Corpora: ACL-2001 Workshop on Collocation Final Call for Papers

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

*** Call for Papers***

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