Semantic Web and Information Extraction

We are pleased to announce that the third edition of SWAIE has been accepted as a workshop at COLING 2014, to be held on Sunday 24th August in Dublin, Ireland.

The Semantic Web aims to add a machine tractable, repurposable layer to complement the existing web of natural language hypertext. In order to realise this vision, the creation of semantic annotation, the linking of Web pages to ontologies and the creation, evolution and interrelation of ontologies must become automatic or semi-automatic processes. Information Extraction, a form of natural language analysis, is becoming a central technology to link Semantic Web models with documents. On the other hand, traditional Information Extraction can be enhanced by the addition of semantic information, enabling disambiguation of concepts, reasoning and inference to take place over the documents. The primary goal of this workshop is to advance the understanding of the relationship between Information Extraction and Semantic Web.

With the adoption of the Web 2.0 paradigm, these technologies further face new challenges because of their inherent multi-source nature, while the rapidly increasing use of social media  also brings a new set of problems in dealing with degraded forms of text such as incorrect grammar, spelling and so on. Information Extraction now has to deal not just with isolated texts or single narratives but with large scale repositories or sources — in one or many languages — containing a multiplicity of views, opinions, or commentaries on particular topics, entities or events, in very diverse styles and formats. New methods and tools thus need to be developed to deal with the changing face of data and the changing needs of society. Furthermore, traditional platforms and architectures for Information Extraction are not necessarily capable of smooth handling of the transition to more semantic forms of annotation. While language analysis tools may not require sophisticated ontology handling mechanisms, the ensuing lack of interoperability can be problematic when embedding such tools and platforms in Semantic Web architectures.

The general theme of the workshop can be seen as an extensive application area for Semantic Web technologies aimed at generating and exploiting semantically rich data, and is thus a critical area of interest to the COLING community. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of the workshop will allow researchers from several distinct though highly related sub-communities to interact with respect to early ideas, work in progress and comprehensive research results.

Important Dates:

Paper Submission Deadline (note extended date): 15th May 2014  (23:59 Hawaii time)

Author Notification Deadline: 10th June 2014

Camera-Ready Paper Deadline: 4 July 2014

Workshop: 24 August 2014