Programme

Invited Keynote Speaker

Prof. Dr. Johan Bos, University of Groningen

Johan Bos is Professor of Computational Semantics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.  Bos was awarded a prestigious Endowed Chair position in 2010 to build his own research lab. He has been on the international forefront of computational semantics, serving as President of the ACL special interest group of computational semantics (SIGSEM) for many years and organising the key workshops and conferences in the field (ICOS, IWCS, *SEM). He co-authored classic textbooks on computational semantics and logic programming. Bos has been instrumental in bridging the gap between formal approaches to semantics and applied language technology. He is the developer of Boxer, a state-of-the-art wide-coverage formal semantic parser for English, initiator of the Groningen Meaning Bank, a large semantically-annotated corpus of texts, and inventor of Wordrobe, a game with a purpose for semantic annotation. Bos received a Vici grant from NWO in 2015 to investigate the role of meaning in human and machine translation (“Lost in Translation — Found in Meaning”). Bos has been keynote speaker at many occasions, including the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2018). His current research is devoted to building a parallel meaning bank for various languages.

Keynote talk topic

A Simple Annotation Scheme for Annotating the Meaning of Discourse

Large-scale meaning annotation efforts often oversee discourse issues. This is understandable, as annotating discourse phenomena risks opening up a semantic can of worms.  Particularly, identifying discourse units, determining rhetorical relations, encoding discourse structure, and navigating the interplay between sentential and discourse meaning have proven to be notorious hurdles.  Building on recent work on meaning banking, I would like to propose an annotation scheme that simplifies the way meaning can be transcribed for texts, while still maintaining the most important characteristics of discourse semantics.

Scientific Programme

The scientific programme will include oral presentations of selected peer reviewed submitted papers