Appel: Deadline extension for Cogalex-IV (june 8, 2014)

Tue May 27 20:17:26 UTC 2014

Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 01:01:04 +0200
From: Michael Zock <Michael.Zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr>
Message-ID: <53827630.80204 at lif.univ-mrs.fr>
X-url: http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/%7Emichael.zock/CogALex-IV/cogalex-webpage/index.html

Apologies for multiple postings. Please distribute to colleagues.
Due to various requests, we extend the deadline to june 8, 2014
Please note that no extra time can be granted, as we are already a bit
short of time.
---------------------------------------------

Last Call for Papers

Workshop on  Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-IV)
together with a shared task addressing the ‘lexical access-problem’

Pre-conference workshop at COLING 2014 (August 23d,2014)

Submission deadline: June 8, 2014

Invited speaker : Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome)

http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/CogALex-IV/cogalex-webpage/index.html

GOAL

The aim of the 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

The way we look at dictionaries (their creation and use) has changed
dramatically over the past 30 years. While being considered as an
appendix to grammar in the past, by now they have moved to centre
stage. Indeed, there is hardly any task in NLP which can be conducted
without them. Also, rather than being static entities (data-base view),
dictionaries are now viewed as dynamic networks, i.e. graphs, whose
nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over
time. Interestingly, properties concerning topology, clustering and
evolution known from other disciplines (society, economy, human brain)
also apply to dictionaries: everything is linked, hence accessible, and
everything is evolving. Given these similarities, one may wonder what we
can learn from these disciplines.

In this 4th edition of the CogALex workshop we therefore also invite
scientists working in these fields, with the goal to broaden the
picture, i.e. to gain a better understanding concerning the mental
lexicon and to integrate these findings into our dictionaries in order
to support navigation. Given recent advances in neurosciences, it
appears timely to seek inspiration from neuroscientists studying the
human brain. There is also a lot to be learned from other fields
studying graphs and networks, even if their object of study is something
else than language, for example biology, economy or society.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources and
electronic dictionaries. To perform the groundwork for the next
generation of such resources we invite researchers involved in the
building of such tools.  The idea is to discuss modifications of
existing resources by taking the users’ needs and knowledge states into
account, and to capitalize on the advantages of the digital media. For
this workshop we solicit papers including but not limited to the
following topics, each of which can be considered from various points of
view: linguistics, neuro- or psycholinguistics (tip of the tongue
problem, associations), network related sciences (sociology, economy,
biology), mathematics (vector-based approaches, graph theory,
small-world problem), etc.

1) Analysis of the conceptual input of a dictionary user

* What does a language producer start from (bag of words)?
* What is in the authors' minds when they are generating a message and
  looking for a word?
* What does it take to bridge the gap between this input and the desired
  output (target word)?

2) The meaning of words

* Lexical representation (holistic, decomposed)
* Meaning representation (concept based, primitives)
* Revelation of hidden information (distributional semantics, latent
  semantics, vector-based approaches: LSA/HAL)
* Neural models, neurosemantics, neurocomputational theories of content
  representation.

3) Structure of the lexicon

* Discovering structures in the lexicon: formal and semantic point of
  view (clustering, topical structure)
* Creative ways of getting access to and using word associations
  (reading between the lines, subliminal communication);
* Evolution, i.e. dynamic aspects of the lexicon (changes of weights)
* Neural models of the mental lexicon (distribution of information
  concerning words, organisation of words)

4) Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes

* Manual, automatic or collaborative building of dictionaries and
  indexes (crowd-sourcing, serious games, etc.)
* Impact and use of social networks (Facebook, Twitter) for building
  dictionaries, for organizing and indexing the data (clustering of
  words), and for allowing to track navigational strategies, etc.
* (Semi-) automatic induction of the link type (e.g. synonym, hypernym,
  meronym, association, collocation, ...)
* Use of corpora and patterns (data-mining) for getting access to words,
  their uses, combinations and associations

5) Dictionary access (navigation and search strategies, interface issues,...)

* Search based on sound, meaning or associations
* Search (simple query vs multiple words)
* Context-dependent search (modification of users’ goals during search)
* Recovery
* Navigation (frequent navigational patterns or search strategies used
  by people)
* Interface problems, data-visualisation

6) Dictionary applications

* Methods supporting vocabulary learning (for example, creation of
  data-bases showing words in various contexts)
* Tools for supporting Human translation

IMPORTANT DATES

* Deadline for paper submissions: May 25, 2014
* Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2014
* Camera-ready papers due : July 7, 2014
* Worskhop date: August 23, 2014

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Papers should follow the COLING main conference formatting details
(http:// www.coling-2014.org/call-for-papers.php) and should be
submitted as a PDF-file via the START workshop manager at
https://www.softconf.com/coling2014/WS-1/ (you must register first).

Contributions can be short or long papers. Short paper submission must
describe original and unpublished work without exceeding six (6) pages
(references included). Characteristics of short papers include: a small,
focused contribution; work in progress; a negative result; a piece of
opinion; an interesting application nugget. Long paper submissions must
describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work without
exceeding twelve (12) pages (references included).

Reviewing will be double blind, so the papers should not reveal the
authors' identity. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings.

For further details see:
http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/CogALex-IV/cogalex-webpage/index.html

SHARED TASK ON THE LEXICAL ACCESS PROBLEM (COMPUTING ASSOCIATIONS WHEN
GIVEN MULTIPLE STIMULI)

In the framework of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon
(CogALex) to be held at COLING 2014, we invite participation in a shared
task devoted to the problem of lexical access in language production,
with the aim of providing a quantitative comparison between different
systems.

MOTIVATION

The quality of a dictionary depends not only on coverage, but also on
the accessibility of the information. That is a crucial point is
dictionary access.  Access strategies vary with the task (text
understanding vs. text production) and the knowledge available at the
very moment of consultation (words, concepts, 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).

To bring some structure into this multitude of possibilities, the shared
task will concentrate on a crucial subtask, namely multiword
association.  What we mean by this in the context of this workshop is
the following. Suppose, we were looking for a word expressing the
following ideas: 'superior dark coffee made of beans from Arabia', but
could not remember the intended word 'mocha' due to the
tip-of-the-tongue problem. Since people always remember something
concerning the elusive word, it would be nice to have a system accepting
this kind of input, to propose then a number of candidates for the
target word.  Given the above example, we might enter 'dark', 'coffee',
'beans', and 'Arabia', and the system would be supposed to come up with
one or several associated words such as 'mocha', 'espresso', or
'cappuccino'.

TASK DEFINITION

The participants will receive lists of five given words (primes) such as
'circus', 'funny', 'nose', 'fool', and 'fun' and are supposed to compute
the word which is most closely associated to all of them. In this case,
the word 'clown' would be the expected response. Here are some more
examples:

 given words: gin, drink, scotch, bottle, soda
 target word: whisky

 given words: wheel, driver, bus, drive, lorry
 target word: car

 given words: neck, animal, zoo, long, tall
 target word: giraffe

 given words: holiday, work, sun, summer, abroad
 target word: vacation

 given words: home, garden, door, boat, chimney
 target word: house

 given words: blue, cloud, stars, night, high
 target word: sky

We will provide a training set of 2000 sets of five input words
(multiword stimuli), together with the expected target words
(associative responses). The participants will have about five weeks to
train their systems on this data.  After the training phase, we will
release a test set containing another 2000 sets of five input words, but
without providing the expected target words.

Participants will have five days to run their systems on the test data,
thereby predicting the target words. For each system, we will compare
the results to the expected target words and compute an accuracy. The
participants will be invited to submit a paper describing their approach
and their results.

For the participating systems, we will distinguish two categories:

(1) Unrestricted systems. They can use any kind of data to compute their
    results.

(2) Restricted systems: These systems are only allowed to draw on the
    freely available ukWaC corpus in order to extract information on
    word associations.  The ukWaC corpus comprises about 2 billion words
    and is can be downloaded from
    http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php?id=corpora.

Participants are allowed to compete in either category or in both.

VENUE

The shared task will take place as part of the CogALex workshop which is
co-located with COLING 2014 (Dublin). The workshop date is August 23,
2014.  Shared task participants who wish to have a paper published in
the workshop proceedings will be required to present their work at the
workshop.

SHARED TASK SCHEDULE

  - Deadline for paper submission: May 31, 2014
  - Reviewers' feedback: June, 15, 2014
  - Camera-ready version: June 27, 2014
  - Workshop date: August 23, 2014

FURTHER INFORMATION

CogALex workshop website:
http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/CogALex-IV/cogalex-webpage/index.html

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS and CONTACT PERSONS

* Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), michael.zock AT
  lif.univ-mrs.fr
* Reinhard Rapp (University of Aix Marseille (France) and Mainz (Germany),
  reinhardrapp AT gmx.de
* Chu-Ren Huang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong),
  churen.huang AT inet.polyu.edu.hk

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