such no longer exists, but some of its instigators proposed that the conference should remain and thus organized the 2009 edition.

This year, the programme committee wanted to focus on terms, their realizations in running text and terminological structures. Terms are used as focal points for knowledge structuring in many applications, including ontologies, thesauri, and other conventional terminological resources such as specialized dictionaries and terminological databases. A number of semantic relations between terms may be identified (and may vary depending on the application). However, although the aim of all of these applications is a certain degree of stability, the linguistic nature of terms and of the relations they share raises many questions. Which relations should be represented in specific applications? How should terms and the relations between them be represented? How can the relations in terminological resources and their linguistic representation in texts be linked?

In line with what the founders of the Conference aimed to create in 1995, TIA 2009 wants to provide an opportunity for researchers developing fundamental and methodological approaches in knowledge engineering in which textual linguistics plays a central role to discuss problems and issues related to their work. A special emphasis has been placed on multidisciplinary research in which linguistics, terminology, information science and/or natural language processing are concerned. Hence, when selecting articles, we paid special attention to the following criteria: diversity of approaches, contribution against the background of previous work started more than 10 years ago on the various links between text and knowledge representation on formal media, studies and concrete experiments that help us better understand the role of the term as a conveyor of specialized knowledge.

The programme committee first invited contributions addressing theoretical Semantic theories and terminology in relation to text linguistics and ontologies (especially theoretical linguistic approaches to describing terms and terminological structures). By doing so, the committee wanted to encourage participants to continue to investigate fundamental issues.

In addition, the committee wanted to discuss other methodological and theoretical questions such as: the representation of terms and semantic and conceptual relations in specific data structures (ontologies, thesauri, etc.), the representation of terms in relations in multilingual applications, comparative studies of terminologies / terminological resources / ontological resources from different languages, communities or time frames; theoretical and technical problems in automated or manual compilation of terminologies using mono- or multi-lingual corpora; methods for automatic terminology structuring (identification of relations between terms, linking of terms to specific fields of knowledge); studies on the relationships between ontologies and terminologies and/or thesauri. Also, submissions on complete or partial automation of knowledge acquisition and representation were also invited, more specifically methods for structuring terminologies automatically; identification of relations between terms, automatic attribution of specialized domains, use of ontologies to better understand their contribution to thesaurus or terminological semantics. Issues related to evaluation methods and criteria, and validation of terminologies, problems in compiling multilingual terminologies, reuse, standardization, comparison and merging of terminological or ontological resources have also always been identified as topics of interests at TIA Conferences. Finally, applications are central in research work presented at TIA Conferences: applications of terminological resources (the Semantic Web, information retrieval, technology watch, question answering, document management, ranking and/or classification, etc.).

 The call for papers was a success since 32 articles were submitted to the programme committee. This year, the programme has an international flavour since contributions were submitted by researchers from Belgium, Canada, China, Croatia, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This also has a consequence on the number of languages that are described in the papers which are much more varied than in previous editions.

The programme committee selected 13 full papers for oral presentation and 11 short papers presented as posters. Papers address the following topics: semantic annotation of specialized and/or general corpora for specific applications; ontology engineering or thesaurus compilation in fields such as medicine, ceramics, the food industry, building construction, environment; analysis of terms in corpora (e.g., polysemy, reduction of multiword terms); special denominations, such as commercial trademarks; conceptual or semantic patterns (this topic is addressed in a one of the two workshops organized jointly with the Conference); images as media to convey knowledge; applications such as automatic categorization of documents, compilation of rich terminological resources (including formalized definitions or relations between terms), term (or collocation) extraction.

            In addition to the papers selected by the programme committee, two invited speakers have agreed to give talks that will highlight specific perspectives on methods for acquiring knowledge from corpora and semantic analysis in running text.

            The first talk is given by Diana Maynard and is entitled “GATE: Bridging the Gap between Terminology and Linguistics”. The talk will describe the basics of the GATE platform and of its components. It will also show that it can lend itself to a variety of uses.

The second talk delivered by Carlos Subirats and entitled “Spanish FrameNet. An On-line Lexical Resource and its Application to NLP" will give a general overview of the Spanish version of FrameNet, how it was compiled and how it can be applied to natural language processing.

This year, two workshops were organized jointly with the Conference. In both cases, the relation between text and knowledge is clearly emphasized. The first workshop, entitled “Du thème au terme. Émergence et lexicalisation des connaissances” (From Topic to Term: Creation and Lexicalization of Knowledge), aim to better understand how new concepts appear and evolve. The second workshop, entitled Acquisition et modélisation de relations sémantiques" (Acquiring and Modelling Semantic Relations), focuses on fundamental aspects of the analysis of semantic relations in specialized corpora, i.e. how to locate them in running text and how to represent them in various types of applications. 

The organization of TIA 2009 was made possible thanks to the support and help of many colleagues and friends that we would like to thank here. First and foremost, we would like to thank the organizers of the event, Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles and Anne Condamines, who were very active in every aspect of the preparation of the Conference. Their constant help and valuable advice made the organization of the conference a much easier task to accomplish for us. The two Presidents of the organizing committee could also count on a team comprising members from the IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) and the CLLE-ERSS (Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie-Equipe de Recherche en Syntaxe et Sémantique). For the first time, two separate workshops are held jointly with the Conference and we would like to thank their organizers – Sylvie Després, Natalia Grabar, Monique Slodzian and Mathieu Valette – for posting original call for papers on specific topics and for taking full responsibility of the organization of the events.

We would also like to extend our thanks to the members of the programme committee. Their advice and comments helped us design a very rich programme. Also, we address special thanks to Diana Maynard and Carlos Subirats for agreeing to give invited talks on topics of interest for the participants.

Finally, the organization of the two days of the Conference and of the day devoted to the workshops could rely on financial contribution of the following French organizations: the Conseil Régional de la Région Midi Pyrénées, the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Université Paul Sabatier Toulouse 3, the Université Toulouse 2 le Mirail, the Institut National en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA), and the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française et aux Langues de France (DGLFLF), CFH: Facteurs humains et ingénierie Linguistique. The Conference is held under the auspices of the AFIA and the GDR I3.

 

Organizing committee

Under the responsibility of

Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles (IRIT, Toulouse) aussenac@irit.fr

Anne Condamines (CLLE-ERSS, Toulouse) anne.condamines@univ-tlse2.fr

 

Members

 

Françoise Agar (IRIT, Toulouse)

Jean-Pierre Bariteau (IRIT, Toulouse)

Ludovic Chacun (IRIT, Toulouse)

Jean-Philippe Cornille (IRIT, Toulouse)

Véronique Debats (IRIT, Toulouse)

Corinne Doumerc (IRIT, Toulouse)

Nathalie Duhaut (CLLE-ERSS, Toulouse)

Sabyne Lartigue (IRIT, Toulouse)

Stéphanie Lopez (CLLE - ERSS, Toulouse)

Christine Pernet (CLLE - ERSS, Toulouse)

Aurélie Piction (CLLE-ERSS, Toulouse)

Sophie Rességuier (IRIT, Toulouse)

Bernard Rothenburger (IRIT, Toulouse)

Anis Tissaoui (IRIT, Toulouse)

 

Programme committee

 

Chairs

 

Marie-Claude L’Homme (OLST, Université de Montréal

Sylvie Szulman (LIPN, Université Paris XIII)

 

Members

 

Guadalupe Aguado (Universitad Politécnica de Madrid, Espagne)

Amparo Alcina (Universitat Jaume-I, Espagne)

Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles (IRIT, France)

Caroline Barrière (NRC, Canada)

Olivier Bodenreider (National Library of Medicine, USA)

Maria Teresa Cabré (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)

Marc van Campenhoudt (Université de Bruxelles, Belgique)

Farid Cerbah (Dassault-aviation, France)

Jean Charlet (AP-HP & INSERM, France)

Anne Condamines (CLLE-ERSS, France)

James Cussens (University of York, UK)

Lyne Da Sylva (EBSI, Montréal, Canada)

Valérie Delavigne (Institut national du cancer, France)

Patrick Drouin (OLST, Montréal, Canada)

Pamela Faber (Universidad de Granada, Espagne)

Ulrich Heid (Universität Stuttgart, Allemagne)

Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan (Université Lyon-3, France) 

Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)

Adeline Nazarenko (LIPN, Université Paris 13)

Pascale Sébillot (IRISA, France)

Koichi Takeuchi (Okayama University, Japan)

Rita Temmerman (Erasmushogeschool, Belgique)

Yannick Toussaint (LORIA, France)

Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS & CRIM-INALCO, France)