Call for Papers --- Special Issue on Multiword Expressions (CSL)

[bond at cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp]

G'day,

  due to numerous requests, the deadline for submissions has been
moved back to the 5th of June.

I apologize if you receive this message multiple times.

Francis Bond

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Call for Papers:

 Journal of Computer Speech and Language

 Special Issue on Multiword Expressions

 Guest editors:

 Aline Villavicencio  (University of Cambridge, UK)
 Francis Bond       (NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan)
 Anna Korhonen      (University of Cambridge, UK)
 Diana McCarthy     (University of Sussex, UK)

Multiword expressions (MWEs) include a large range of linguistic
phenomena, such as phrasal verbs (e.g. "add up"), nominal compounds
(e.g. "telephone box"), and institutionalized phrases (e.g. "salt and
pepper"), and they can be syntactically and/or semantically
idiosyncratic in nature. MWEs are used frequently in everyday language,
usually to express precisely ideas and concepts that cannot be
compressed into a single word.

A considerable amount of research has been devoted to this subject, both
in terms of theory and practice, but despite increasing interest in
idiomaticity within linguistic research, there is still a gap between
the needs of natural language processing (NLP) and the descriptive
tradition of linguistics. Most real-world applications tend to ignore
MWEs or address them simply by listing. However, it is clear that
successful applications will need to be able to identify and treat them
more appropriately.

In recent years there has been a growing awareness in the NLP community
of the problems that MWEs pose and the need for their robust handling.
This special issue of Computer Speech and Language, due for publication
in 2005, will be devoted to the acquisition, identification and
treatment of MWEs. We invite papers adopting a quantitive approach to
the following aspects of MWE research:

* Extraction of MWEs:

There has been considerable research into extraction of lists of some
multiword expressions and collocations of certain types, such as noun
noun compounds, institutionalised expressions and verb particle
constructions. Papers which explore the benefits and weaknesses of
methods across different MWE types, and across different languages are
particularly welcome. Also, we encourage papers where the extraction is
not limited to an enumeration of MWEs of a given type, but permits some
sort of subcategorization or analysis of the syntactic or semantic
properties of the expression.

* Evaluation of extracted MWEs:

To date researchers have tended to evaluate MWE extraction by exploiting
available man-made lexical resources or using manual annotation of
either the input data or the automatically extracted lists. There is
considerable scope for proposals of standard evaluation metrics, test
and training data and for task-based evaluation.

* Identification of MWEs:

Whilst there has been considerable research on extraction, less
attention has been paid to determining if a candidate multiword token is
in fact a genuine multiword, or simply a regular compositional
occurrence of the words that can comprise a multiword e.g. "She looked
up the road" vs "She looked up his telephone number".

* The benefits of MWE identification and treatment for applications:

Papers are encouraged which expose the problems that MWEs pose for
specific applications and solutions to these problems.

Submission Information:

Deadline for paper submissions: June 5, 2004

All submissions will be subject to the normal peer review process for
this journal.
We recommend that papers do not exceed 15 pages, and they must conform
to the Computer Speech and Language specifications, which are available
at http://authors.elsevier.com/journal/csl. Submission are to be done
electronically, by sending the paper to both: the editors, mailing
mwe-editors at cl.cam.ac.uk, and the journal, using the on-line submission
facility in http://authors.elsevier.com/journal/csl .

Any queries should be addressed to mwe-editors at cl.cam.ac.uk .


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--
Francis Bond  <www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/icl/mtg/members/bond/>
NTT Communication Science Laboratories | Machine Translation Research Group