[Corpora-List] Call for Papers: CogALex-08 (Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon) Coling Workshop held in conjunction with COLING-2008

Sat Mar 8 12:22:22 UTC 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS : CogALex-08 (Coling Workshop held in conjunction with 
COLING-2008)

"Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon: Enhancing the Structure, Indexes and 
Entry Points of Electronic Dictionaries"

CONTEXT :
========

What are people looking for when they use a dictionary? What strategies 
do they use for search? What do people know before they start? These 
questions concern the cognitive aspects of the lexicon, and their 
answers should guide the design of online dictionaries.

Many people believe in the virtues of completeness. Yet, the quality of 
a dictionary depends not only on coverage (number of entries) and 
granularity, 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, 
sound). 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 word) and via diverse access 
routes. Navigation takes place in a huge conceptual-lexical space, and 
the results are displayable in a multitude of forms (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 resource. But access to 
the potential wealth 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. We have not even realized their full potential yet. More than 
just allowing electronic versions of paper-bound dictionaries, computers 
provide a freedom for rethinking dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedia, 
etc., a distinction necessary in the past for economical reasons, but no 
longer justified anymore. 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 feasability of taking the user’s needs, knowledge and 
access strategies into account.

TOPICS :
=======

For this workshop, we solicit papers addressing any of the following issues:

1. CONCEPTUAL INPUT of a dictionary user: what is present in 
speakers’/writers’ minds when they are generating a message and looking 
for a (target) word? Does the user have in mind conceptual primitives, 
semantically related words, some type of partial definition, something 
like synsets, or something completely different?

2. ACCESS, NAVIGATION and SEARCH STRATEGIES: we would like to be able to 
access entries by word form but also by meaning and sounds (syllables). 
Even if input is given in an incomplete, imprecise or degraded form. The 
more precise the conceptual input, the less navigation should be needed 
and vice versa. How can we create local search spaces, and provide a 
user with the tools for navigating within them?

3. INDEXING words and ORGANIZING the lexicon: Words and concepts can be 
organized in many ways, varying according to typology and conceptual 
systems. For example, words are traditionally organized alphabetically 
in Western languages, but by semantic radicals and stroke counts in 
Chinese. The way how words and concepts are organized affects indexing 
and access. Indexing must robustly allow for multiple ways of navigation 
and access. What efficient organizational principles allow the greatest 
flexibility for access? What about lexical entry standardization? Are 
universal definitions possible? What about efforts such as the Lexical 
Markup Framework (LMF) and other global structures for the lexicon? Can 
ontologies be combined with standards for the lexicon?

4. NLP Applications: Contributors can also address the issue of 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.

Goal and 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 contributions address computational aspects.

Important Dates
===============

Paper Submission Deadline: 5th May
Notification of Acceptance: 6th June
Camera-Ready Papers Due: 1st July
Workshop: 24th August

Submission Instructions
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work on the topic 
areas of the workshop. As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not 
include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, 
self-references that reveal the author's identity, should be avoided.

Submitted papers should be no longer than eight (8) pages, 4 in the case 
of project reports (including data, tables, figures, and references).
Please include a one-paragraph abstract of the entire work (about 200 
words) and use the Coling 2008 LaTeX or MS Word style sheets 
(http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/harold.somers/coling/style.html). 
Submission will be electronic (pdf format only) via the START paper 
submission webpage: https://www.softconf.com/coling08/CAL08/submit.html

Workshop Organizers
================

Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille)
Churen Huang (Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan)

Programme Committee
===================
* Slaven Bilac, Google-Tokyo, Japan
* Pierrette Bouillon, ISSCO, Geneva, Switzerland
* Dan Cristea, University of Iasi, Romania
* Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton, USA
* Olivier Ferret, CEA LIST, France
* Thierry Fontenelle, Microsoft, Redmont
* Gregory Grefenstette, CEA LIST, France
* Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
* Ed Hovy, ISI, Los Angeles, USA
* Chu-Ren Huang, Sinica, Taiwan
* Terry Joyce, Tama University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan
* Adam Kilgarriff, Brighton, Lexical Computing Ltd, UK
* Philippe Langlais, University of Montreal, Canada
* Dekang Lin, Google, Mountain View, California, USA
* Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA
* Alain Polguère, University of Montreal, Canada
* Reinhard Rapp, university of Tarragona, Spain
* Sabine Schulte im Walde, University of Stuttgart, Germany
* Gilles Serasset, Imag, Grenoble, France
* Anna Sinopalnikova, FIT, BUT, Brno, Czech Republic
* Takenobu Tokunaga, Titech, Tokyo, Japan
* Dan Tufis, RACAI, Bucharest, Romania
* Jean Véronis, University of Aix-Marseille, France
* Yorick Wilks, Oxford Internet Institute, UK
* Michael Zock LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France
* Pierre Zweigenbaum, Limsi, Orsay, France

Contact Person and workshop website
===================================

Michael Zock (michael.zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr)
http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/

-- 
------------------------------------------------
  Michael ZOCK 
  Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale (LIF)
  CNRS,  UMR 6166
  Parc Scientifique et Technologique de Luminy
  Case 901 - 163 Avenue de Luminy
  F-13288 Marseille Cedex 9

  Mail:   michael.zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr
  Tel.    +33 (0) 4 91 82 94 88
  Secr.   +33 (0) 4 91 82 90 70
  Fax     +33 (0) 4 91 82 92 75
------------------------------------------------

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