17.3071, Calls: Computational Ling, Discourse Anayslsis/USA; General Ling/USA

Thu Oct 19 15:17:10 UTC 2006

LINGUIST List: Vol-17-3071. Thu Oct 19 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.3071, Calls: Computational Ling, Discourse Anayslsis/USA; General Ling/USA

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1)
Date: 17-Oct-2006
From: Xiaofei Lu < xxl13 at psu.edu >
Subject: Computational Approaches to Figurative Language 

2)
Date: 17-Oct-2006
From: Aviad Eilam < plc31 at babel.ling.upenn.edu >
Subject: 31st Penn Linguistics Colloquium 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:14:55
From: Xiaofei Lu < xxl13 at psu.edu >
Subject: Computational Approaches to Figurative Language 

Full Title: Computational Approaches to Figurative Language 

Date: 26-Apr-2007 - 26-Apr-2007
Location: Rochester, NY, USA 
Contact Person: Xiaofei Lu
Meeting Email: xxl13 at psu.edu
Web Site: http://chss3.montclair.edu/linguistics/lingpage/faculty/feldman/FigLang2007 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis 

Call Deadline: 18-Jan-2007 

Meeting Description:

Figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms, among others, is in abundance in natural discourse. The recognition of figurative language use and the computation of figurative language meaning constitute one of the hardest problems for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, and question answering. As natural language processing moves to an unprecedented new stage, it has become more urgent than ever to tackle the bottleneck presented by figurative language. 

This workshop will provide a venue for researchers in this area to inform  each other and the natural language processing community at large of the state of the art of current systems and to reach a better understanding of the new issues and challenges that need to be tackled. This workshop will be held in conjunction with HLT/NAACL 2007. 

Workshop in conjunction with HLT/NAACL 2007
To be held in Rochester, NY, April 26, 2007

Figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms, personification, simile among others, is in abundance in natural discourse. It is an effective apparatus to heighten effect and convey various meanings, such as humor, irony, sarcasm, affection, etc. Figurative language can be found not only in fiction, but also in everyday speech, newspaper articles, research papers, and even technical reports. The recognition of figurative language use and the computation of figurative language meaning constitute one of the hardest problems for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, and question answering. Resolution of this problem involves both a solid understanding of the distinction between literal and non-literal language and the development of effective computational models that can make the appropriate semantic interpretation automatically.

As natural language processing moves to an unprecedented new stage, it has become more urgent than ever to tackle the bottleneck presented by figurative language. There has been an increasing amount of work in this area in the past few years (e.g. theoretical semantic/pragmatic analyses of non-compositional phenomena, research on psychological/neuro-linguistic modeling of figurative language comprehension and production, research on the structure of the lexicon, knowledge representation and figurative language comprehension, domain-specific figurative language detection, computational corpus studies of figurative language), but much more work needs to be done (e.g. large-scale automatic figurative language detection, automatic extraction of idioms and non-compositional phrases from large corpora, automatic semantic interpretation of figurative language, automatic figurative language generation, machine translation of non-literal phenomena, etc.). The goal of this workshop is to provide a venue for researchers in this area to inform each other and the natural language processing community at large of the state of the art of current systems and to reach a better understanding of the new issues and challenges that need to be tackled.

The workshop is intended to be highly interdisciplinary. We encourage the participation of people whose research deals with figurative language from different perspectives, including (but not limited to) applied linguistics, psychology, corpus linguistics, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, etc. 

Topics covered by the workshop include, but are not limited to:

(1) Computational models of figurative language processing, including:
    - extracting idioms and non-compositional phrases from large
      corpora;
    - classifying metaphoric/non-metaphoric and humorous/non-humorous
      language use;
    - computing non-literal meaning;
    - multilingual or cross-lingual processing of figurative language;
    - computational modeling of human figurative language
      comprehension and production.

(2) Psychological models of figurative language processing, including:
    - figurative language comprehension;
    - figurative language production;
    - figurative language acquisition.

(3) Corpus-driven studies of figurative language, including:
    - corpus-based studies of figurative aspects of any language;
    - corpus-based studies of specific linguistic cues for figurative language;
    - effects of domain and genre on studies of figurative language;
    - annotation of non-literal phenomena in corpora.

(4) Theoretical discussions on literal and non-literal language, including discussions on:
    - the distinction between literal and non-literal language;
    - the distinction between different types of figurative language;
    - cross-linguistic differences of figurative language.

(5) Lexical and ontological resources for figurative language processing, including:
    - representation of non-literal meaning in lexicons and ontologies;
    - development of new lexical resources for figurative language processing.

(6) Evaluation of figurative language processing in large-scale NLP systems, such as machine translation, Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL), question answering, dialogue systems, etc. 

The emphasis of the workshop is on computational approaches to figurative language. We particularly are interested in submissions that deal with figurative language in the context of Machine Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation, Information Extraction, Document Retrieval, Dialogue Systems, Intelligent Tutoring systems, etc.

Workshop Home Page: 

http://chss3.montclair.edu/linguistics/lingpage/faculty/feldman/FigLang2007

Paper Submission:

Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Papers are limited to 8 pages. Submissions should use the style files available on the main HLT/NAACL2007 conference web site. No author information should be included in the papers since reviewing will be blind. Papers not conforming to these requirements are subject to rejection without review. Papers should be submitted via START, which will become available at the following website in the near future: 

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/workshops.shtml.

Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: January 18, 2007
Notification of acceptance for papers: February 22, 2007
Camera ready papers due: March 1, 2007
Workshop Date: April 26, 2007

Organizers:

Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University (xxl13 AT psu.edu)
Anna Feldman, Montclair State University (feldmana AT mail.montclair.edu)

Program Committee:

Chris Brew, The Ohio State University
Afsaneh Fazly, University of Toronto, Canada
Eileen Fitzpatrick, Montclair State University
Sam Glucksberg, Princeton University
Sid Horton, Northwestern University
Diana Inkpen, University of Ottawa, Canada
Kevin Knight, USC/Information Sciences Institute
Mark Lee, The University of Birmingham, UK
Katja Markert, The University of Edinburgh, UK
Detmar Meurers, The Ohio State University
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
Andrew Ortony, Northwestern University
Wim Peters, University of Sheffield, UK
Vasile Rus, The University of Memphis
Richard Sproat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain
Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto, Canada
Carlo Strapparava, Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Trento, Italy

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:15:00
From: Aviad Eilam < plc31 at babel.ling.upenn.edu >
Subject: 31st Penn Linguistics Colloquium 

Full Title: 31st Penn Linguistics Colloquium 
Short Title: PLC 

Date: 23-Feb-2007 - 25-Feb-2007
Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA 
Contact Person: Aviad Eilam
Meeting Email: plc31 at babel.ling.upenn.edu
Web Site: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/ 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2006 

Meeting Description:

The 31st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium 

The 31st Penn Linguistics Colloquium
2nd Call for Papers

The 31st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium will take place February 23-25, 2007
at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Keynote Speaker:
Harald Clahsen
University of Essex
''Psycholinguistic studies of grammatical representation:
Evidence from acquisition, processing, and disorders''

Special Session:
''Integrating Models of Language Change''

Papers on any topic in linguistics and associated fields are welcome. We particularly encourage submissions for work done on the topic of the special session.

Speakers will have 20 minutes for their presentations and 5 minutes for discussion and questions.

Deadline: Abstracts are due by Wednesday, November 15, 2006. Notification of
acceptance/rejection will be given on Monday, January 15, 2007.

Length: Please limit abstracts to one page, single- or double-spaced, using 1''
margins on all sides and 11pt font size. An additional page may be used for
examples, references and tables. Do not include your name or affiliation within the abstract.

Abstract submission will be done online, on the PLC website:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/. Follow the instructions under ''Abstract Submission''. When submitting your abstract, please specify whether you would like to be considered for the general sessions or the special session. Submissions must be in PDF format.

Proceedings: Conference proceedings will be published as a volume of the Penn
Working Papers in Linguistics. Speakers will be invited to provide camera-ready
copies of their papers after the Colloquium.

For More Information:
Email plc31 at babel.ling.upenn.edu
Visit http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/

Penn Linguistics Colloquium
Department of Linguistics
619 Williams Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

This event is supported by funding from GSAC, the Graduate Student Association
Council of the University of Pennsylvania.

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