Second CALL FOR PAPERS The 12th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2016) http://multiword.sourceforge.net/mwe2016

Workshop at ACL 2016 (Berlin, Germany), August 11, 2016

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

Submission deadline: Long & short papers – May 15, 2016 (23:59 Pacific time – GMT-08:00)

Online submission: https://www.softconf.com/acl2016/mwe

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Call For Papers

Under the denomination “multiword expression” (MWE), we assume 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 texts, and this problem of coverage may impact the performance of many NLP tasks. Moreover, treating MWEs also involves problems like understanding their semantics, which is not always compositional (e.g., “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 for real-life applications depending on language technology, such as machine translation, just to name a prominent one among many other. 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 that 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, to share resources and tools, and to collaborate on efforts for advancing the computational treatment of MWEs. Currently, EU supports the IC1207 COST Action PARSEME (2013-2017) that focuses on the role of MWEs in parsing. Additionally, special issues on MWEs have been published by leading journals in computational linguistics. The latest such effort is the special issue in 2013 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). Also in 2013, there was a special issue of Natural Language Engineering on the “Semantics of Noun Compounds” (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=NLE&volumeId=19&seriesId=0&issueId=03).

MWE 2016 will be the 12th event in the series. We will be interested in major challenges in the overall process of MWE treatment, both from a theoretical and from a computational viewpoint, focusing on original research related but not limited to the following topics:

* Lexicon-grammar interface for MWEs * Parsing techniques for MWEs * Hybrid parsing of MWEs * MWE annotation in treebanks * 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

Submission modalities

For MWE 2016, we will accept the following two types of submissions:

– Long papers (8 content pages + 2 pages for references): Long papers should report on solid and finished research including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques. – Short papers (4 content pages + 2 pages 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 ACL 2016 formatting requirements (available on the ACL 2016 website: http://acl2016.org/files/acl2016.zip). We strongly advise the use of the provided 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. No distinction will be made between papers presented orally and papers presented as posters.

For the submission use the following link: https://www.softconf.com/acl2016/mwe

Important dates

15 May 2016: Long & short paper submission deadline (23:59 East Coast USA time – GMT -05:00) 12 June 2016: Notification of Acceptance 22 June 2016: Camera-ready papers due 11 August 2016: Workshop Date

Program Committee

* Dimitra Anastasiou, LIST-Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (Luxembourg) * Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne (Australia) * Núria Bel, Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) * Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg (Sweden) * Jill Burstein, ETS (USA) * Aoife Cahill, ETS (USA) * Paul Cook, University of New Brunswick (Canada) * Anastasia Christofidou, Academy of Athens/National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece) * Béatrice Daille, Nantes University (France) * Joaquim Ferreira da Silva, New University of Lisbon (Portugal) * Aggeliki Fotopoulou, Institute for Language and Speech Processing/“Athena” Research Center (Greece) * Voula Gotsoulia, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece) * Chikara Hashimoto, Information Analysis Laboratory, NICT (Japan) * Kyo Kageura, University of Tokyo (Japan) * Dimitrios Kokkinakis, University of Gothenburg (Sweden) * Ioannis Korkontzelos, Edge Hill University (UK) * Takuya Matsuzaki, Nagoya University (Japan) * Yusuke Miyao, National Institute of Informatics (Japan) * Joakim Nivre, University of Uppsala (Sweden) * Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, University of Cambridge and VocalIQ (UK) * Harris Papageorgiou, Institute for Language and Speech Processing/“Athena” Research Center (Greece) * Yannick Parmentier, Universite d’Orleans (France) * Pavel Pecina, Charles University Prague (Czech Republic) * Scott Piao, Lancaster University (UK) * Barbara Plank, University of Copenhagen (Denmark) * Prokopis Prokopidis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing/“Athena” Research Center (Greece) * Carlos Ramisch, Aix-Marseille University (France) * Martin Riedl, University of Darmstadt (Germany) * Will Roberts, Humboldt University Berlin (Germany) * Agata Savary, Université François Rabelais Tours (France) * Aline Villavicencio, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) * Veronika Vincze, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary)

Workshop Organizers

Valia Kordoni (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany) Kostadin Cholakov (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany) Markus Egg (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany) Stella Markantonatou (Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) – Athena Research Center, Greece) Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU (Qatar)

Contact: For any inquiries regarding the workshop, please send an email to mwe2016.acl at gmail.com