Publikation
Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language
Manuel Alcántara-Plá; Thierry Declerck (Hrsg.)
International Workshop on the Semantic Representation of Spoken Language (SRSL-09), located at 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, March 30, Athens, Greece, EACL, 4/2009.
Zusammenfassung
We are delighted to present you with this volume containing the papers accepted for presentation at
the SRSL 2009, the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language, held in Athens,
Greece, on March 30th 2009.
The aim of the SRSL 2009 workshop is to bring together researchers interested in the semantic
representation of spoken corpora, especially spontaneous speech. On one hand, the semantic gap between
contents conveyed by natural languages and their formal representations is a burning aspect in tasks such
as information extraction and corpus annotation. The current state-of-the-art supports solutions from
very different backgrounds and perspectives, but still remain important and complex issues to deal with,
such as the accurate segmentation of speech in semantic units. The discussion of those aspects are
one of the main reasons for this workshop. On the other hand, spoken language is a pending issue
in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, both traditionally focused on written language,
although semantic processing of speech is necessary for the understanding of both natural and humanmachine
interaction. Finally, the problems found when trying to linguistically structure spontaneous
speech are leading to works focused on its semantic representation. In-depth research on the semantic
representation of speech can provide us with a suitable basis for further analysis of related linguistic
levels, like prosody or pragmatics.
This event is a highly collaborative effort and we are grateful to all those who helped us construct the
program: the authors for submitting their research results; the reviewers for delivering their reviews
and discussing them whenever there was some disagreement; and the EACL 2009 organizers for their
support.