17.3505, Calls: Computational Linguistics, Discourse Analysis/USA

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-3505. Mon Nov 27 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.3505, Calls: Computational Linguistics,  Discourse Analysis/USA

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1)
Date: 27-Nov-2006
From: Xiaofei Lu < xxl13 at psu.edu >
Subject: Computational Approaches to Figurative Language 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:34:03
From: Xiaofei Lu < xxl13 at psu.edu >
Subject: Computational Approaches to Figurative Language 
 


Full Title: Computational Approaches to Figurative Language 

Date: 26-Apr-2007 - 26-Apr-2007
Location: Rochester, NY, USA 
Contact Person: Xiaofei Lu
Meeting Email: xxl13 at psu.edu
Web Site: http://chss3.montclair.edu/linguistics/lingpage/faculty/feldman/FigLang2007 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis 

Call Deadline: 18-Jan-2007 

Meeting Description:

Figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms, among others, is in abundance in natural discourse. The recognition of figurative language use and the computation of figurative language meaning constitute one of the hardest problems for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, and question answering. As natural language processing moves to an unprecedented new stage, it has become more urgent than ever to tackle the bottleneck presented by figurative language. 

This workshop will provide a venue for researchers in this area to inform  each other and the natural language processing community at large of the state of the art of current systems and to reach a better understanding of the new issues and challenges that need to be tackled. This workshop will be held in conjunction with HLT/NAACL 2007. 

Computational Approaches to Figurative Language

Workshop in conjunction with HLT/NAACL 2007
To be held in Rochester, NY, April 26, 2007

Figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms, personification, simile among others, is in abundance in natural discourse. It is an effective apparatus to heighten effect and convey various meanings, such as humor, irony, sarcasm, affection, etc. Figurative language can be found not only in fiction, but also in everyday speech, newspaper articles, research papers, and even technical reports. The recognition of figurative language use and the computation of figurative language meaning constitute one of the hardest problems for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, and question answering. Resolution of this problem involves both a solid understanding of the distinction between literal and non-literal language and the development of effective computational models that can make the appropriate semantic interpretation automatically.

As natural language processing moves to an unprecedented new stage, it has become more urgent than ever to tackle the bottleneck presented by figurative language. There has been an increasing amount of work in this area in the past few years (e.g. theoretical semantic/pragmatic analyses of non-compositional phenomena, research on psychological/neuro-linguistic modeling of figurative language comprehension and production, research on the structure of the lexicon, knowledge representation and figurative language comprehension, domain-specific figurative language detection, computational corpus studies of figurative language), but much more work needs to be done (e.g. large-scale automatic figurative language detection, automatic extraction of idioms and non-compositional phrases from large corpora, automatic semantic interpretation of figurative language, automatic figurative language generation, machine translation of non-literal phenomena, etc.). The goal of this workshop is to provide a venue for researchers in this area to inform each other and the natural language processing community at large of the state of the art of current systems and to reach a better understanding of the new issues and challenges that need to be tackled.

The workshop is intended to be highly interdisciplinary. We encourage the participation of people whose research deals with figurative language from different perspectives, including (but not limited to) applied linguistics, psychology, corpus linguistics, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, etc.

Topics covered by the workshop include, but are not limited to:

(1) Computational models of figurative language processing, including
    - extracting idioms and non-compositional phrases from large corpora
    - classifying metaphoric/non-metaphoric and humorous/non-humorous language use
    - computing non-literal meaning
    - multilingual or cross-lingual processing of figurative language
    - computational modeling of human figurative language  comprehension and production

(2) Psychological models of figurative language processing, including
    - figurative language comprehension
    - figurative language production
    - figurative language acquisition

(3) Corpus-driven studies of figurative language, including
    - corpus-based studies of figurative aspects of any language
    - corpus-based studies of specific linguistic cues for figurative language
    - effects of domain and genre on studies of figurative language
    - annotation of non-literal phenomena in corpora

(4) Theoretical discussions on literal and non-literal language,  including discussions on
    - the distinction between literal and non-literal language
    - the distinction between different types of figurative language
    - cross-linguistic differences of figurative language

(5) Lexical and ontological resources for figurative language  processing, including
    - representation of non-literal meaning in lexicons and ontologies
    - development of new lexical resources for figurative language processing

(6) Evaluation of figurative language processing in large-scale NLP systems, such as machine translation, Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL), question answering, dialogue systems, etc. 

The emphasis of the workshop is on computational approaches  to figurative language. We particularly are interested in  submissions that deal with figurative language in the context  of Machine Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation, Information  Extraction, Document Retrieval, Dialogue Systems, Intelligent Tutoring systems, etc.

Workshop Home Page:

http://chss3.montclair.edu/linguistics/lingpage/faculty/feldman/FigLang2007/

Paper Submission:

Submissions should describe original, unpublished work.  Papers are limited to 8 pages. Submissions should use the style files available at
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/styles/.

No author information should be included in the papers since reviewing will be blind. Papers not conforming to these requirements are subject to rejection without review. 

Papers should be submitted via Start which is available here: 
http://www.softconf.com/hlt/wsfigurative/submit.html.

Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: January 18, 2007
Notification of acceptance for papers: February 22, 2007
Camera ready papers due: March 1, 2007
Workshop Date: April 26, 2007

Organizers:

Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, xxl13 AT psu.edu
Anna Feldman, Montclair State University, feldmana AT mail.montclair.edu

Program Committee:

Chris Brew, The Ohio State University
Afsaneh Fazly, University of Toronto, Canada
Eileen Fitzpatrick, Montclair State University
Sam Glucksberg, Princeton University
Sid Horton, Northwestern University
Diana Inkpen, University of Ottawa, Canada
Kevin Knight, USC/Information Sciences Institute
Mark Lee, The University of Birmingham, UK
Katja Markert,University of Leeds, UK
Detmar Meurers, The Ohio State University
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
Andrew Ortony, Northwestern University
Wim Peters, University of Sheffield, UK
Vasile Rus, The University of Memphis
Richard Sproat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain
Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto, Canada
Carlo Strapparava, Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Trento, Italy




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