Appel: Cogalex-II, Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (pre-conference workshop of COLING 2010)

Thu Apr 22 09:20:03 UTC 2010

Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2010 18:18:47 +0200
From: Michael Zock <Michael.Zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr>
Message-ID: <4BC9DF67.9010709 at lif.univ-mrs.fr>
X-url: http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-2.html
X-url: http://www.coling-2010.org/SubmissionGuideline.htm

Apologies for multiple postings
========================================================================
2nd Call for Paper Submissions

Cogalex-II, 2nd Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (August
22, 2010)
pre-conference workshop of COLING 2010 (Beijing, China)

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

Submission deadline: May 30, 2010

http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/cogalex-2.html

========================================================================

AIMS and TARGET AUDIENCE

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers involved in
the construction and application of electronic dictionaries to discuss
modifications of existing resources in line with the users' needs,
thereby fully exploiting 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: computational
lexicography, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, language
learning and ergonomics.

MOTIVATION

Whenever we read a book, write a letter or launch a query on a search
engine, we always use words, the shorthand labels and concrete forms
of abstract notions (concepts, ideas and more or less well specified
thoughts). Yet, words are not only vehicles to express thoughts, they
are also means to conceive them. They are mediators between language
and thought, allowing us to move quickly from one idea to another,
refining, expanding or illustrating our possibly underspecified
thoughts. Only words have these unique capabilities, which is why they
are so important.

Obviously, a good dictionary should contain many entries and a lot of
information associated with each one of them. Yet, the quality of a
dictionary depends not only on coverage, 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, speech sounds). 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 words) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes
place in a huge conceptual lexical space, and the results are
displayable in a multitude of forms (e.g. 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 lexicon. But access
to the potential wealth of information 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. Computational resources are not prone to the
same limitations as paperbound dictionaries. The latter were limited
in scope, being confined to a specific task (translation, synonyms,
...)  due to economical reasons, but this limitation is not justified
anymore.

Today we can perform all tasks via one single resource, which may
comprise a dictionary, a thesaurus and even more. 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
feasibility of taking the user's needs, knowledge and access
strategies into account.

TOPICS

For this workshop we invite papers including but not limited to the
following topics:

* Conceptual input of a dictionary user.
What is in the authors' minds when they are generating a message and
looking for a word? Do they start from partial definitions, i.e.
underspecified input (bag of words), conceptual primitives,
semantically related words, something akin to synsets, or something
completely different? What does it take to bridge the gap between this
input, incomplete as it may be, and the desired output (target word)?

* Organizing the lexicon and indexing words.
Concepts, words and multi-word expressions can be organized and
indexed in many ways, depending on the task and language type. For
example, in Indo-European languages words are traditionally organized
in alphabetical order, whereas in Chinese they are organized by
semantic radicals and stroke counts. The way words and multi-word
expressions are stored and organized affects indexing and
access. Since knowledge states (i.e. knowledge available when
initiating search) vary greatly and in unpredictable ways, indexing
must allow for multiple ways of navigation and access. Hence the
question: what organizational principles allow the greatest
flexibility for access?

* Access, navigation and search strategies based on various entry
types (modalities) and knowledge states.
Words are composed of meanings, forms and sounds. Hence, access should
be possible via any of these components: via meanings (bag of words),
via forms, simple or compound ('hot, dog' vs. 'hot-dog'), and via
sounds (syllables). Access should even be possible if input is given
in an incomplete, imprecise or degraded form. Furthermore, to allow
for natural and efficient access, we need to take the users' knowledge
into account (search space reduction) and provide adequate
navigational tools, metaphorically speaking, a map and a compass. How
do existing tools address these needs, and what could be done to go
further?

* NLP applications:
Contributors can also demonstrate 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.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Deadline for paper submissions: May 30, 2010
- Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2010
- Camera-ready papers due: July 10, 2010
- Cogalex workshopˇ: August 22, 2010

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work on any of the
topic areas of the workshop. As reviewing will be blind the paper
should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore
self-references revealing the authors' identity should be avoided.
The submitted papers can be of any of the following two types:

1. Long papers should present completed work and should not exceed 10
   pages (including data, tables, figures, and references).
2. Short papers can present work in progress (up to 6 pages)

Please include a one-paragraph abstract of the work (about 200 words).
While the paper length may differ, the format will be the same as the
one of the main conference. Hence we suggest that you get hold of the
adequate style sheets (LATEX or MS Word) which can be found
here:http://www.coling-2010.org/SubmissionGuideline.htm.

Submission will be electronic (PDF format only) via the START 
conference management software 
(https://www.softconf.com/coling2010/COGALEX2010/).

Double submission policy: Authors may submit the same paper at several
meetings, but a paper published at this workshop cannot be published
elsewhere. In case of double submission, you must notify the workshop
organizers in a separate e-mail, so we know that the paper might be
withdrawn depending on the results elsewhere.

RELATED CONFERENCES in BEIJING

Next to COLING 2010 there are two conferences workshop participants
may be interested in:

- the 7th International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS) which
  takes place August 17 to 20, 2010, just before COLING. It is our
  hope that this unique opportunity will foster scientific exchange
  between the scientific communities of Computational Linguistics and
  Cognitive Science. The ICCS' venue is the China National Convention
  Center (CNCC) which is close to COLING's site, the Beijing
  International Convention Center (BICC), located on the other side of
  the China National Stadium ('Bird Nest').

- Also somewhat related is the 6th IEEE International Conference on
  Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering (IEEE
  NLP-KE'10).  Yet, as it is scheduled for August 21 to 23, 2010, it
  overlaps with our workshop.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Slaven Bilac (Google Tokyo, Japan)
Pierrette Bouillon (ISSCO, Geneva, Switzerland)
Dan Cristea (University of Iasi, Romania)
Katrin Erk (University of Texas, USA)
Olivier Ferret (CEA LIST, France)
Thierry Fontenelle (EU Translation Centre, Luxemburg)
Sylviane Granger (Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France)
Ulrich Heid (IMS, University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Erhard Hinrichs (University of Tuebingen, Germany)
Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto, Canada)
Ed Hovy (ISI, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA)
Chu-Ren Huang (Hongkong Polytechnic University, China)
Terry Joyce (Tama University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan)
Philippe Langlais (DIRO/RALI, University of Montreal, Canada)
Marie Claude L'Homme (University of Montreal, Canada)
Verginica Mititelu (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)
Alain Polguere (Nancy-Universite & ATILF CNRS, France)
Reinhard Rapp (University of Tarragona, Spain)
Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Gilles Serasset (IMAG, Grenoble, France)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
Anna Sinopalnikova (FIT, BUT, Brno, Czech Republic)
Carole Tiberius (Institute for Dutch Lexicology, The Netherlands)
Takenobu Tokunaga (TITECH, Tokyo, Japan)
Dan Tufis (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)
Piek Vossen (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Yorick Wilks (Oxford Research Institute, UK)
Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France)
Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS and CONTACT PERSONS

Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), michael.zock AT lif.univ-mrs.fr
Reinhard Rapp (University of Tarragona, Spain), reinhardrapp AT gmx.de

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