Textual inference and paraphrase have attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. Many NLP tasks, including question answering, information extraction, and text summarization, can be mapped at least partially onto the recognition of textual entailments and the detection of semantic equivalence between texts. Robust and accurate algorithms and resources for inference and paraphrasing can therefore be beneficial for a broad range of NLP applications, and have generally stimulated research in the area of applied semantics.

TextInfer 2011 invites both theoretical and applied research contributions on the topic of inference. We aim to bring together empirical approaches (which have tended to dominate textual entailment events) with formal approaches to inference (which are more often presented at events like ICoS or IWCS). We feel that the time is ripe for researchers from both groups to join for this event, with the goal of establishing a discussion on how the two approaches relate to one another, and how to define interfaces between the two methodologies.

Chairs

  • Sebastian Pado, Heidelberg University
  • Stefan Thater, Saarland University

Organizing Committe

  • Peter Clark, Vulcan Inc.
  • Ido Dagan, Bar-Ilan University
  • Katrin Erk, University of Texas at Austin
  • Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, University of Rome "Tor Vergata"

Program Committee

  • Richard Bergmair, University of Cambridge
  • Johan Bos, University of Groningen
  • Aljoscha Burchardt, DFKI GmbH
  • Chris Callison-Burch, John Hopkins University
  • Phillip Cimiano, Bielefeld University
  • David Clausen, Stanford University
  • Ann Copestake, Cambridge University
  • Kees van Deemter, Aberdeen University
  • Bill Dolan, Microsoft Research
  • Mark Dras, Macquarie University
  • Markus Egg, HU Berlin
  • Anette Frank, Heidelberg University
  • Claire Gardent, LORIA
  • Andy Hickl, Extractiv/Swingly
  • Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto
  • Jerry Hobbs, USC/ISI
  • Kentaro Inui Tohoku University
  • Hans-Ulrich Krieger, DFKI
  • Piroska Lendvai, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
  • Bill MacCartney, Google
  • Bernardo Magnini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
  • Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Stanford University
  • Erwin Marsi, NTNU
  • Yashar Mehdad, FBK
  • Detmar Meurers, Tuebingen University
  • Shachar Mirkin, Bar-Ilan University
  • Michael Mohler, University of North Texas
  • Dan Moldovan, University of Texas at Dallas
  • Robero Navigli, University of Rome
  • Patrick Pantel, Microsoft Research
  • Marco Pennacchiotti, Yahoo!
  • Ian Pratt-Hartmann, Manchester University
  • Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Satoshi Sato, Nagoya University
  • Satoshi Sekine, New York University
  • Idan Szpektor, Yahoo!
  • Ivan Titov, Saarland University
  • Antonio Toral, Dublin City University
  • Kentaro Torisawa, NICT
  • Annie Zaenen, PARC