current trends and future directions Summary: Research on modality and negation focuses on [...]]]> Speaker: Roser Morante Senior researcher on the BIOGRAPH project led by Walter Daelemans.  CLiPS-Computational Linguistics research group University of Antwerp, Date: February 23, 2010 Time: 16:00 Where: Computer Science Faculty, Meeting room (batzar aretoa) .

Modality and negation in natural language processing: 

current trends and future directions

Summary:
Research on modality and negation focuses on finding subjective,
uncertain and counterfactual information in texts, be it in scientific
papers, product reviews, or opinions in blogs. This type of +research is
concerned with processing texts at the information level and aims at
deep text understanding.  Modality and negation are phenomena relevant
for all applications that are concerned with +some form of text
understanding, including text mining, sentiment analysis, recognizing
textual entailment, information extraction, text summarization, and
question answering. Hence, the adequate +modeling of these phenomena is
of crucial importance to the natural language processing (NLP) community
as a whole.

Whereas from a theoretical perspective, the study of modality has a long
tradition, only in the recent years have these topics attracted the
attention of NLP researchers. Mainly, the development of +sentiment
analysis techniques and the growing need of mining biomedical texts have
been the causes for the interest in these semantic aspects of language.
In this talk I will define modality and +negation from an NLP
perspective, I will motivate the need for processing these phenomena,
and I will summarize existing research on processing modality and
negation, touching on diverse aspects +ranging from task modelling to
feature visualization. Finally, I will speculate about future
developments in this research area.

ABSTRACT These two sessions cover some of the most important aspects of Computational Semantics and Pragmatics including: * Lexical Representations and Argument Structure * Parsing with constituency or dependency structure * Co-reference resolution [...]]]> Speaker: Rodolfo Delmonte, (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy).
Date: January 17 and 18, 2011
Time: 16:00 – 19:30
Where: Computer Science Faculty

ABSTRACT
These two sessions cover some of the most important aspects of Computational Semantics and Pragmatics including:
* Lexical Representations and Argument Structure
* Parsing with constituency or dependency structure
* Co-reference resolution
* Underspecified arguments
* Argumentative structure, subjectivity, factuality and sentiment analysis
* Textual Entailment
The talks follow a linguistically motivated approach with the use of ontologies and similar resources to deal with co-reference or textual entailment tasks. The talks are accompanied by several applications and demonstrations.

SHORT BIO
Rodolfo Delmonte is Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Venice where he is in charge of the corresponding course at BA, MA and Ph.D. level. Specialist in experimental phonetics and computational linguistics he presents his research work at major international conferences and publishes articles in international journals. He is referee for and publishes in Speech Communication, International Journal of Speech Technologies, Journal of Natural Language Engineering and international conferences every year. He has been invited speaker in a number of conferences, teacher at international schools, and invited professor in the last five years in Boulder, Colorado at the CLSR, in Besançon at the Centre Tesnière, in Dallas at UTD. Hot topics of his latest research include the following: Implicit entities and antecedents of omitted and underspecified arguments; Argumentative Analysis, Subjectivity, Factuality and Sentiment Analysis.

project.cgm.unive.it/delmonte.html