Motivation and Aims

The rise of the semantic web has greatly increased the interest in ontologies, but also added new critical requirements for them, such as wide coverage, interoperability and multi-linguality. In the perspective of the semantic web, the link between ontologies and natural language appears to be crucial. Indeed, there is a high level of correspondence between ontologies and lexical knowledge bases. They are subject to the same requirements, and there is an ever increasing potential and need for cooperation between the two fields.

Following the tradition of the first OntoLex workshop (OntoLex'00 Sozopol, Bulgaria 2000), this workshop will focus on the links between ontologies and lexical knowledge bases, aiming at being a meeting point for a number of communities that are currently not sufficiently connected:

• Lexical semanticists;
• Lexicographers and terminologists;
• Ontologists with computer science background;
• Ontologists with philosophical background;
• Ontology users active in various areas (knowledge management, information extraction, information retrieval, machine translation, conceptual modelling, eCommerce).

The needs for greater interconnectivity among the above research areas have been widely recognized in the last years. Two good examples of an interdisciplinary approach are the use of upper ontologies in European projects as EuroWordNet and SIMPLE, and some recent work on the conceptual analysis of WordNet's top-level taxonomy presented at FOIS2001.

Lexical knowledge bases are considered an important kind of language resources. Moreover, lexical knowledge bases and ontologies are starting to play a crucial role in the creation and usage of other language resources such as syntactic tree-banks and lexicons.

Two European thematic networks will support the workshop: ELSNET and OntoWeb.

Topics of interest

• Design principles for upper-level ontologies and semantic lexical resources;
• Ways for handling systematic polysemy and compound concepts;
• Interoperability between semantic lexical resources and ontologies;
• Applications of ontologies and semantic lexical resources in IR and IE;
• Role of semantic lexical resources in ontology learning;
• Evaluation, comparison, mapping, and integration of ontologies and semantic lexical resources.

One discussion will be organized on the following topic:

• Distinctions between lexical and ontological knowledge.

  Important Dates

  Deadline for workshop abstract submission	8th February 2002
  Notification of acceptance	8th March 2002
  Final version of paper for workshop proceedings	5th April 2002
  Workshop	27th May 2002

  Submissions

  Papers should describe existing research connected to the topics of the workshop. The presentation at the workshop will be 25 minutes long (20 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for questions and discussion). Each submission should show: title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, postal address, telephone and fax numbers. Abstracts (maximum 500 words, plain-text format) should be sent to Wim Peters
  Those who wish to attend without offering a paper are asked to briefly motivate their interest.

  The final version of the accepted papers should not be longer than 4,000 words or 10 A4 pages. Instructions for formatting and presentation of the final version will be sent to authors upon notification of acceptance.

  Organizing committee

  Kiril Simov
  Linguistic Modelling Laboratory, CLPP,
  Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
  Acad. G.Bonchev St. 25A
  1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
  and
  OntoText Lab. Sirma AI Ltd
  Bulgaria
  Phone: +359 2 979 2812
  Fax: +359 2 707273
  E-mail: kivs@bgcict.acad.bg
  
  Nicola Guarino
  National Research Council
  LADSEB-CNR
  Corso Stati Uniti, 4
  I-35127 Padova
  Italy
  Phone: +39 O49 8295751
  Fax: +39 O49 8295763
  Email: Nicola.Guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it
  
  Wim Peters
  NLP group
  Department of Computer Science
  University of Sheffield
  Regent Court
  211 Portobello Street
  Sheffield S1 4DP
  Phone: 00-44-114-2221902
  Fax: 00-44-114-2221810
  Email: w.peters@dcs.shef.ac.uk

  Program Committee

  Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles	IRIT, Toulouse (France)
  Michael Brown	SemanticEdge ( Germany)
  Paul Buitelaar	DFKI (Germany)
  Werner Ceusters	L&C (Belgium)
  Aldo Gangemi	Institute of Biomedical Technologies, CNR (Italy)
  Julio Gonzalo	UNED, Madrid (Spain)
  Erhard Hinrichs	SfS, Tuebingen University (Germany)
  Atanas Kyriakov	OntoText Lab (Bulgaria)
  Alessandro Lenci	Universita' di Pisa (Italy)
  Kavi Mahesh	Knowledge Management Group, Infosys Technologies (USA)
  Sergej Nirenburg	CRL, New-Mexico State University (USA)
  Piek Vossen	Irion Technologies, Delft (The Netherlands)
  James Pustejovsky	Brandeis University (USA)
  Paola Velardi	"La Sapienza", Rome (Italy)
  Ellen Voorhees	NIST (USA)

  Invited Speakers

  Yorick Wilks	Shefield University (UK)
  Christiane Fellbaum	Princeton University (USA)

  Workshop Registration Fees

  The registration fees for the workshop are:
  • If you are not attending LREC: 140 EURO
  • If you are attending LREC: 90 Euro

  The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings of the attended workshop, coffee-breaks and refreshments.

  Participation in the workshop is limited by the venue. Requests for participation will be processed on first come first served basis. Registration will be handled by the LREC Secretariat. s limited by the venue. Requests for participation will be processed on first come first served basis. Registration will be handled by the LREC Secretariat.