Computational Approaches to Figurative Language
Workshop in conjunction with HLT/NAACL 2007
To be held in Rochester, NY, April 26, 2007
Submission deadline: January 18, 2007
Figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms, personification,
simile among others, is in abundance in natural discourse. It is an
effective apparatus to heighten effect and convey various meanings, such
as humor, irony, sarcasm, affection, etc. Figurative language can be found
not only in fiction, but also in everyday speech, newspaper articles,
research papers, and even technical reports. The recognition of figurative
language use and the computation of figurative language meaning constitute
one of the hardest problems for a variety of natural language processing
tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, information
retrieval, and question answering. Resolution of this problem involves
both a solid understanding of the distinction between literal and
non-literal language and the development of effective computational models
that can make the appropriate semantic interpretation automatically.
As natural language processing moves to an unprecedented new stage, it has
become more urgent than ever to tackle the bottleneck presented by
figurative language. There has been an increasing amount of work in this
area in the past few years (e.g. theoretical semantic/pragmatic analyses
of non-compositional phenomena, research on psychological/neuro-linguistic
modeling of figurative language comprehension and production, research on
the structure of the lexicon, knowledge representation and figurative
language comprehension, domain-specific figurative language detection,
computational corpus studies of figurative language), but much more work
needs to be done (e.g. large-scale automatic figurative language
detection, automatic extraction of idioms and non-compositional phrases
from large corpora, automatic semantic interpretation of figurative
language, automatic figurative language generation, machine translation of
non-literal phenomena, etc.). The goal of this workshop is to provide a
venue for researchers in this area to inform each other and the natural
language processing community at large of the state of the art of current
systems and to reach a better understanding of the new issues and
challenges that need to be tackled.
The workshop is intended to be highly interdisciplinary. We encourage the
participation of people whose research deals with figurative language from
different perspectives, including (but not limited to) applied
linguistics, psychology, corpus linguistics, human-computer interaction,
natural language processing, etc.
Topics covered by the workshop include, but are not limited to:
(1) Computational models of figurative language processing, including
- extracting idioms and non-compositional phrases from large corpora
- classifying metaphoric/non-metaphoric and humorous/non-humorous
language use
- computing non-literal meaning
- multilingual or cross-lingual processing of figurative language
- computational modeling of human figurative language comprehension
and production
(2) Psychological models of figurative language processing, including
- figurative language comprehension
- figurative language production
- figurative language acquisition
(3) Corpus-driven studies of figurative language, including
- corpus-based studies of figurative aspects of any language
- corpus-based studies of specific linguistic cues for figurative
language
- effects of domain and genre on studies of figurative language
- annotation of non-literal phenomena in corpora
(4) Theoretical discussions on literal and non-literal language,
including discussions on
- the distinction between literal and non-literal language
- the distinction between different types of figurative language
- cross-linguistic differences of figurative language
(5) Lexical and ontological resources for figurative language processing,
including
- representation of non-literal meaning in lexicons and ontologies
- development of new lexical resources for figurative language
processing
(6) Evaluation of figurative language processing in large-scale NLP
systems, such as machine translation, Computer-assisted Language Learning
(CALL), question answering, dialogue systems, etc.
The emphasis of the workshop is on computational approaches to figurative
language. We particularly are interested in submissions that deal with
figurative language in the context of Machine Translation, Word Sense
Disambiguation, Information Extraction, Document Retrieval, Dialogue
Systems, Intelligent Tutoring systems, etc.
Workshop Home Page:
http://chss3.montclair.edu/linguistics/lingpage/faculty/feldman/FigLang2007/
Paper Submission:
Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Papers are
limited to 8 pages. Submissions should use the style files available at
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/styles/.\ No author
information should be included in the papers since reviewing will be
blind. Papers not conforming to these requirements are subject to
rejection without review. Papers should be submitted via START which is
available here: http://www.softconf.com/hlt/wsfigurative/submit.html.
Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: January 18, 2007
Notification of acceptance for papers: February 22, 2007
Camera ready papers due: March 1, 2007
Workshop Date: April 26, 2007
Organizers:
Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, xxl13 AT psu.edu
Anna Feldman, Montclair State University, feldmana AT mail.montclair.edu
Program Committee:
Chris Brew, The Ohio State University
Afsaneh Fazly, University of Toronto, Canada
Eileen Fitzpatrick, Montclair State University
Sam Glucksberg, Princeton University
Sid Horton, Northwestern University
Diana Inkpen, University of Ottawa, Canada
Kevin Knight, USC/Information Sciences Institute
Mark Lee, The University of Birmingham, UK
Katja Markert,University of Leeds, UK
Detmar Meurers, The Ohio State University
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
Andrew Ortony, Northwestern University
Wim Peters, University of Sheffield, UK
Vasile Rus, The University of Memphis
Richard Sproat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain
Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto, Canada
Carlo Strapparava, Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica,
Trento, Italy
-- Xiaofei Lu, Assistant Professor Linguistics and Applied Language Studies Pennsylvania State University http://www.personal.psu.edu/xxl13
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