Appel: CogALex-08 (Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon) Coling Workshop held in conjunction with COLING-2008

Tue Mar 11 09:26:08 UTC 2008

Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:22:22 +0100
From: Michael Zock <Michael.Zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr>
Message-ID: <47D284FE.5060900 at lif.univ-mrs.fr>
X-url: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/harold.somers/coling/style.html
X-url: http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/

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/

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