Call for Participation: NAACL/HLT Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2013)

[Valia Kordoni]

Call for participation

NAACL/HLT Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2013)
Atlanta, Georgia, USA, June 13-14, 2013
http://multiword.sourceforge.net/PHITE.php?sitesig=CONF&page=CONF_09_MWE_2013___lb__NAACL__rb__

Hosted in conjunction with NAACL-HLT 2013 (NAACL early registration closes
this Friday, May 10: http://naacl2013.naacl.org/Registration.aspx)

The list of accepted papers and the schedule is available at:
http://multiword.sourceforge.net/PHITE.php?sitesig=CONF&page=CONF_09_MWE_2013___lb__NAACL__rb__&subpage=CONF_10_Program

Keynote speakers:
Jill Burstein  - Educational Testing Service
Malvina Nissim - University of Bologna
Martha Palmer - University of Colorado at Boulder

Workshop Organizers:
Valia Kordoni (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
Carlos Ramisch (Joseph Fourier University, France)
Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)

Description:

Under the denomination "multiword expression", one assumes a wide range of
linguistic constructions such as idioms (storm in a teacup, sweep under
the rug), fixed phrases (in vitro, by and large, rock'n roll), noun
compounds (olive oil, laser printer), compound verbs (take a nap, bring
about), etc. While easily mastered by native speakers, their
interpretation poses a major challenge for computational systems, due to
their flexible and heterogeneous nature.

For starters, MWEs are not nearly as frequent in NLP resources as they are
in real-word text, and this problem of coverage may impact the performance
of many NLP tasks. Moreover, treating MWEs also involves problems like
determining their semantics, which is not always compositional (to kick
the bucket meaning to die). In sum, MWEs are a key issue and a current
weakness for natural language parsing and generation, as well as real-life
applications depending on language technology, such as machine
translation, just to name a prominent one among many.

Thanks to the joint efforts of researchers from several fields working on
MWEs, significant progress has been made in recent years, especially
concerning the construction of large-scale language resources. For
instance, there is a large number of recent papers that focus on
acquisition of MWEs from corpora, and others that describe a variety of
techniques to find paraphrases for MWEs. Current methods use a plethora of
tools such as association measures, machine learning, syntactic patterns,
web queries, etc. A considerable body of techniques, resources and tools
to perform these tasks are now available, and are indicative of the
growing importance of the field within the NLP community.

Many of these advances are described as part of the annual workshop on
MWEs, that attracts the attention of an ever-growing community working on
a variety of languages and MWE types. The workshop has been held since
2001 in conjunction with major computational linguistics conferences (ACL,
COLING, LREC and EACL), providing an important venue for the community to
interact, share resources and tools and collaborate on efforts for
advancing the computational treatment of MWEs. Additionally, special
issues on MWEs have been published by leading journals in computational
linguistics. The latest such effort is the special issue on “Multiword
Expressions: from Theory to Practice and Use”, currently under publication
from the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing.

MWE 2013 will be the 9th event in the series. We will be interested in
major challenges in the overall process of MWE treatment, both from the
theoretical and the computational viewpoint, focusing on original research
related (but not limited) to the following topics:

- Manually and automatically constructed resources
- Representation of MWEs in dictionaries and ontologies
- MWEs in linguistic theories like HPSG, LFG and minimalism
- MWEs and user interaction
- Multilingual acquisition
- Multilingualism and MWE processing
- Models of first and second language acquisition of MWEs
- Crosslinguistic studies on MWEs
- The role of MWEs in the domain adaptation of parsers
- Integration of MWEs into NLP applications
- Evaluation of MWE treatment techniques
- Lexical, syntactic or semantic aspects of MWEs

The workshop is endorsed by ACL SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group on the
Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Program Committee:

Iñaki Alegria, University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Dimitra Anastasiou, University of Bremen (Germany)
Doug Arnold, University of Essex (UK)
Giuseppe Attardi, Università di Pisa (Italy)
Eleftherios Avramidis, DFKI GmbH (Germany)
Tim Baldwin, The University of Melbourne (Australia)
Chris Biemann, Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany)
Francis Bond, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Antonio Branco, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Aoife Cahill, Educational Testing Service (USA)
Helena Caseli, Federal University of São Carlos (Brazil)
Ken Church, IBM Research (USA)
Matthieu Constant, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée (France)
Paul Cook, The University of Melbourne (Australia)
Béatrice Daille, Nantes University (France)
Koenraad de Smedt, University of Bergen (Norway)
Markus Egg, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)
Stefan Evert, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
Afsaneh Fazly, University of Toronto (Canada)
Joaquim Ferreira da Silva, New University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Chikara Hashimoto, National Institute of Information and Communications
Technology (Japan)
Kyo Kageura, University of Tokyo (Japan)
Su Nam Kim, Monash University (Australia)
Ioannis Korkontzelos, University of Manchester (UK)
Brigitte Krenn, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
(Austria)
Evita Linardaki, Hellenic Open University (Greece)
Takuya Matsuzaki, National Institute of Informatics (Japan)
Yusuke Miyao, National Institute of Informatics (Japan)
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute - Qatar Foundation (Qatar)
Joakim Nivre, Uppsala University (Sweden)
Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, University of Cambridge (UK)
Jan Odijk, University of Utrecht (The Netherlands)
Yannick Parmentier, Université d'Orléans (France)
Pavel Pecina, Charles University Prague (Czech Republic)
Scott Piao, Lancaster University (UK)
Adam Przepiórkowski, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
Magali Sanches Duran, University of São Paulo (Brazil)
Agata Savary, Université François Rabelais Tours (France)
Ekaterina Shutova, University of California at Berkeley (USA)
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Sara Stymne, Uppsala University (Sweden)
Stan Szpakowicz, University of Ottawa (Canada)
Beata Trawinski, University of Vienna (Austria)
Yulia Tsvetkov, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Yuancheng Tu, Microsoft (USA)
Kyioko Uchiyama, National Institute of Informatics (Japan)
Ruben Urizar, University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Tony Veale, University College Dublin (Ireland)
David Vilar, DFKI GmbH (Germany)
Veronika Vincze, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary)
Tom Wasow, Stanford University (USA)
Eric Wehrli, University of Geneva (Switzerland)