21.633, Calls: Cognitive Science, Computational Ling, Lexicography/China

Sun Feb 7 22:59:41 UTC 2010

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-633. Sun Feb 07 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.633, Calls: Cognitive Science, Computational Ling, Lexicography/China

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1)
Date: 05-Feb-2010
From: Michael Zock < michael.zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr >
Subject: Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:56:14
From: Michael Zock [michael.zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr]
Subject: Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon

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Full Title: Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon 
Short Title: Cogalex-2 

Date: 22-Aug-2010 - 22-Aug-2010
Location: Beijing, China 
Contact Person: Michael Zock
Meeting Email: michael.zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr
Web Site: http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-2.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; General
Linguistics; Lexicography; Neurolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 30-May-2010 

Meeting Description:

Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (Cogalex-2)
2nd SIGLEX endorsed COLING Workshop (August 22, 2010, Beijing)
http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-2.html 

First Call for Papers

Submission deadline: May 30, 2010

Aims and Target Audience
The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers involved in the
construction and application of electronic dictionaries to discuss modifications
of existing resources in line with the users' needs, thereby fully exploiting
the advantages of the digital form. Given the breadth of the questions, we
welcome reports on work from many perspectives, including but not limited to:
computational lexicography, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, language
learning and ergonomics.

Motivation
Whenever we read a book, write a letter or launch a query on a search engine, we
always use words, the shorthand labels and concrete forms of abstract notions
(concepts, ideas and more or less well specified thoughts). Yet, words are not
only vehicles to express thoughts, they are also means to conceive them. They
are mediators between language and thought, allowing us to move quickly from 
one idea to another, refining, expanding or illustrating our possibly
underspecified thoughts. Only words have these unique capabilities, which is why
they are so important.

Obviously, a good dictionary should contain many entries and a lot of
information associated with each one of them. Yet, the quality of a dictionary
depends not only on coverage, but also on accessibility of information. Access
strategies vary with the task (text understanding vs. text production) and the
knowledge available at the moment of consultation (word, concept, speech
sounds). Unlike readers who look for meanings, writers start from them,
searching for the corresponding words. While paper dictionaries are static,
permitting only limited strategies for accessing information, their electronic
counterparts promise dynamic, proactive search via multiple criteria (meaning,
sound, related words) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes place in a
huge conceptual lexical space, and the results are displayable in a multitude of
forms (e.g. as trees, as lists, as graphs, or sorted alphabetically, by topic,
by frequency).

Many lexicographers work nowadays with huge digital corpora, using language
technology to build and to maintain the lexicon. But access to the potential
wealth of information in dictionaries remains limited for the common user. Yet,
the new possibilities of electronic media in terms of comfort, speed and
flexibility (multiple inputs, polyform outputs) are enormous. Computational
resources are not prone to 
the same limitations as paperbound dictionaries. The latter were limited in
scope, being confined to a specific task (translation, synonyms, ...) due to
economical reasons, but this limitation is not justified anymore.

Today we can perform all tasks via one single resource, which may comprise
a dictionary, a thesaurus and even more. The goal of this workshop is to perform
the groundwork for the next generation of electronic dictionaries, that is, to
study the possibility of integrating the different resources, as well as to
explore the feasibility of taking the user's needs, knowledge and access
strategies into account.

Topics
For this workshop we invite papers including but not limited to the following
topics:

- Conceptual input of a dictionary user. What is in the authors' minds when they
are generating a message and looking for a word? Do they start from partial
definitions, i.e. underspecified input (bag of words), conceptual primitives,
semantically related words, something akin to synsets, or something completely
different? What does it take to bridge the gap between this input, incomplete as
it may be, and the desired output (target word)?

- Organizing the lexicon and indexing words. Concepts, words and multi-word
expressions can be organized and indexed in many ways, depending on the task and
language type. For example, in Indo-European languages words are traditionally
organized in alphabetical order, whereas in Chinese they are organized by
semantic radicals and stroke counts. The way words and multi-word expressions
are stored and organized affects indexing and access. Since knowledge states
(i.e. knowledge available when initiating search) vary greatly and in
unpredictable ways, indexing must allow for multiple ways of navigation and
access. Hence the question: what organizational principles allow the greatest
flexibility for access?

- Access, navigation and search strategies based on various entry types
(modalities) and knowledge states. Words are composed of meanings, forms and
sounds. Hence, access should be possible via any of these components: via
meanings (bag of words), via forms, simple or compound ('hot, dog' vs.
'hot-dog'), and via sounds (syllables). Access should even be possible, if input
is given in an incomplete, imprecise or degraded form. Furthermore, to allow for
natural and efficient access, we need to take the users' knowledge into account
(search space reduction) and provide adequate navigational tools, metaphorically
speaking, a map and a compass. How do existing tools address these needs, and
what could be done to go further?

- NLP applications: Contributors can also demonstrate how such enhanced
dictionaries, once embedded in existing NLP applications, can boost performance
and help solve lexical and textual-entailment problems, such as those evaluated
in SEMEVAL 2007, or, more generally, generation problems encountered in the
context of summarization, question-answering, interactive paraphrasing or
translation.

Important Dates
- Deadline for paper submissions: May 30, 2010
- Notification of acceptance:  June 30, 2010
- Camera-ready papers due: July 10, 2010
- Cogalex workshop:  August 22, 2010

Submission Instructions
Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work on any of the topic
areas of the workshop. As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include
the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references revealing the
authors' identity, should be avoided. Further details concerning the paper
submission will be announced closer to the May 30 submission deadline.

Related Conferences in Beijing
Next to COLING 2010 there are two conferences workshop participants may be
interested in:
- The 7th International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS) which takes place
August 17 to 20, 2010, just before COLING. It is our hope that this unique
opportunity will foster scientific exchange between the scientific communities
of Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science. The ICCS' venue is the China
National Convention Center (CNCC) which is close to COLING's site, the Beijing
International Convention Center (BICC), located on the other side of the China
National Stadium ('Bird Nest').

- Also somewhat related is the 6th IEEE International Conference on Natural
Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering (IEEE NLP-KE'10). Yet, as it
is scheduled for August 21 to 23, 2010, it overlaps with our workshop.

Program Committee
- Slaven Bilac (Google Tokyo, Japan)
- Pierrette Bouillon (ISSCO, Geneva, Switzerland)
- Dan Cristea (University of Iasi, Romania)
- Katrin Erk (University of Texas, USA)
- Olivier Ferret (CEA LIST, France)
- Thierry Fontenelle (EU Translation Centre, Luxemburg)
- Sylviane Granger (Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
- Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France)
- Ulrich Heid (IMS, University of Stuttgart, Germany)
- Erhard Hinrichs (University of Tuebingen, Germany)
- Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto, Canada)
- Ed Hovy (ISI, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA)
- Chu-Ren Huang (Hongkong Polytechnic University, China)
- Terry Joyce (Tama University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan)
- Philippe Langlais (DIRO/RALI, University of Montreal, Canada)
- Marie Claude L'Homme (University of Montreal, Canada)
- Verginica Mititelu (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)
- Alain Polguere (Nancy-Universite & ATILF CNRS, France)
- Reinhard Rapp (University of Tarragona, Spain)
- Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
- Gilles Serasset (IMAG, Grenoble, France)
- Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
- Anna Sinopalnikova (FIT, BUT, Brno, Czech Republic)
- Carole Tiberius (Institute for Dutch Lexicology, The Netherlands)
- Takenobu Tokunaga (TITECH, Tokyo, Japan)
- Dan Tufis (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)
- Piek Vossen (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
- Yorick Wilks (Oxford Research Institute, UK)
- Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France)
- Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France)

Website, Workshop Organizers and Contact Persons
- http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-2.html
- Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), michael.zock AT lif.univ-mrs.fr
- Reinhard Rapp (University of Tarragona, Spain), reinhard.rapp AT urv.cat

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