I UNL Panel

[martins]

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I UNL Panel
www.unlweb.net/panel
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December 15, 2012 - Mumbai, India
Associated event to COLING 2012
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The UNL is an artificial language created to represent and process information across language barriers. Initially proposed by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University, in Tokyo, Japan, in 1996, it has been enhanced and promoted by the UNDL Foundation, in Geneva, Switzerland, under a mandate of the United Nations, since 2000. The basic assumption of the UNL approach is that the information conveyed by natural languages can be formally represented through a semantic network made of three different types of discrete semantic units: Universal Words (UW's), relations and attributes. The UW's are the nodes in the graph, to be interlinked by relations and specified by attributes.

The main purpose of the UNL Panel is to collect the opinion of specialists, from inside and outside the UNL Community, about technical issues of UNL, in order to prepare the ground for an in-depth revision of the current UNL specifications. The I UNL Panel, an associated event to COLING 2012, is devoted to the nature and role of Universal Words (UW's), the nodes in the UNL semantic graph.

As the name indicates, Universal Words are expected to be "universal". This does not mean that they represent a sort of common lexical denominator to all languages or a semantic primitive. The concept of universality, in UNL, must be understood in terms of "semantic accessibility", i.e, in the sense of "capable of being used and understood by all" (as in "universal adapter", "universal screwdriver" or "universal remote control"), and UW's depict concepts that may range from absolutely global to absolutely local, and even temporary. They are universal in the sense that they are uniform identifiers to the entities defined in the UNL Knowledge Base, which is expected to map everything that we know about the world, and that is used to assign translatability to any concept.

In order to take the best directions concerning the UW's, the UNDL Foundation will listen to 6 specialists about 5 topics of lexical semantics:
*What is to be considered a "Universal Word"?
*Which named entities should be introduced in the dictionary of UW's, if any?
*UW's must correspond to roots, to stems or to word forms?
*Antonyms should be represented as a single UW or as different UW's?
*When a multiword expression must be represented as a UW?

These topics will be discussed considering the five questions available at www.unlweb.net/wiki/I_UNL_Panel. They illustrate practical issues concerning UW's and have been receiving several different possible answers. The main goal of I UNL Panel is to discuss which answers would be more appropriate and feasible, considering the nature and role of the UNL, and the state of the art of the theory and technology on natural language processing.

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Panelists
*Eric Wehrli (Université de Genève)
*Igor Boguslavsky (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid/Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences)
*Mike Dillinger (eBay)
*Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale Antonio Zampolli, Pisa)
*Pushpak Bhattacharyya (IIT-Bombay)
*Sameh Alansary (University of Alexandria)
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Chair
*Ronaldo Martins (UNDL Foundation)
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Program
Saturday, December 15, 2012
*09:00-09:30 - Opening session
*09:30-10:00 - General presentation of the questions
*10:00-12:00 - Presentations of the panelists
*12:00-14:00 - Lunch break
*14:00-16:00 - Presentations of the panelists
*16:00-17:30 - Discussion session
*17:30-18:00 - Closing session
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Venue
*Victor Menezes Convention Center - IIT Bombay
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Further information
*Ronaldo Martins (r.martins@undlfoundation.org)