NAACL 2018 Workshop on Figurative Language Processing

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

NAACL 2018 Workshop on Figurative Language Processing
including a shared task on metaphor detection

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA – June 5 or 6, 2018

https://sites.google.com/site/figlangworkshop/

Submission deadline: March 12, 2018

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Figurative language processing is a rapidly growing area in NLP,
including processing of metaphors, idioms, puns, irony, sarcasm, as
well as other figures. Characteristic to all areas of human activity
(from poetic to ordinary to scientific) 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 and interpretation
indispensable for any semantics-oriented NLP application.

The work on figurative language in NLP and AI started in the 1980s,
mainly focusing on metaphor and metonymy, and providing us with a
wealth of ideas on the structure and mechanisms of these phenomena. In
recent years, the problem of figurative language understanding has
been steadily gaining interest within the NLP community, with a
growing number of approaches exploiting statistical techniques and
venturing into further areas, such as sarcasm, irony and puns.
Advances in other areas of computational semantics continue to open
many new avenues for the creation of open-domain, large-scale tools
for recognition, interpretation, and generation of figurative
language. In addition, the growth of the area of social media analysis
provides an exciting platform to study figurative language in its
social and pragmatic context.

The goal of the proposed workshop is to build upon the successful
start of the Metaphor in NLP workshop series, substantially expanding
its scope to incorporate the rapidly growing body of research on
various types of figurative language in NLP, with the aim of
maintaining and nourishing a community of NLP researchers interested
in this topic. The main focus of the workshop will be on computational
modelling of figurative language using state-of-the-art NLP
techniques. However, papers on cognitive, linguistic, social,
rhetorical, and applied aspects are also of interest, provided that
they are presented within a computational, a formal, or a quantitative
framework.

We will also conduct a shared task on metaphor detection.

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

*Systems for processing figurative language that incorporate
state-of-the-art NLP methods*
Machine learning for figurative language processing
The use of lexical resources in figurative language processing
Paraphrasing of figurative language
Generation of figurative language
Multilingual processing and translation of figurative language

*Resources and evaluation*
Annotation of figurative language in corpora
Figurative language in lexical resources
Datasets for evaluation of tools for automated processing of figurative language
Evaluation methodologies and frameworks

*Processing of figurative language for NLP applications*
Figurative language in sentiment analysis
Figurative language in computational social science
Figurative language in educational applications
Figurative language and mental health
Figurative language in dialog systems
Figurative language in digital humanities

*Figurative language and cognition*
Computational approaches to metaphor and other figures inspired by
cognitive evidence
Cognitive models of processing of figurative language by the human brain
Models of metaphor and other figures across languages and cultures

*Figurative language in social context*
Figurative language in political communication
Figurative language in education
Figurative language in social media

*Interaction of figurative language with other linguistic phenomena*
Figurative language and compositionality
Figurative language and abstractness / concreteness
Figurative language and sentiment
Figurative language and argumentation
Figurative language and grammar

IMPORTANT DATES

March 12, 2018 Paper submissions due (23:59 West Coast USA time)

April 2, 2018 Notification of acceptance

April 16, 2018 Camera-ready papers due

June 5 or 6, 2018 Workshop in New Orleans, Louisiana

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages, with up
to 2 additional pages for references. We also invite short papers of
up to 4 pages, with up to 2 additional pages for references.

All submissions should follow the two-column format of NAACL 2018
proceedings. Please use ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word style
files tailored for this year's conference; these style files are
available from NAACL 2018 website. Submissions must conform to the
official style guidelines, which are contained in the style files, and
they must be electronic in PDF format. Please see naaclhlt2018.pdf for
detailed formatting instructions.

Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will
be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind,
please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal
the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...",
should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to these
requirements will be rejected without review. In addition, please do
not post your submissions on the web until after the review process is
complete.

Please submit papers electronically at:
https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sof...

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS

Beata Beigman Klebanov, Educational Testing Service, USA

Ekaterina Shutova, University of Cambridge, UK

Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University, USA

Patricia Lichtenstein, University of California, Merced, USA

Ben Leong, Educational Testing Service, USA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Yulia Badryzlova, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

Susan Brown, University of Colorado, USA

Paul Cook, University of New Brunswisk, Canada

Gerard de Melo, Rutgers University, USA

Ellen Dodge, ICSI, UC Berkeley, USA

Jonathan Dunn, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

Anna Feldman, Montclair State University, USA

Elena Filatova, CUNY, USA

Michael Flor, Educational Testing Service, USA

Debanjan Ghosh, Rutgers University, USA

Mark Granroth-Wilding, University of Helsinki, Finland

Dario Gutierrez, IBM Research, USA

Eduard Hovy, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Hyeju Jang, University of British Columbia, Canada

Aditya Joshi, IITB-Monash Research Academy, India

Valia Kordoni, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

Mark Last, Ben Gurion University, Israel

Mark Lee, University of Birmingham, UK

Xiaofei Lu, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

Jean Maillard, University of Cambridge, UK

James H. Martin,University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, USA

Saif Mohammad, National Research Council Canada, Canada

Michael Mohler, Language Computer Corporation, USA

Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar

Srini Narayanan, Google, Switzerland

Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Diarmuid O'Seaghdha, Apple, UK

Gözde Özbal, FBK-irst Trento, Italy

Thierry Poibeau, Ecole Normale Superieure and CNRS, France

Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, UK

Marek Rei, University of Cambridge, UK

Ellen Riloff, University of Utah, USA

Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

Victoria Rubin, University of Western Ontario, CA

Eyal Sagi, University of St. Francis, USA

Agata Savary, Université François Rabelais Tours, France

Sabine Schulte im Walde, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Samira Shaikh, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

Carlo Stapparava, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy

Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh, UK

Tomek Strzalkowski, SUNY Albany, USA

Marc Tomlinson, Language Computer Corporation, USA

Yulia Tsvetkov, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Tony Veale, University College Dublin, Ireland

Aline Villavicencio, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil