The Lexicon and Figurative Language
July 11 2003, Sapporo, Japan
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~amw/ACLWorkshop.html
Post-Conference Workshop as part of ACL 2003
http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/
endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group
on the Lexicon (SIGLEX)
http://www.siglex.org
Final, Extended, Call for Papers
Workshop Description
The problem of word-sense disambiguation is currently one of the central
concerns of natural language processing. However, it is becoming increasingly
apparent that WordNet-type approaches that list the different polysemous senses
of a word without saying anything about how they relate to each other lead to
considerable problems. Novel uses of words occur frequently and the problem is
particularly acute when figurative language is being used. Figurative language,
such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms and so on, is pervasive in normal discourse,
but the source meaning of a word being used metaphorically is often far removed
from the intended, target, meaning.
One possibility is not to just list all the different senses but to have
fewer senses and employ a different mechanism for generating new senses and
treating the relations between them. The Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky
1995) assumes a structure to the lexicon and much richer representations
that determine how different senses combine in context. Whilst some success
has been achieved with some of the more simple cases of metonymy, the
question of how well the approach copes with metaphor is open to debate.
Furthermore, the distinction between metonymy and metaphor is not always
easy to make.
An alternative would be to treat computationally the claim from Cognitive
Linguistics that metaphor is not a matter of linguistic expression. Instead, the
meanings of many different words are best related in terms of an underlying
conceptual metaphor. However, if metaphor is a cognitive rather than a
linguistic phenomenon, and word senses are related solely in terms of their
underlying conceptual domains, then this implies that there need be no structure
specifically in the lexicon. Instead the lexicon can be a list of items, but
metaphorical extensions of words would not be listed as a matter of course. The
list approach is compatible with WordNet-type approaches, but puts the approach
in conflict with that of the generative lexicon, and so the question is raised
as to how much structure is needed in the lexicon in order to cope with
figurative language.
We therefore have three different approaches to the lexicon and the problems
that figurative language poses for word-sense disambiguation, and the major
theme of this workshop is to explore means for tackling these problems,
particularly means that could be used in practical NLP applications.
However, papers that computationally address other aspects of figurative
language, including metaphor, metonymy, idioms, and so on, will also be
welcomed. In particular, since word meanings do not come marked with the
information that they are metaphorical, metonymical, or not, papers that address
the issue of how to distinguish literal from non-literal language will be very
welcome, especially if this can be done automatically. Likewise, much work on
figurative language has relied on intuitions and handcrafted relations, and in
this respect research on figurative language has lagged behind recent work in
the rest of computational linguistics. Consequently, there is an urgent need for
computational corpus studies of figurative language.
Submission
Please submit full papers of maximum 8 pages (including references, figures
etc). Authors should follow the main conference ACL style format. Electronic
submission only. As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include
the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, 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 the requirements
above are subject to be rejected without review.
Send the pdf, postscript, or MS Word form of your submission to: Alan
Wallington (A.M.Wallington@cs.bham.ac.uk ), who will also answer any queries
regarding the submission.
Important Dates
* Submission deadline for workshop papers: 09:00 GMT Tuesday 6th May 2003
* Notification of accepted papers: 19 May 2003
* Deadline for camera ready copies: 28 May 2003
* Workshop date: 11 July 2003
Workshop Organizers
John Barnden School of Computer Science J.A.Barnden@cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.
Sheila Glasbey School of Computer Science S.R.Glasbey@cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.
Mark Lee School of Computer Science M.G.Lee@cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.
Alan Wallington School of Computer Science A.M.Wallington@cs.bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.
Programme Committee
* John Barnden: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK.
* Tony Berber Sardinha: LAEL, Catholic University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
* Dan Fass: Gavagai Technology and School of Computing Science, Simon
Fraser University, Canada.
* Josef van Genabith: Computer Applications Department, Dublin City
University, Ireland.
* Sheila Glasbey: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham,
UK.
* Adam Kilgarriff: Information technology Research Institute, University
of Brighton, UK.
* Mark Lee: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK.
* Katja Markert: Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh, UK.
* James Martin: Department of Computer Science and the Institute of
Cognitive Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.
* Alan Wallington: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham,
UK.
* Tony Veale: Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin,
Ireland.
* Carl Vogel: Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin,
Ireland.
* Yorick Wilks: Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield,
UK.
REGISTRATION
For workshop registration information, please see the main ACL2003 web
site: http://www.ec-inc.co.jp/ACL2003/
The registration fee will include attendance at the workshop and a copy of
workshop proceedings.
Further Information
Alan Wallington
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B152TT,
UK.
phone: (+44)(0)121 4142795
email: A.M.Wallington@cs.bham.ac.uk
fax: (+44) (0)121 4144281
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