Second Call for Papers: DMR 2025

SW
Shira Wein
Mon, Mar 10, 2025 3:13 PM

DMR 2025

The 6th International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

To be held in beautiful Prague, Czechia, August 4-5, 2025, following ACL
2025 in Vienna, Austria.

DMR 2025 invites the submissions of long and short papers about original
works on the design, processing, and use of meaning representations. While
deep learning methods have led to many breakthroughs in practical natural
language applications, there is still a sense among many NLP researchers
that we have a long way to go before we can develop systems that can
actually “understand” human language and explain the decisions they make.
Indeed, “understanding” natural language entails many different human-like
capabilities, and they include but are not limited to the ability to track
entities in a text, understand the relations between these entities, track
events and their participants described in a text, understand how events
unfold in time, and distinguish events that have actually happened from
events that are planned or intended, are uncertain, or did not happen at
all. We believe a critical step in achieving natural language understanding
is to design meaning representations for text that have the necessary
meaning “ingredients” that help us achieve these capabilities. Such meaning
representations can also potentially be used to evaluate the compositional
generalization capacity of deep learning models.

There has been a growing body of research devoted to the design,
annotation, and parsing of meaning representations in recent years. In
particular, formal meaning representation frameworks such as Minimal
Recursion Semantics (MRS) and Discourse Representation Theory are developed
with the goal of supporting logical inference in reasoning-based AI systems
and are therefore easily translatable into first-order logic, while other
meaning representation frameworks such as Abstract Meaning Representation
(AMR), Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), Tecto-grammatical
Representation (TR) in Prague Dependency Treebanks and the Universal
Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA), put more emphasis on the
representation of core predicate-argument structure. The automatic parsing
of natural language text into these meaning representations and the
generation of natural language text from these meaning representations are
also very active areas of research, and a wide range of technical
approaches and learning methods have been applied to these problems.

DMR intends to bring together researchers who are producers and consumers
of meaning representations and, through their interaction, gain a deeper
understanding of the key elements of meaning representations that are the
most valuable to the NLP community. The workshop will provide an
opportunity for meaning representation researchers to present new
frameworks and to critically examine existing frameworks with the goal of
using their findings to inform the design of next-generation meaning
representations. One particular goal is to understand the relationship
between distributed meaning representations trained on large data sets
using network models and the symbolic meaning representations that are
carefully designed and annotated by NLP researchers, with an aim of gaining
a deeper understanding of areas where each type of meaning representation
is the most effective.

The workshop solicits papers that address one or more of the following
topics:

Development and annotation of meaning representations;

Challenges and techniques in leveraging meaning representations for
downstream applications, including neuro-symbolic approaches;

The relationship between symbolic meaning representations and
distributed semantic representations;

Issues in applying meaning representations to multilingual settings and
lower-resourced languages;

Challenges and techniques in automatic parsing of meaning
representations;

Challenges and techniques in automatically generating text from meaning
representations;

Meaning representation evaluation metrics;

Cross-framework comparison of meaning representations and their formal
properties;

Any other topics that address the design, processing, and use of meaning
representations.

Important dates:

Workshop papers due: April 21, 2025

Notification of acceptance: June 16, 2025

Camera-ready papers due: July 1, 2025

Workshop date: August 4-5, 2025

All deadlines are 11:59pm UTC-12 ("anywhere on Earth").

Paper Submission and Templates

We accept long papers (describing substantial original research) of up to
eight (8) pages and short papers (making a small, focused contribution) of
up to four (4) pages. If a paper is accepted, the authors will be given an
additional page to address reviewers’ comments in the final version. The
ethics statement (optional), limitations (optional), references, and
appendices do not count against these limits. Long and short papers will be
directly submitted via OpenReview at the following link:
https://openreview.net/group?id=DMR/2025 Papers should adhere to the
following guidelines (from ACL Rolling Review):

Instructions for Two-Way Anonymized Review
https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#instructions-for-two-way-anonymized-review

Authorship https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#authorship

Citation and Comparison
https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#citation-and-comparison

Ethics Policy https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#ethics-policy (although
note that we do not require completion of the responsible NLP research
checklist)

Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are
available here https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files (Latex and
Word). Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including
paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected
without review.

Dual Submission Policy

Dual submissions are allowed. Authors of papers that have been or will be
submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information
to the workshop co-chairs (dmr.workshop.2025@gmail.com). In your message,
please list the names and dates of the conferences, workshops or meetings
where you have submitted or plan to submit your paper in addition to DMR.
Authors of accepted papers must notify the program chairs within 5 business
days of acceptance if the paper is withdrawn for any reason.

Other Questions

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the program
co-chairs (dmr.workshop.2025@gmail.com) and see the workshop website (
dmr2025.github.io).

DMR 2025 The 6th International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations To be held in beautiful Prague, Czechia, August 4-5, 2025, following ACL 2025 in Vienna, Austria. DMR 2025 invites the submissions of long and short papers about original works on the design, processing, and use of meaning representations. While deep learning methods have led to many breakthroughs in practical natural language applications, there is still a sense among many NLP researchers that we have a long way to go before we can develop systems that can actually “understand” human language and explain the decisions they make. Indeed, “understanding” natural language entails many different human-like capabilities, and they include but are not limited to the ability to track entities in a text, understand the relations between these entities, track events and their participants described in a text, understand how events unfold in time, and distinguish events that have actually happened from events that are planned or intended, are uncertain, or did not happen at all. We believe a critical step in achieving natural language understanding is to design meaning representations for text that have the necessary meaning “ingredients” that help us achieve these capabilities. Such meaning representations can also potentially be used to evaluate the compositional generalization capacity of deep learning models. There has been a growing body of research devoted to the design, annotation, and parsing of meaning representations in recent years. In particular, formal meaning representation frameworks such as Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) and Discourse Representation Theory are developed with the goal of supporting logical inference in reasoning-based AI systems and are therefore easily translatable into first-order logic, while other meaning representation frameworks such as Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), Tecto-grammatical Representation (TR) in Prague Dependency Treebanks and the Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA), put more emphasis on the representation of core predicate-argument structure. The automatic parsing of natural language text into these meaning representations and the generation of natural language text from these meaning representations are also very active areas of research, and a wide range of technical approaches and learning methods have been applied to these problems. DMR intends to bring together researchers who are producers and consumers of meaning representations and, through their interaction, gain a deeper understanding of the key elements of meaning representations that are the most valuable to the NLP community. The workshop will provide an opportunity for meaning representation researchers to present new frameworks and to critically examine existing frameworks with the goal of using their findings to inform the design of next-generation meaning representations. One particular goal is to understand the relationship between distributed meaning representations trained on large data sets using network models and the symbolic meaning representations that are carefully designed and annotated by NLP researchers, with an aim of gaining a deeper understanding of areas where each type of meaning representation is the most effective. The workshop solicits papers that address one or more of the following topics: - Development and annotation of meaning representations; - Challenges and techniques in leveraging meaning representations for downstream applications, including neuro-symbolic approaches; - The relationship between symbolic meaning representations and distributed semantic representations; - Issues in applying meaning representations to multilingual settings and lower-resourced languages; - Challenges and techniques in automatic parsing of meaning representations; - Challenges and techniques in automatically generating text from meaning representations; - Meaning representation evaluation metrics; - Cross-framework comparison of meaning representations and their formal properties; - Any other topics that address the design, processing, and use of meaning representations. Important dates: - Workshop papers due: April 21, 2025 - Notification of acceptance: June 16, 2025 - Camera-ready papers due: July 1, 2025 - Workshop date: August 4-5, 2025 All deadlines are 11:59pm UTC-12 ("anywhere on Earth"). Paper Submission and Templates We accept long papers (describing substantial original research) of up to eight (8) pages and short papers (making a small, focused contribution) of up to four (4) pages. If a paper is accepted, the authors will be given an additional page to address reviewers’ comments in the final version. The ethics statement (optional), limitations (optional), references, and appendices do not count against these limits. Long and short papers will be directly submitted via OpenReview at the following link: https://openreview.net/group?id=DMR/2025 Papers should adhere to the following guidelines (from ACL Rolling Review): - Instructions for Two-Way Anonymized Review <https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#instructions-for-two-way-anonymized-review> - Authorship <https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#authorship> - Citation and Comparison <https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#citation-and-comparison> - Ethics Policy <https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#ethics-policy> (although note that we do not require completion of the responsible NLP research checklist) Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available here <https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files> (Latex and Word). Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. Dual Submission Policy Dual submissions are allowed. Authors of papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information to the workshop co-chairs (dmr.workshop.2025@gmail.com). In your message, please list the names and dates of the conferences, workshops or meetings where you have submitted or plan to submit your paper in addition to DMR. Authors of accepted papers must notify the program chairs within 5 business days of acceptance if the paper is withdrawn for any reason. Other Questions If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the program co-chairs (dmr.workshop.2025@gmail.com) and see the workshop website ( dmr2025.github.io).