Temporal and spatial information is ubiquitous in natural language, yet many challenging computational issues are relatively unexplored. This workshop will bring together researchers working on a variety of tasks that depend on representing spatial and temporal information in natural language.

We invite papers on any topic dealing with automatic processing of spatial or temporal information in natural language.

As a special theme of this workshop, we would also like to encourage the discussion of common issues across spatial and temporal domains. For example, systems that process temporal or spatial information need to deal with ‘absolute’ references (“November 18, 1999”, “Toulouse”), as well as relative references (“now”, “here”, two weeks ago”, “thirty miles north of Paris”), and vague references  (“some time in June”, “a town in Provence”, “nearly a year ago”, “near Dusseldorf”, “Tuesday morning”, “southern England”). There are also many parallels between the way events are characterized in time and objects are characterized in space. For example, events can be described relative to some point or interval in time (e.g., “I met John yesterday”, “he was crossing the street.”) while objects in space can be described in relation to some place, object, or in terms of movement (e.g., “the cup was on top of that”, “it fell off”).

Topics

The topics covered will include corpus-based, knowledge-based, and hybrid approaches to:

• resolution of temporal and spatial references, especially discourse-dependent ones
• standards for encoding the values of temporal and spatial expressions in natural language
• temporal and spatial  characterization of events
• establishing coreference, ordering and inclusion relations in spatial or temporal information
• computational analysis of tense and aspect
• semantics of indeterminate or vague temporal and spatial references
• semantics and pragmatics of spatial and temporal prepositions
• leveraging of ontologies for spatial and temporal information
• reasoning about modals, i.e., possible events, necessary events, counterfactual events, etc.
• application of logics for spatial and temporal reasoning
• analysis of temporal and spatial aspects of narrative structure
• generation of temporal and spatial references
• linguistic and graphical representations

• machine translation (e.g., translating temporal and spatial references)
• question answering (e.g., answering "when" or "where" questions)
• information extraction (e.g., normalizing time values for entry into databases, disambiguating place names using a gazetteer)
• summarization (e.g., producing temporally coherent summaries of multiple documents, or generating route plans)
• information retrieval (e.g., indexing broadcast news by event time)
• information visualization (e.g., constructing event chronologies, geospatial visualization)
• multimodal interfaces (e.g., interfaces to simulations, gesture and speech input graphical applications, navigation systems)
• interfaces to spatial and temporal databases (e.g., normalizing temporal and spatial references)
• planning and problem solving
• multimedia presentations (e.g., generating textual descriptions or captions, scene and route descriptions, generation of spatio-temporal maps)

Lisa Harper, MITRE, USA
Inderjeet Mani, MITRE and Georgetown University, USA
Beth Sundheim, SPAWAR Systems Center, USA

SPONSORS

MITRE
ACL SIGMEDIA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Elisabeth Andre, DFKI, Germany
Myriam Bras, IRIT, France
Rob Gaizauskas, Sheffield, UK
Udo Hahn, Freiburg University, Germany
Eduard Hovy, USC-ISI, USA
Gérard Ligozat, LIMSI-CNSRS, France,
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Marc Moens, University of Edinburgh, UK
Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan, USA
Ellen Riloff, University of Utah, USA
Barbara Tversky, Stanford University, USA
Laure Vieu, IRIT, France
Michael White, Cogentex, USA
Janyce Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh, USA
George Wilson, MITRE, USA
Cornelia Zelinsky-Wibbelt, Hannover, Germany

SCHEDULE
 

Submissions	April 8, 2001
Notification of  acceptance	April 30, 2001
Deadline for camera-ready versions	May 13, 2001
Workshop	July 7, 2001

SUBMISSION FORMAT AND INSTRUCTIONS

Submissions must be in English, no more than 8 pages long, and in the two-column format prescribed by ACL’2001. Please see  http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/ for the detailed guidelines. However, please put the authors’ names, rather than a paper id, since reviewing will not be blind.

Submissions should be sent electronically in either Word, pdf, or postscript format (only) no later than April 8, 2001 to:
 

Beth Sundheim

sundheim@spawar.navy.mil