This is funding to support approximately 40 attendees in a workshop to be held at the University of Maryland Inn and Conference Center on April 14-15, 2005. Participants will be a mixture of researchers who are developing representations of the semantics of a text, and those developing applications such as machine translation and summarization systems, as well as knowledge-based inferencing and analysis applications such as Social Network Analysis. The goal of the meeting is to create a representation that would serve as input to these applications. Workshop participants will model the problem as an extended exercise in extracting information elements from a "document" (that is, from language communication which may have been written or spoken). There are two broad questions that attendees hope to answer: (a) what are the elements of knowledge that can be derived from a document, and (b) can the representation, and hence, the annotation, be laid out in terms of iterative layers, the accumulation of which would represent the sum of the knowledge? Thus, the workshop outcome will be creation of a "road map" for building up representations over the long term, which will get richer as the community learns to exploit more of the information content.
Broader Impacts: The government has an interest in using a unified representation rather than a set of individual representations. The Intelligence Community, DARPA, and NSF have funded a number of efforts towards the annotation of meaning representations in the past few years; this workshop is an attempt to pull this expertise together to produce a unified approach.
