STEP 2008 Conference Report
From SIGSEM
A conference report by Johan Bos
The first STEP in Venice, Italy
The first STEP workshop on semantics in text processing was organised as a three-day (Sept 22-24, 2008) event in the beautiful Aula Magna at Ca' Dolfin, part of the University Ca' Foscari in the magical city of Venice. The workshop attracted 38 participants, mostly from Europe and the United States, who enjoyed a program featuring 18 regular papers, 5 short papers and 7 shared task papers. The overall acceptance rate was 75%. Two invited speakers, Harry Bunt (University of Tilburg) on A New Life for Semantic Annotations, and Sanda Harabagiu (University of Texas at Dallas) on Semantic Processing in Textual Question Answering, complemented the program. In the main session, a nice diversity of topics were presented and discussed, ranging from word sense disambiguation, interpreting referring expressions, dealing with quantifier scope ambiguities (yeah!), acquiring background and lexical knowledge, explaining explanations, computing non-literal meanings, to discourse segmentation. The short papers were presented as posters.
The shared task on comparing semantic representations (as output by wide-coverage NLP systems) saw seven contestants 'battle' for the STEP 2008 award. On the first day of the workshop each of them had to deliver a tutorial-type talk on their system, explaining the semantic formalism and the system implementation. The second day the contestants had to report how well their system (in their own view) performed on the shared task texts chosen by the other participants. The moment surpreme arrived at the third day, when each participant voted for the best system for semantic interpretation. This last bit, of course, does not constitute any formal kind of evaluation, and has to be taken with a grain of salt, but was the icing on the cake of an interesting and fascinating experience. It was stunning to see so many non-participants interested in the shared task event, whose sessions were planned in the late hours of the afternoon each day (there is a lot of other interesting things to do in Venice!). It was informative and instructive to see how other semanticists dealt with common problems (that one never comes across in ordinary publications), the diversity of formalisms, the bitter reality of failure and success of a system performing on unseen real-world texts.
It was however not all about semantics at STEP. With the local organisation in the safe hands of Rodolfo Delmonte, we enjoyed a relaxing Venetian baroque chamber music concert, featuring a wildly enthusiastic cello player. Just as memorable was the social dinner, which took place in a typical Venetian trattoria treating us with a delicious selection of sea food (and wine).
Finally, for those who weren't there: all 32 papers of STEP 2008 are stored in PDF form at the [ACL anthology]. The proceedings are also available in bookform and published by [College Publications].
Group Picture
This is going to be hard, but here goes, from left to right: Emanuela Pianta (Italy), Suhel Jaber (Italy), Diego De Cao (Italy), Allan Ramsay (UK), Jan Tore Lønning (Norway), Manfred Stede (Germany), Steve Pulman (UK), Livio Robaldo (Italy), Marjorie McShane (US), Ben van Durme (US), Sergei Nirenburg (US), Alessandro Mazzei (Italy), Rob Koeling (UK), Alessandro Oltramari (Italy), Rodolfo Delmonte (Italy), Francisco Costa (Portugal), Manuele Speranza (Italy), Johan Bos (Italy), Harry Bunt (Netherlands), German Rigau (Spain), Charles Callaway (UK), Peter Clark (US), David Goss-Grubbs (US), Rodrigo Agerri (UK), Maria Liakata (UK), James Allen (US), Pierpaolo Basile (Italy), Leonardo Lesmo (Italy). Thanks to Ben van Durme for making this picture available!
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