2nd Call for Papers ISA-17, 17th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation Full-day workshop at at IWCS 2021, Groningen (Netherlands), 14-18 May 2021 Submission date: April 2, 2021 Homepage: https://sigsem.uvt.nl/isa17/ Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/iwcs2021/ISA17/ DESCRIPTION: ISA-17 is the seventeenth edition of a series of joint workshops of the ACL Special Interest Group in Semantics (SIGSEM) and the International Organisation for Standardisation ISO. The first workshop in this series took part in conjunction with the IWCS 2003 conference in Tilburg (Netherlands); the latest editions were held as part of COLING 2018 in Santa Fé (New Mexico), of IWCS 2019 in Gothenburg, and of LREC 2020 in Marseille (canceled due to Covid-19). ISA workshops bring together experts in the annotation of semantic information as expressed in text, speech, gestures, graphics, video, images, and in multiple modalities combined. Examples of semantic annotation include the markup of events, time, space, motion, dialogue acts, discourse relations, semantic roles, coreference, and quantification phenomena, for which the ISO organisation pursues the establishment of standardized annotation methods and representation schemes, to support the creation of interoperable semantic resources. Besides a main track, ISA-17 will feature two specialized tracks, focused on (a) the annotation of quantification (and quantified modification) in natural language and (b) the design and representation of data structures for generating visualisations of linguistically represented objects, properties, and events. These topics are inspired by a recently started project on developing an ISO annotation standard for quantification (ISO/WD 24617-12) and a proposal for developing an ISO standard for the representation of visual information ('VoxML'). Both specialized tracks will consist of a pre-conference on-line portion and an on-site portion during the workshop. For the pre-conference on-line portion participants are invited to take part in a shared task, submitting their commented annotations and observations for a batch of example items that are provided with documentation and guidelines of the envisaged annotation and representation schemes. Quantification track: for the pre-conference on-line work, we make the current version of the QuantML annotation scheme and markup language available, under development as ISO Working Draft 24617-12, and a batch of example sentences. Participants in the shared task are asked to annotate as many of the example sentences as they can using QuantML, and to submit a short project note (up to 4 pages) covering the adequacy of the QuantML scheme and representations, of the annotation guidelines, problems encountered in annotating the example sentences or related examples, and optionally other properties that should be included, relations to recently proposed representations of quantification such as those in the Groningen MeaningBank or using AMR annotation or frame representation. These will be reviewed for presentation at the on-site portion of the workshop. Visual representation track: for the pre-conference on-line work, we supply a new VoxML annotation interface and a batch of images of objects and people participating in activities and events. Participants in the shared task of this track are asked to annotate as many of the images as they can using the provided tool, and to submit a short project note (up to 4 pages) covering the adequacy of the annotation guidelines, functionality of the annotation tool, properties observed in the raw image data while annotating, and optional deeper investigations into other things that would be interesting to annotate (other data, other properties we should have included, problems pertaining to standardization, etc.) These will be reviewed for presentation at he on-site portion of the workshop. For both tracks, annotators should attempt to follow the guidelines and stay within the provided vocabulary where possible, but are permitted to go outside if required. In this case, we ask that they summarily justify their additions or alternatives in their project note. The track organizers will provide feedback on submitted annotations, observations and analyses during the workshop. This will be followed by a discussion of the entire annotation effort, lessons learned (problems, gaps, suitability of results for ML, automated generation, etc), and the adequacy and expressiveness of the representation language. TOPICS OF INTEREST FOR SUBMISSIONS TO THE MAIN ISA-17 TRACK: Topics include, but are not limited to: * methodological aspects of semantic annotation * experiments in semantic annotation * context in semantic annotation * applications of semantic annotation * generating scenes from annotated text * events and participants in annotation and visualisation * uncertainty and ambiguity in annotations * combining annotations from different schemes * semantic annotation, interpretation, and inference * granularity in annotation schemes * evaluation and comparison of semantic annotations * semantic annotation in specialised domains * issues in the modelling of semantic information in specific areas, such as: - events, states, processes, circumstances, facts - space, motion events and 3D objects as participants - modality, factuality, polarity and negation - quantification and modification - relations in discourse and dialogue - referential relations - attribution, sentiment, attitudes, and emotions SUBMISSION DETAILS: The following types of submission are invited: 1. Research papers, describing original research in the area of semantic annotation; these can be either: a. long (6-8 pages, with additional pages for references) or b. short (3-5 pages plus references); 2. Project notes: a. describing recent, ongoing or planned projects involving semantic annotation (2-4 pages including references); b. discussing observations and analyses relating to the participation in the shared task of one of the specialized tracks (up to 4 pp). Submission of papers is in PDF form through the ISA-17 submission site: https://www.softconf.com/iwcs2021/ISA17/ All submitted papers should be formatted using the IWCS 2021 style files, with a strong preference for the LaTeX version -- see https://iwcs2021.github.io/call_for_papers.html . IMPORTANT DATES: Submissions to the main track (submission types 1a,1b,2a): April 2 Notification of acceptance: April 18 Camera-ready material: May 7 Submissions to the specialised tracks (annotations and submissions type 2b): April 21 ORGANISING COMMITTEE: Harry Bunt Nancy Ide Kiyong Lee Volha Petukhova James Pustejovsky Laurent Romary Ielka van der Sluis MORE INFORMATION For the latest information see the workshop page at https://sigsem.uvt.nl/isa17/; for any questions contact the workshop chair Harry Bunt (harry.bunt@uvt.nl<mailto:harry.bunt@uvt.nl><mailto:harry.bunt@uvt.nl>).