[Corpora-List] CFP: Workshop on The Lexicon and Figurative Language at ACL 2003, Sapporo, Japan

[Alan M Wallington]

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                                Workshop on

                     The Lexicon and Figurative Language

                        July 11 2003, Sapporo, Japan

                http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~amw/ACLWorkshop.html

                Post-Conference Workshop as part of ACL 2003

                      http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/

                               Call for Papers

Workshop Description

The problem of word-sense disambiguation is currently one of the central
concerns of natural language processing. However, it is becoming
increasingly apparent that WordNet type approaches that list the different
polysemous senses of a word without saying anything about how they relate to
each other lead to considerable problems. Novel uses of words occur
frequently and the problem is particularly acute when figurative language is
being used. Figurative language is pervasive in normal discourse, but the
source meaning of a word being used metaphorically is often far removed from
the intended, target, meaning.

One possibility is not to just list all the different senses but to have
fewer senses and employ a different mechanism for generating new senses and
treating the relations between them. The Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky
1995) assumes a structure to the lexicon and much richer representations
that determine how different senses combine in context. Whilst some success
has been achieved with some of the more simple cases of metonymy, the
question of how well the approach copes with metaphor is open to debate.
Furthermore, the distinction between metonymy and metaphor is not always
easy to make.

An alternative would be to treat computationally the claim from Cognitive
Linguistics that metaphor is not a matter of linguistic expression. Instead,
the meanings of many different words are best related in terms of an
underlying conceptual metaphor. However, if metaphor is a cognitive rather
than a linguistic phenomenon, and word senses are related solely in terms of
their underlying conceptual domains, then this implies that there need be no
structure specifically in the lexicon. Instead the lexicon can be a list of
items, but metaphorical extensions of words would not be listed as a matter
of course. The list approach is compatible with WordNet approaches, but puts
the approach in conflict with that of the generative lexicon, and so the
question is raised as to how much structure is needed in the lexicon in
order to cope with figurative language.

We therefore have three different approaches to the lexicon and the problems
that figurative language poses for word-sense disambiguation, and the major
theme of this workshop is to explore means for tackling these problems,
particularly means that could be used in practical NLP applications.

However, papers that computationally address other aspects of figurative
language will also be welcomed. In particular, since word meanings do not
come marked with the information that they are metaphorical, metonymical, or
not, papers that address the issue of how to distinguish literal from
non-literal language will be very welcome, especially if this can be done
automatically. Likewise, much work on figurative language has relied on
intuitions and handcrafted relations, and in this respect research on
figurative language has lagged behind recent work in the rest of
computational linguistics. Consequently, there is an urgent need for
computational corpus studies of figurative language.

The relationship between discourse issues and figurative language, such as
the interaction of anaphora and metonymy has been addressed in the past, but
more studies are needed using other types of figurative language such as
metaphor. Indeed the issue of how metaphor and metonymy relate to each other
may benefit from computational study. There has been some work (notably by
Dan Fass and Jerry Hobbs) on bringing them into a common computational
framework, but this is largely with the aim of coping with mixtures rather
helping with the other problems.

Submission

Please submit full papers of maximum 8 pages (including references, figures
etc). Authors should follow the main conference ACL style format. Electronic
submission only. As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include
the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that
reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991)
...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to the requirements
above are subject to be rejected without review

Send the pdf, postscript, or MS Word form of your submission to: Alan
Wallington (A.M.Wallington at cs.bham.ac.uk ), who will also answer any queries
regarding the submission.

Important Dates

   * Submission deadline for workshop papers: 13 April 2003
   * Notification of accepted papers:  14 May 2003
   * Deadline for camera ready copies:  29 May 2003
   * Workshop date: 11 July 2003

Workshop Organizers

 John Barnden     School of Computer Science  J.A.Barnden at cs.bham.ac.uk
                  University of Birmingham
                  Birmingham B15 2TT
                  U.K.
 Sheila Glasbey   School of Computer Science  S.R.Glasbey at cs.bham.ac.uk
                  University of Birmingham
                  Birmingham B15 2TT
                  U.K.
 Mark Lee         School of Computer Science  M.G.Lee at cs.bham.ac.uk
                  University of Birmingham
                  Birmingham B15 2TT
                  U.K.
 Alan Wallington  School of Computer Science  A.M.Wallington at cs.bham.ac.uk
                  University of Birmingham
                  Birmingham B15 2TT
                  U.K.

Program Committee

   * John Barnden: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK.
   * Tony Berber Sardinha: LAEL, Catholic University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
   * Dan Fass: School of Computing Science and the Centre for Systems
     Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada.
   * Josef van Genabith: Computer Applications Department, Dublin City
     University, Ireland.
   * Sheila Glasbey: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham,
     UK.
   * Adam Kilgarriff: Information technology Research Institute, University
     of Brighton, UK.
   * Mark Lee: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK.
   * Katja Markert: Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh, UK.
   * James Martin: Department of Computer Science and the Institute of
     Cognitive Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.
   * Alan Wallington: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham,
     UK.
   * Tony Veale: Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin,
     Ireland.
   * Carl Vogel: Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin,
     Ireland.
   * Yorick Wilks: Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield,
     UK.

Further Information

Alan Wallington
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B152TT,
UK.

phone: (+44)(0)121 4142795
email: A.M.Wallington at cs.bham.ac.uk
fax: (+44) (0)121 4144281