Schedule:

   12:30pm Lunch at the   University of Maryland Visitor Center 
    (also known as "The Dairy" and "Turner Hall")  
      - Map (see square H-4/5)
      - Directions to campus

   2:00pm  Maria Katsova, LCS-Based Cross-Language Information Retrieval
           (abstract below)


   3:00pm  Amy Weinberg, Levin on the Lexicon: Evidence from 
           Language Acquisition (abstract below)

   4:00pm  BREAK


   4:15pm  Martha Palmer,  SIGLEX/Senseval Summary

Maria Katsova and Bonnie Dorr: "LCS-Based Cross-Language Information Retrieval"

This paper describes experiments for testing the power of large-scale resources for lexical selection in machine translation (MT) and cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). We adopt the view that verbs with similar argument structure share certain meaning components, but we show that those meaning components are more relevant to argument realization than to idisoyncratic verb meaning. We verify this by demonstrating that verbs with similar argument structure as encoded in Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) are rarely synonymous in WordNet. We then use the results of this work to guide our implementation of an algorithm for cross-language selection of lexical items, exploiting the strengths of each resource: LCS for semantic structure and WordNet for semantic content. We use the Parka Knowledge-Based System to encode LCS representations and WordNet synsets and we implement our lexical-selection algorithm as Parka-based queries into a common knowledge base containing both information types.

Amy Weinberg: "Levin on the Lexicon: Evidence from Language Acquisition"

In this paper I discuss Levin and Rappaport's model of the relationship between aspectual class and argument arrays and provide some support for this approach based on evidence from language acquisition. If time permits, I will discuss the relevance of this type of evidence for purely denotational theories of the lexicon such as those of Fodor and Lepore. I will argue that acquisition evidence suggests that children are sensitive to the complexity of lexical representations and not simply to their denotations.

For the colloquium series schedule, see the UMD Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series web page at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/cl_colloquium/. If you are interested in meeting with the speaker, please contact Mari Broman Olsen (molsen@umiacs.umd.edu) or Philip Resnik (resnik@umiacs.umd.edu).