[Corpora-List] Computer Speech and Language Special Issue on Multiword Expressions

[Anna Korhonen]

Apologies for multiple postings.


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: 05/05/2004
Notification of acceptance: 05/08/2004
Final manuscripts due: 05/11/2004

All submissions will be subject to the normal peer review process for this
journal.

Submissions in electronic form (PDF) are strongly preferred and must
conform to the Computer Speech and Language specifications, which are
available at: http://authors.elsevier.com/journal/csl

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