Corpora: ACL'01 Worshop on Collocation

[Beatrice Daille]

WORKSHOP ON COLLOCATION

Computational Extraction, Analysis and Exploitation

ACL'2001 Conference
Toulouse, France
July 7th, 2001

We invite papers on topics relating to the theme of collocation and more
particularly their
computational extraction, analysis and exploitation. This workshop
follows the French
ATALA workshop on collocation which took place in Paris, France on
January 2001 and
seeks to go forward so as to explore the wider perspective of
computational linguistics.

The term "collocation" was introduced in the nineteen thirties by J. R.
Firth, founder
member of the British Contextualist school, to characterise certain
linguistic phenomena
of cooccurrence that stem principally from the linguistic competence of
native speakers
(Firth 1957). By its very nature collocation remains a relatively fuzzy
concept, the
consequence of which being that traditional grammarians and semanticists
have tended to
ignore it, the exception being some lexical semanticists as Cruse
(1986). The study of
collocation is above all a practical one aimed at assisting language
learners and
translators in their tasks.

Essentially idiomatic in nature, collocation defies rigid formalisation
which explains the
existence of different schools of thought between those seeking a
descriptive
contextualised view of linguistic phenomena and those who seeks
formalised applications
for translation, lexicography or computational purposes. This has led to
a variety of
approaches based around a general core meaning for the phenomenon.

For several years, NLP has been concerned with collocation largely
through the following
fields:

       Formalisation through specialised formalisms for different NLP
tasks: dictionary
       formalism such as lexical function; HPSG, LFG, TAG, ...
formalisms for analysis
       or generation.
       Extraction from monolingual or bilingual texts or dictionairies
using either raw
       statistics or statistics combined with linguistic information
such as
       part-of-speech or grammar dependancy.
       Exploitation through specific NLP systems dedicated to second
language learning
       or translation, or for such NLP tasks as information retrieval or
thematic
       structuration.

This workshop aims to guage the extend to which the role of collocation
as a phenomenon
in applied linguistics is now being taken into account in formal
linguistics and NLP and
addresses the following topics (not limitative):

       Formal description of collocation through existing or  dedicated
specialised
       formalisms
       New methods adopted for the identification of collocations. This
would  include
       statistics and also more linguistic oriented methods.
       NLP systems dedicated to collocation.
       Exploitation of collocations for other NLP tasks through
monolingual or
       multilingual environments.

This workshop addresses researchers in all fields of theoretical and
applied computational
linguistics and most particularly those working in automatic and
assisted machine
translation, dictionnary building and computationally assisted language
teaching as well
as those concerned with information retrieval and text mining.


ORGANIZERS

       Béatrice Daille     IRIN - University of Nantes, France -
       daille at irin.univ-nantes.fr
       Geoffrey Williams     CRELLIC - University of Bretagne-Sud,
France -
       Geoffrey.Williams at univ-ubs.fr

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

       Jeremy Clear, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Birmingham
       Pernilla Danielsson, TELRI
       Chris Gledhill, University of St Andrews
       Syvain Kahane,  LaTTiCe/TALaNa
       Marie-Claude L'Homme, University of Montreal
       Julia Pajzs, Hungarian Academy of Science
       Antoinette Renouf, University of Liverpool
       Alain Polguère, OLST - University of Montreal
       Laurent Romary, LORIA
       Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy - RACAI
       Jean Véronis, University of Provence
       Leo Wanner, University of Stuttgart


SCHEDULE

Workshop paper submissions
       April 8, 2001
Notification of acceptance
       April 30, 2001
Deadline for camera-ready papers
       May 13, 2001

WORKSHOP DATE

July 7th, 2001

SUBMISSION FORMAT AND INSTRUCTIONS

Submissions must be in English, no more than 8 pages long, and in the
two-column format
prescribed by ACL'2001. Please see http://acl2001.dfki.de/style/ for the
detailed
guidelines; however, please put the authors' names, rather than a paper
id, since
reviewing will not be
blind. Submissions should be sent electronically in either Word, pdf, or
postscript format
(only) no later than April 8, 2001 to: Béatrice Daille
daille at irin.univ-nantes.fr