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==None==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1983/nl4ai_preface.pdf
Introduction to the First Workshop on Natural
Language for Artificial Intelligence
Pierpaolo Basile1 , Danilo Croce2 , Marco Guerini3
1
University of Bari Aldo Moro
pierpaolo.basile@uniba.it
2
University of Roma, Tor Vergata
croce@info.uniroma2.it
3
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento
guerini@fbk.eu
Natural Language Processing plays a relevant role in current AI research, as
target of different scientific and industrial interests. At the same time, several
recent AI achievements have shown their beneficial impact on applications in
linguistic modelling, processing and generation. Therefore, Natural Language
Processing is still a rich research topic, whose cross-fertilization with AI spans a
number of independent areas such as Cognitive Computing, Robotics as well as
Human-Computer Interaction. For AI, Natural Languages are the research focus
of paradigms and applications but, at the same time, they act as cornerstones
of automation, autonomy and learnability for most intelligent tasks. Such tasks
range from Computer Vision, to Planning and Social Behavior analysis, up to
more imponderable cognitive phenomena such as creativity. A reflection about
such diverse and promising interactions is an important target for current AI
studies, fully in the core mission of AI*IA. Still, we also believe this area is
not only “populated” of scientific and technological challenges. In fact, we trust
that at the crossroad between NLP and AI, new technological paradigms rise:
the resulting methodologies and technologies can change our reality and their
societal impact has not yet been fully-fledged.
Given these premises, the goal of the workshop “Natural Language for Ar-
tificial Intelligence” (NL4AI) is to provide a meeting forum for stimulating and
disseminating research where researchers (especially those affiliated with Italian
institutions) can network and discuss their results in an informal way4 . NL4AI-
2017 was the 1st edition of this workshop, it took place on November 16th and
17th, at the Department of Computer Science of University of Bari, Italy. We
acknowledge AILC, the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics, that
supported the invitation of Carlo Strapparava who, as invited speaker to the
workshop, gave the talk entitled “Computational explorations of creative lan-
guage”.
The contributions to the workshop covered several of the aforementioned
topics, even more than one at a time, showing the interdependencies among
them. Here below we briefly review the contributions in light of such topics.
For example, the area of creativity - where cognition, knowledge represen-
tation and language collide - is addressed in Valitutti and Novielli, that focuses
4
http://sag.art.uniroma2.it/NL4AI
1
on the use of irony, or in Lombardo et al. that addresses the problem of dramatic
texts annotation.
The area of Human-Computer Interaction - where user interaction, rea-
soning and language generation intersect - is covered by two papers. In Anselma
and Mazzei reasoning and language generation are exploited for supporting users
in their dietary choices, while Zanzotto et al. propose a framework for program-
ming chatbots for communication experts and artists.
Other works are devoted to knowledge extraction from texts, in order to
enable complex inference tasks. Montagnuolo et al. presents the results of the
project “La Città Educante” (carried out by RAI) aiming at creating statistical
models for automatic document categorization and named entity recognition,
both acting in the educational field and in Italian language. At the same time,
Lombardo et al. address the problem of metadata annotation - for dramatic
texts. Metadata for drama describe the dramatic qualities of a text, connecting
them with the linguistic expressions. Relying on an ontological representation
of the dramatic qualities, the paper presents an annotation environment for the
creation of a corpus of annotated texts.
The problem of representing ontological information is discussed in Bianchi
and Polmonari where the authors focus on a method for representing entities and
their types in a joint vector space for analogical reasoning. A shallower, more
linguistic related information is presented in Valitutti and Novielli, to address
the problem of recognizing irony and sarcasm in short texts. In particular it
presents and evaluate two specific measures, i.e. polarity divergence and polar-
ity dimorphism.
Other works investigate the relation between Natural language processing
tasks and complex inference tasks, ranging from Question Answering to Dia-
logue Management. Madotto and Attardi address these tasks by exploiting a
neural network architecture, which is a form of Memory Network, that recognizes
entities and their relations to answers through a focus attention mechanism.
Moreover, the paper by Anselma and Mazzei describes a project involving
automatic reasoning and natural language generation in the domain of diet
management. The main issues related to the automatic reasoning mechanisms for
diet management are reported and the message generation techniques, designed
to support the users in managing their dietary choices, are presented.
Finally, Zanzotto et al. propose a framework to support the definition and
implementation of conversational agents. This paper refers to a linguistic the-
ory, i.e. Frame Semantics, to enhance the linguistic capability of conversational
agents in a collaborative ecosystem.
As a final remark, the program co-chairs would like to thank all the members
of the Program Committee (see below) as well as the local organizers of the
AI*IA 2017 Conference5 .
– Agnese Augello - ICAR-CNR, Palermo
– Valerio Basile - INRIA, France
5
http://aiia2017.di.uniba.it/index.php/organizers/
2
– Roberto Basili - University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy
– Cristina Bosco - Università di Torino, Italy
– Elena Cabrio - INRIA, France
– Berardina Nadja De Carolis - Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
– Mauro Dragoni - FBK, Trento
– Simone Filice - University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy
– Marco Gori - Università di Siena, Italy
– Bernardo Magnini - FBK, Trento
– Alessandro Mazzei - Università di Torino, Italy
– Alessandro Moschitti - University of Trento, Italy
– Daniele Nardi - Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
– Malvina Nissim - Università di Bologna, Italy
– Nicole Novielli - Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
– Viviana Patti - Università di Torino, Italy
– Giovanni Pilato - ICAR-CNR, Palermo
– Elisa Ricci - FBK, Trento
– Marco Rospocher - FBK, Trento
– Giovanni Semeraro - Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
– Rachele Sprugnoli - FBK, Trento
– Carlo Strapparava - FBK, Trento
– Sara Tonelli - FBK, Trento
– Serena Villata - INRIA, France
– Fabio Massimo Zanzotto - University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy
3