TextInfer 2011 - TextInfer-2011 ? Workshop on Textual Entailment Sebastian Padó and Stefan Thater

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.

TextInfer will be co-located with EMNLP 2011, at Edinburgh, Scotland and will take place on July 30th, 2011.

TextInfer has been endorsed by the ACL SIGSEM and ACL SIGLEX interest groups.