*** Apologies for multiple copies ***
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://www.purl.org/net/fa/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
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