MWE 2011 - Multiword Expressions: from Parsing and Generation to the Real World (MWE 2011)

Multiword Expressions: from Parsing and Generation to the Real World (MWE 2011)

Workshop at ACL 2011 (Portland, Oregon, USA), June 23, 2011

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

Submission deadline: Mar 4, 2011 at 23:59 PDT (GMT-7)

Electronic submission: https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/mwe/

Last updated: January 13, 2011

News
January 13, 2011: The START submission system is now open! Please check the detailed submission guidelines.
December 09, 2010: The website and first CFP of MWE 2011: from Parsing and Generation to the real world are now online!

First Call For Paper Submission
Under the denomination "Multiword Expression", one can hang a wide range of linguistic constructions such as idioms (a frog in the throat, kill some time), fixed phrases (per se, by and large, rock'n roll), noun compounds (telephone booth, cable car), compound verbs (give a presentation, go by [a name]), etc. While easily mastered by native speakers, their interpretation poses a major challenge for computational systems, due to their flexible and heterogeneous nature. Surprisingly enough, MWEs are not nearly as frequent in NLP resources (dictionaries, grammars) as they are in real-word text, where they have been reported to account for over 70% of the terms in a domain. Thus, MWEs are a key issue and a current weakness for tasks like Natural Language Parsing (NLP) and Generation (NLG), as well as real-life applications such as Machine Translation.

MWE 2011 will be the 8th event in the series, and the time has come to move from basic preliminary research and theoretical results to actual applications in real-world NLP tasks. Therefore, following further the trend of previous MWE workshops, we propose a turn towards MWEs on NLP applications, specifically towards Parsing and Generation of MWEs, as there is a wide range of open problems that prevent MWE treatment techniques to be fully integrated in current NLP systems. We will be asking for original research related (but not limited) to the following topics:

Lexical representations: In spite of several proposals for MWE representation ranging along the continuum from words-with-spaces to compositional approaches connecting lexicon and grammar, to date, it remains unclear how MWEs should be represented in electronic dictionaries, thesauri and grammars. New methodologies that take into account the type of MWE and its properties are needed for efficiently handling manually and/or automatically acquired expressions in NLP systems. Moreover, we also need strategies to represent deep attributes and semantic properties for these multiword entries.
Application-oriented evaluation: Evaluation is a crucial aspect for MWE research. Various evaluation techniques have been proposed, from manual inspection of top-n candidates to classic precision/recall measures. However, only application-oriented techniques can give a clear indication of whether the acquired MWEs are really useful. We call for submissions that study the impact of MWE handling in applications such as Parsing, Generation, Information Extraction, Machine Translation, Summarization, etc.
Type-dependent analysis: While there is no unique definition or classification of MWEs, most researchers agree on some major classes such as named entities, collocations, multiword terminology and verbal expressions. These, though, are very heterogeneous in terms of syntactic and semantic properties, and should thus be treated differently by applications. Type-dependent analyses could shed some light on the best methodologies to integrate MWE knowledge in our analysis and generation systems.
MWE engineering: Where do my MWEs go after being extracted? Do they belong to the lexicon and/or to the grammar? In the pipeline of linguistic analysis and/or generation, where should we insert MWEs? And even more important: HOW? Because all the effort put in automatic MWE extraction will not be useful if we do not know how to employ these rich resources in our real-life NLP applications!
Important dates
Mar 4, 2011 Long paper submission deadline 23:59 PDT (GMT-7)
Mar 11, 2011 Short paper and demo submission deadline 23:59 PDT (GMT-7)
Apr 15, 2011 Notification of acceptance
Apr 22, 2011 Camera-ready deadline
Jun 23, 2011 Workshop
Workshop Organizers
Valia Kordoni (DFKI GmbH & Saarland University, Germany)
Carlos Ramisch (University of Grenoble, France and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
Contact
For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to mwe2011 at gmail.com