35.311, Calls: FigLang 2024: Workshop of Figurative Language Processing

Fri Jan 26 17:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-311. Fri Jan 26 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.311, Calls: FigLang 2024: Workshop of Figurative Language Processing

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Date: 25-Jan-2024
From: Debanjan Ghosh [dghosh at ets.org]
Subject: FigLang 2024: Workshop of Figurative Language Processing

Full Title: FigLang 2024: Workshop of Figurative Language Processing
Short Title: FlgLang 2023

Date: 21-Jul-2024 - 22-Jul-2024
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Contact Person: Debanjan Ghosh
Meeting Email: dghosh at ets.org
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/figlang2024

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 10-Mar-2024

Meeting Description:

Processing of figurative language is a rapidly growing area in NLP,
including computational modeling of metaphors, idioms, puns, irony,
sarcasm, simile, and other figures.  Characteristic to all areas of
human activity (from poetic, ordinary, scientific, social media) and,
thus, to all types of discourse, figurative language becomes an
important problem for NLP systems. Its ubiquity in language has been
established in a number of corpus studies and the role it plays in
human reasoning has been confirmed in psychological experiments. This
makes figurative language an important research area for computational
and cognitive linguistics, and its automatic identification,
interpretation and generation indispensable for any semantics-oriented
NLP application.

 The proposed workshop will be the fourth edition of the biennial
Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, whose first editions were
held at NAACL 2018, ACL 2020 and EMNLP 2022, respectively. The
workshop builds upon a long series of related workshops that the
current organizers have been involved with: “Metaphor in NLP” series
(2013-2016) and “Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity”
series (2009-2010). We expand the scope to incorporate various types
of figurative language, with the aim of maintaining and nourishing a
community of NLP researchers interested in this topic. The main focus
will be on computational modeling of figurative language, however
papers on cognitive, linguistic, social, rhetorical, and applied
aspects are also of interest, provided that they are presented within
a computational, formal, or a quantitative framework.  Recent
advancement in language models have led to several works on figurative
language understanding (Chakrabarty et al 2022a; Chakrabarty et al
2022b; Liu et al 2022; Hu et al 2023) and generation (Stowe et al
2021; Chakrabarty et al 2021; Sun et al 2022; Tian et al 2021)  At the
same time large language models have opened up opportunities to
utilize figurative language in scientific (Kim et al 2023) as well as
creative writing (Chakrabarty et al 2022c; Tian et al 2022).
Additionally there have also been recent work on multimodal figurative
language generation (Chakrabarty et al 2023; Akula et al 2023),
understanding (Hessel et al 2023; Yosef et al 2023) and interpretation
(Hwang et al 2023; Desai et al 2022; Kumar et al 2022). We encourage
submissions along these axes.

Call for Papers:

Topics of Interest

The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either
oral or poster presentation. Topics will include, but will not be
limited to, the following:

Identification and interpretation of different types of figurative
language: Linguistic, conceptual and extended metaphor; irony,
sarcasm, puns, simile, metonymy, personification, synecdoche,
hyperbole

Generation of different types of figurative language: sarcasm, simile,
metaphors, humor, hyperbole

Multilingual and multimodal figurative language processing

Resources and evaluation

    Annotation of figurative language in corpora

    Datasets for evaluation of tools

    Evaluation methodologies

    Figurative use in low-resource languages

Processing of figurative language for NLP applications

    Figurative language in sentiment analysis; dialogue systems;
computational social science; educational applications

    Figurative language and mental health

    Figurative language in digital humanities

    Figurative language in creative writing

Figurative language and cognition

    Cognitive models of processing of figurative language by the human
brain

Human-AI collaboration for figurative language

Shared Tasks

Multilingual euphemisms detection: Euphemisms are a linguistic device
used to soften or neutralize language that may otherwise be harsh or
awkward to state directly (e.g. "between jobs" instead of
"unemployed", "late" instead of "dead", "collateral damage" instead of
"war-related civilian deaths"). By acting as alternative words or
phrases, euphemisms are used in everyday language to maintain
politeness, mitigate discomfort, or conceal the truth. While they are
culturally-dependent, the need to discuss sensitive topics in a
non-offensive way is universal, suggesting similarities in the way
euphemisms are used across languages and cultures. We propose a shared
task in which participants will need to disambiguate sentences in
multiple languages as either euphemistic or not. The dataset will
include English, Mandarin, Spanish, Yoruba, and possibly additional
languages.

Understanding of Figurative Language through Visual Entailment: One
important modality that has gained interest recently is vision, namely
the interpretation of figurative language in media such as memes, art,
or comics. This task is challenging because it involves reasoning
abstractly about images, and also involves understanding social
commonsense and cultural context. We will frame this as a visual
entailment task where a model not only has to predict if a caption
entails the content in the image but also provide free text
explanations justifying the label prediction. These tasks have proved
difficult for state-of-the-art multimodal models in the past. We will
have a paper and a baseline for the same.

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