1st CFP: ACL 2011 Workshop on Multiword Expressions

[avillavicencio at inf.ufrgs.br]

===================================
                First Call for Paper Submissions

          ACL 2011 Workshop on Multiword Expressions:
    from Parsing and Generation to the real world (MWE 2011)

               http://multiword.sf.net/mwe2011

   endorsed by the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the
       Association for Computational Linguistics (SIGLEX)

            Portland, Oregon, USA - June 23-24, 2011

   ***Submission deadline: Mar 4, 2011 at 23:59 PDT (GMT-7)***
=================================================================

   Under the denomination "Multiword Expression", one can hang a
wide range of linguistic constructions such as idioms (a frog in
the throat, kill some time), fixed phrases (per se, by and large,
rock'n roll), noun compounds (telephone booth, cable car),
compound verbs (give a presentation, go by [a name]), etc. While
easily mastered by native speakers, their interpretation poses a
major challenge for computational systems, due to their flexible
and heterogeneous nature. Surprisingly enough, MWEs are not
nearly as frequent in NLP resources (dictionaries, grammars) as
they are in real-word text, where they have been reported to
account for over 70% of the terms in a domain. Thus, MWEs are a
key issue and a current weakness for tasks like Natural Language
Parsing (NLP) and Generation (NLG), as well as real-life
applications such as Machine Translation.

   MWE 2011 will be the 8th event in the series, and the time has
come to move from basic preliminary research and theoretical
results to actual applications in real-world NLP tasks. Therefore,
following further the trend of previous MWE workshops, we propose
a turn towards MWEs on NLP applications, specifically towards
Parsing and Generation of MWEs, as there is a wide range of open
problems that prevent MWE treatment techniques to be fully
integrated in current NLP systems. We will be asking for original
research related (but not limited) to the following topics:

     * Lexical representations: In spite of several proposals for
     MWE representation ranging along the continuum from words-
     with-spaces to compositional approaches connecting lexicon
     and grammar, to date, it remains unclear how MWEs should be
     represented in electronic dictionaries, thesauri and grammars.
     New methodologies that take into account the type of MWE and
     its properties are needed for efficiently handling manually
     and/or automatically acquired expressions in NLP systems.
     Moreover, we also need strategies to represent deep attributes
     and semantic properties for these multiword entries.

     * Application-oriented evaluation: Evaluation is a crucial
     aspect for MWE research. Various evaluation techniques have
     been proposed, from manual inspection of top-n candidates to
     classic precision/recall measures. However, only application-
     oriented techniques can give a clear indication of whether the
     acquired MWEs are really useful. We call for submissions that
     study the impact of MWE handling in applications such as
     Parsing, Generation, Information Extraction, Machine
     Translation, Summarization, etc.

     * Type-dependent analysis: While there is no unique definition
     or classification of MWEs, most researchers agree on some
     major classes such as named entities, collocations, multiword
     terminology and verbal expressions. These, though, are very
     heterogeneous in terms of syntactic and semantic properties,
     and should thus be treated differently by applications. Type-
     dependent analyses could shed some light on the best
     methodologies to integrate MWE knowledge in our analysis and
     generation systems.

     * MWE engineering: Where do my MWEs go after being extracted?
     Do they belong to the lexicon and/or to the grammar? In the
     pipeline of linguistic analysis and/or generation, where
     should we insert MWEs? And even more important: HOW? Because
     all the effort put in automatic MWE extraction will not be
     useful if we do not know how to employ these rich resources in
     our real-life NLP applications!


SUBMISSIONS

MWE 2011 introduces three different submission modalities:

     * Regular long papers (8 content pages + 1 page for references):
     Long papers should report on solid and finished research
     including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques.

     * Regular short papers (4 content pages + 1 page for references):
     Short papers should report on small experiments, focused contributions,
     ongoing research, negative results and/or philosophical discussion.

     * System demonstration (2 pages): System demonstration papers should
     describe and document the demonstrated system or resources. We
     encourage the demonstration of both early research prototypes and
     mature systems, that will be presented in a separate demo session.

   All submissions must be in PDF format and must follow the ACL
2011 formatting requirements (available at
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml#submission). We strongly advise
the use of the provided Word or LaTeX template files. For regular
long and short papers, the reported research should be
substantially original. The papers will be presented
orally or as posters. The decision as to which paper will be
presented orally and which as poster will be made by the program
committee based on the nature rather than on the quality of the
work.

   Following the example of major conferences like ACL-HLT 2011,
this year we will also accept papers accompanied by the resource
(software or data) described in the paper. Resources will be
reviewed separately and the final acceptance decision will be made
based on both the resource reviews and the paper reviews. The
software or data resources submitted should be ready for release
and should contain at a README file. All resources will be made
available to the MWE community.

   Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information
should be included in the papers; self-reference should be avoided
as well. Resources submitted with the papers should be anonymized
for submission. Papers and/or resources that do not conform to
these requirements will be rejected without review. Accepted
papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, where no
distinction will be made between papers presented orally or as
posters.

   More details about the submission procedure (e.g. online
submission system) will be available soon.


IMPORTANT DATES

Mar 4, 2011          Long paper submission deadline 23:59 PDT (GMT-7)
Mar 11, 2011      Short paper and demo submission deadline 23:59 PDT (GMT-7)
Apr 15, 2011      Notification of acceptance
Apr 22, 2011      Camera-ready deadline
Jun 23-24, 2011      Workshop (to be confirmed by ACL)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

     * Inaki Alegria (University of the Basque Country, Spain)
     * Dimitra Anastasiou (University of Bremen, Germany)
     * Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne, Australia)
     * Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Labs-Research, USA)
     * Colin Bannard (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
     * Francis Bond (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
     * Aoife Cahill (IMS University of Stuttgart, Germany)
     * Paul Cook (University of Toronto, Canada)
     * Beatrice Daille (Nantes University, France)
     * Mona Diab (Columbia University, USA)
     * Gael Dias (Beira Interior University, Portugal)
     * Stefan Evert (University of Osnabrueck, Germany)
     * Roxana Girju (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
     * Chikara Hashimoto (National Institute of Information and
Communications Technology, Japan)
     * Ulrich Heid (Stuttgart University, Germany)
     * Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
     * Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd., UK)
     * Anna Korhonen (University of Cambridge, UK)
     * Ioannis Korkontzelos (University of York, UK)
     * Zornitsa Kozareva (University of Southern California, USA)
     * Brigitte Krenn (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial
Intelligence, Austria)
     * Takuya Matsuzaki (University of Tokyo, Japan)
     * Diana McCarthy (Lexical Computing Ltd., UK)
     * Yusuke Miyao (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
     * Rosamund Moon (University of Birmingham, UK)
     * Diarmuid O Seaghdha (University of Cambridge, UK)
     * Jan Odijk (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands)
     * Darren Pearce-Lazard (University of Sussex, UK)
     * Pavel Pecina (Dublin City University, Ireland)
     * Scott Piao (Lancaster University, UK)
     * Elisabete Ranchhod (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
     * Barbara Rosario (Intel Labs, USA)
     * Agata Savary (Universite Francois Rabelais Tours, France)
     * Violeta Seretan (University of Edinburgh, UK)
     * Suzanne Stevenson (Univesity of Toronto, Canada)
     * Sara Stymne (Linkoping University, Sweden)
     * Stan Szpakowicz (University of Ottawa, Canada)
     * Beata Trawinski (University of Vienna, Germany)
     * Vivian Tsang (Bloorview Research Institute, Canada)
     * Kyioko Uchiyama (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
     * Ruben Urizar (University of the Basque Country, Spain)
     * Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
     * Tony Veale (University College Dublin, Ireland)
     * Begona Villada Moiron (Q-go, The Netherlands)
     * Yi Zhang (DFKI GmbH & Saarland University, Germany)


CONSULTING BODY

     * Su Nam Kim (University of Melbourne, Australia)
     * Preslav Nakov (National University of Singapore, Singapore)


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS AND CONTACT

     * Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany)
     * Carlos Ramisch (University of Grenoble, France and Federal
University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
     * Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to
mwe2011 at gmail.com

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