[Corpora-List] Post Coling Workshop for "enhancing and using electronic dictionaries"

[Michael Zock]

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CALL FOR PAPERS

ENHANCING AND USING ELECTRONIC DICTIONARIES

Workshop to be held in conjunction with COLING 2004
August 29th, 2004

** Paper submission deadline: May 1st 2004 **

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Introduction

A dictionary is a vital component of any natural 
language processing system. Its modern, digital 
form has considerable potential, especially if it 
is extended and built in a way compatible with 
the needs and habits of the average language 
user. There are many ways to make an electronic 
dictionary useful for people in their daily tasks 
of processing language. One could assist

reading and writing: adding a transliterator and 
a morphological generator/parser to a dictionary 
would put the needed information at the distance 
of a mouse click. Imagine someone trying to look 
up the meaning (or translation) of a word in a 
script he can't read.
language learning: combining dictionaries with a 
parametrizable flashcard system and a goal-driven 
exercice generator could help the memorization 
and automation of words and basic syntactic 
patterns. In such a system choosing a goal would 
trigger syntactic templates, filling the latter 
with words would yield (simple) sentences.
lexical access (navigation): structuring the 
dictionary in a similar way as the human mind, 
i.e. building an associative network akin to 
WordNet, but with many more links in particular 
at the syntagmatic axis, could assist the writer 
not only in finding new ideas (brainstorming), 
but also the word he is looking for. Within this 
framework, word access amounts to entering and 
navigating in a huge, associative network. To 
build such a tool one could extract associations 
from an encyclopedia, label and add them as links 
to a resource like WordNet.

As one can see, there are numerous ways to 
enhance dictionaries. While the new hardware 
offers many, sometimes surprising opportunities 
for novel uses, seizing them requires some 
rethinking. This is the goal of this one-day 
workshop.

In particular, we'd like to discuss interesting 
extensions and enhancements of electronic 
dictionaries. For example, one could consider 
merging different, thesaurus-like dictionaries 
and see what kind of conceptual and navigational 
aids might be added to support the language user: 
what are his needs, what information is he 
looking for? Actually, a focus shift might be 
necessary to move from the data (content and size 
of the dictionary) to their organisation and 
access. As, what is a huge dictionary good for, 
if one cannot find the word one is looking for?


Target audience

The aim of this workshop is to bring together 
leading researchers involved in the building of 
electronic dictionaries to discuss modifications 
of existing resources in line with the users' 
needs (i.e. how to capitalize on 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 
linguistics, computer science, psycholinguistics, 
language learning, and ergonomics. We request 
that each contribution addresses computational 
aspects.


Topics

We would like to invite papers addressing any of the following issues :

* type of information to be stored in the dictionary
* representation and structuring (indexing) of the data;
* management, visualization and useability of the data;
* access (aids for navigation, interface, strategies);
* acquisition of lexical data (corpus);
* possibilities for editing entries (annotation, updating);
* integration (combination of the dictionary with 
other ressources, writer's workbench);
* uses of dictionaries by people 
(learning/teaching; writing) and by machines 
(NLP).


Submission instructions

Papers should be original, hence report on 
previously unpublished work. Papers 
simultaneously submitted to other conferences 
should reflect this fact on the title page.

As the review process will not be blind, papers 
should contain the names and affiliations of 
authors.

Submissions must be electronic only, and should 
consist of full papers of max. 8 pages (inclusive 
of references, tables, figures and equations). 
Project notes and position papers should not 
exceed 4 pages. Authors should follow the  COLING 
2004 formating guidelines, available at: 
http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/coling2004downloads.html.

All submissions should be made by email to the 
following address  zocklimsi.fr. They should 
consist of a single PDF file. Before submitting 
your document, please verify that all 
non-standard fonts are correctly embedded in your 
PDF file (you can do this by disabling the "Use 
Local Font" option when viewing your document 
with Adobe's Reader).

Formating requirements for the final version of 
the papers will be posted as soon as they become 
available.

Important dates:

* Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 1st May 2004

* Notification of workshop paper acceptance: 1st June 2004

* Deadline for camera-ready workshop papers: 15th June 2004

* Workshop Date: 29th August 2004


Organising Committee:

* Michael Zock (Limsi-CNRS, Orsay, France) chair
* Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France)


Program Committee:

* Antonietta Alonge (University of Perugia, Italy)
* Christian Boitet (GETA, Grenoble, France)
* Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy)
* Christiane Fellbaum (University of Princeton, USA)
* Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto, Canada)
* Mathieu Mangeot-Nagata (NII, Tokyo)
* Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas, USA)
* Alain Polguère (OLST, University of Montreal, Canada)
* James Pustejovsky (University of Brandeis, USA)
* Gilles Sérasset (GETA, Grenoble, France)
* Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France)
* Takenobu Tokunaga (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan)
* Dan Tufis (RACAI, Bucharest, Roumania)
* Jean Véronis (University of Aix en Provence, France)
* Piek Vossen (Irion Technologies, Delft, The Netherlands)
* Leo Wanner (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
* Michael Zock (Limsi-CNRS, France)


Contact

For any queries please contact Michael Zock: zock at limsi.fr