Second CfP: EACL 2014 Workshop on Multiword Expressions

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
MWE 2014
Location: 
EACL 2014
Saturday, 26 April 2014 to Sunday, 27 April 2014
Country: 
Sweden
City: 
Gothenburg
Contact: 
Valia Kordoni (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
Markus Egg (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
Agata Savary (Université François Rabelais Tours, France; Special Track Organiser)
Eric Wehrli (Université de Genève, Switzerland; Special Track Organiser)
Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
Submission Deadline: 
Thursday, 23 January 2014

The 10th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2014)

Endorsed by the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (SIGLEX; http://www.siglex.org/);
SIGLEX’s Multiword Expressions Section (SIGLEX-MWE;
http://multiword.sourceforge.net/PHITE.php?sitesig=MWE); and
PARSEME, European IC1207 COST Action (http://www.parseme.eu)

-------------------------
Call For Papers

Under the denomination "multiword expression", one assumes a wide range of
linguistic constructions such as idioms (“storm in a teacup”, “sweep under
the rug”), fixed phrases (“in vitro”, “by and large”, “rock'n roll”), noun
compounds (“olive oil”, “laser printer”), compound verbs (“take a nap”,
“bring about”), etc. While easily mastered by native speakers, their
interpretation poses a major challenge for computational systems, due to
their flexible and heterogeneous nature.

For a start, MWEs are not nearly as frequent in NLP resources as they are
in real-world text, and this problem of coverage may impact the performance of many NLP
tasks. Moreover, treating MWEs also involves problems like determining
their semantics, which is not always compositional (“to kick the bucket”
meaning “to die”). In sum, MWEs are a key issue and a current weakness for
natural language parsing and generation, as well as real-life applications
depending on language technology, such as machine translation, just to
name a prominent one among many. Thanks to the joint efforts of
researchers from several fields working on MWEs, significant progress has
been made in recent years, especially concerning the construction of
large-scale language resources. For instance, there is a large number of
recent papers which focus on acquisition of MWEs from corpora, and others
that describe a variety of techniques to find paraphrases for MWEs.
Current methods use a plethora of tools such as association measures,
machine learning, syntactic patterns, web queries, etc. A considerable
body of techniques, resources and tools to perform these tasks are now
available, and are indicative of the growing importance of the field
within the NLP community.

Many of these advances are described as part of the annual workshop on
MWEs, which attracts the attention of an ever-growing community working on
a variety of languages and MWE types. The workshop has been held since
2001 in conjunction with major computational linguistics conferences (ACL,
EACL, NAACL, COLING, LREC), providing an important venue for the community
to interact, share resources and tools and collaborate on efforts for
advancing the computational treatment of MWEs. Additionally, special
issues on MWEs have been published by leading journals in computational
linguistics. The latest such effort is the special issue on “Multiword
Expressions: from Theory to Practice and Use”, which has recently been
published by the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing
(http://multiword.sourceforge.net/tslp2011si).

MWE 2014 will be the 10th event in the series. We will be interested in
major challenges in the overall process of MWE treatment, both from the
theoretical and the computational viewpoint, focusing on original research
related (but not limited) to the following topics:

* Manually and automatically constructed resources
* Representation of MWEs in dictionaries and ontologies
* MWEs and user interaction
* Multilingual acquisition
* Multilingualism and MWE processing
* Models of first and second language acquisition of MWEs
* Crosslinguistic studies on MWEs
* The role of MWEs in the domain adaptation of parsers
* Integration of MWEs into NLP applications
* Evaluation of MWE treatment techniques
* Lexical, syntactic or semantic aspects of MWEs

The workshop will feature a “Special Track on Parsing and MWEs” dedicated
to “deep” parsing of MWEs, inviting submissions on the following and
related challenges:

* Lexicon-grammar interface: representing, at the lexical level, phenomena
such as agreement, discontinuity and free word order; construction of MWE
lexicons which would be easily convertible and maximally reusable in
different parsing frameworks.
* “Deep” parsing techniques for MWEs: optimal representation of MWEs
within linguistic frameworks, such CCG, HPSG, LFG, TAG, minimalism, etc;
processing MWEs before, during or after parsing; representing the
semantics of MWEs.
* Hybrid parsing of MWEs: combining data-driven and knowledge-based
approaches for efficient and linguistically precise parsers; using
unannotated data for improving models based on annotated data.
* Annotating MWEs in treebanks: MWE-aware methodologies of treebank
construction, and their increased usability in parsing.

This special track is endorsed by PARSEME, European IC1207 COST Action,
dedicated to parsing and MWEs (www.parseme.eu). PARSEME will fund travel
and stay for at least 20 participants from the Action’s member countries
(the grant application procedure will be published shortly). A separate
time slot will be allocated to the special track within the workshop.
Authors may submit papers either to the special track or to the regular
workshop. They should follow common submission instructions.

Submission modalities

For MWE 2014, we will accept the following two types of submissions:

Regular long papers (8 content pages + 1 page for references): Long papers
should report on solid and finished research including new experimental
results, resources and/or techniques.
Regular short papers (4 content pages + 1 page for references): Short
papers should report on small experiments, focused contributions, ongoing
research, negative results and/or philosophical discussion.

The reported research should be substantially original. The papers will be
presented orally or as posters. The decision as to which papers will be
presented orally and which as posters will be made by the program
committee based on the nature rather than on the quality of the work. All
submissions must be in PDF format and must follow the EACL 2014 formatting
requirements (available at
http://www.eacl2014.org/files/eacl-2014-styles.zip). We strongly advise
the use of the provided Word or LaTeX template files.

Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be
included in the papers; self-reference should be avoided as well.

Resources submitted with the papers should be anonymized for submission.
Papers and/or resources that do not conform to these requirements will be
rejected without review. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop
proceedings, where no distinction will be made between papers presented
orally or as posters.

Submission and reviewing will be electronic, managed by the START system:

https://www.softconf.com/eacl2014/MWE/

Submissions must be uploaded onto the START system by the submission
deadline: January 23rd, 2014 (11:59pm GMT -12 hours)

Please choose the appropriate submission type from the starting submission
page, according to the category of your paper.

Important dates

23 January 2014: Long & short paper submission deadline 11:59pm GMT -12 hours
20 February 2014: Notification of Acceptance
03 March 2014: Camera-ready papers due
26-27 April 2014: Workshop Dates

Program Committee

Iñaki Alegria, University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Dimitra Anastasiou, University of Bremen (Germany)
Doug Arnold, University of Essex (UK)
Eleftherios Avramidis, DFKI GmbH (Germany)
Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne (Australia)
Núria Bel, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
Chris Biemann, Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany)
Francis Bond, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)
António Branco, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Miriam Butt, Universität Konstanz (Germany)
Aoife Cahill, ETS (USA)
Ken Church, IBM Research (USA)
Matthieu Constant, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée (France)
Paul Cook, University of Melbourne (Australia)
Béatrice Daille, Nantes University (France)
Koenraad De Smedt, University of Bergen (Norway)
Gaël Dias, University of Caen Basse-Normandie (France)
Gülşen Eryiğit, Istanbul Technical University (Turkey)
Tomaž Erjavec, Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia)
Joaquim Ferreira da Silva, New University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Roxana Girju, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
Chikara Hashimoto, National Institute of Information and Communications
Technology (Japan)
Ulrich Heid, Universität Hildesheim (Germany)
Kyo Kageura, University of Tokyo (Japan)
Su Nam Kim, Monash University (VIC, Australia)
Ioannis Korkontzelos, University of Manchester (UK)
Brigitte Krenn, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
(Austria)
Cvetana Krstev, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, The Ohio State University (USA)
Takuya Matsuzaki, National Institute of Informatics (Japan)
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute (Qatar)
Malvina Nissim, University of Bologna (Italy)
Joakim Nivre, Uppsala University (Sweden)
Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, University of Cambridge (UK)
Jan Odijk, University of Utrecht (The Netherlands)
Yannick Parmentier, Université d'Orléans (France)
Pavel Pecina, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic)
Scott Piao, Lancaster University (UK)
Adam Przepiórkowski, Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of
Sciences (Poland)
Victoria Rosén, University of Bergen (Norway)
Carlos Ramisch, Aix-Marseille University (France)
Manfred Sailer, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Germany)
Magali Sanches Duran, University of São Paulo (Brazil)
Violeta Seretan, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Ekaterina Shutova, University of California, Berkeley (USA)
Jan Šnajder, University of Zagreb (Croatia)
Pavel Straňák, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic)
Sara Stymne, Uppsala University (Sweden)
Stan Szpakowicz, University of Ottawa (Canada)
Beata Trawinski, Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim (Germany)
Yulia Tsvetkov, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Yuancheng Tu, Microsoft (USA)
Ruben Urizar, University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Gertjan van Noord, University of Groningen (The Netherlands)
Aline Villavicencio, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
Veronika Vincze, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary)
Martin Volk, University of Zurich (Switzerland)
Tom Wasow, Stanford University (USA)
Shuly Wintner, University of Haifa (Israel)
Dekai Wu, The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (Hong Kong)