LAW-MWE-CxG 2018: Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (at COLING 2018)

[Carlos Ramisch]

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Call for Papers

Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions 

LAW-MWE-CxG-2018

at COLING 2018 (Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA)

August 25-26, 2018

http://multiword.sourceforge.net/lawmwecxg2018

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This workshop brings together three divergent (but overlapping) research communities studying linguistic annotation, multiword expressions and grammatical constructions. 

Linguistic annotation of natural language corpora is the backbone of supervised methods for statistical natural language processing; further, it is essential for evaluation of both rule-based and supervised systems and can help formalize and study linguistic phenomena. 

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are word combinations, such as all of a sudden, hot dog, to pay a visit or to pull one's leg, which exhibit lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and/or statistical idiosyncrasies. Computational research on MWEs encompasses NLP modelling and processing as well as annotation. 

Construction Grammar (CxG) is a linguistic framework of relevance to both linguistic annotation and MWEs. In this framework, constructions are form-meaning pairings of varying degrees of internal complexity and lexical fixedness, including idioms like the-Xer-the-Yer (the more the merrier, etc.) and semantically productive meaning-bearing syntactic patterns (e.g., the caused-motion construction: Mary pushed the napkin off the table; the ditransitive construction: He gave her a burger), which give rise to novel usages (e.g. Mary sneezed the napkin off the table; He grilled her a burger). Annotation and automatic processing of constructions pose significant challenges: because constructions are form-meaning pairs that can be more or less fluid in form, determining the annotation units for a construction is not straightforward. For the above reasons, grammatical constructions were elected as a joint focus of interest by both the MWE and the LAW communities to constitute a special theme within a joint 2-day workshop. 

We invite long and short papers focusing on research related to the following topics (as well as others traditionally associated with previous editions of the LAW and MWE workshops):

* Joint topics on constructions, annotation, and MWEs

      * MWE and construction annotation in corpora and treebanks

      * MWE and construction representation in manually and automatically constructed lexical resources

      * Extending MWE discovery and identification methods to constructions

* MWEs and constructions (and their annotations) in language acquisition and in non-standard language (e.g. tweets, forums, spontaneous speech)

      * Evaluation of MWE and construction annotation and processing techniques

      * Computationally-applicable theoretical studies on MWEs and constructions in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and grammar formalisms, and/or how such studies can impact annotation of constructions

   

* Annotation-specific topics

      * Annotation procedures, whether manual or automatic, including machine learning and knowledge-based methods

      * Maintenance and interactive exploration of annotation structures and annotated data

      * Qualitative and quantitative annotation evaluation

      * Linguistic considerations, representation formats and exploration tools for merged annotations of different phenomena

      * Standards, best practices, documentation, interoperability, and comparison of annotation schemes

      * Development, evaluation and innovative use of annotation software frameworks

   

* MWE-specific topics

      * Original MWE discovery and identification methods

      * MWE processing in syntactic and semantic frameworks (e.g. HPSG, LFG, TAG, Universal Dependencies, WSD, semantic parsing), and in end-user applications (e.g. summarization, machine translation)

* Special track

      * PARSEME Shared Task on Automatic Identification of Verbal MWE (a dedicated call will follow).

  

### Submission and reviewing

Paper Formats -- All papers should follow the COLING style sheets and guidelines as per the COLING 2018 website (http://coling2018.org/second-call-for-papers/). Review is double-blind as per COLING guidelines.

   

### Page limits:

   

   * Long papers (9 content pages + references)   

   * Short papers (4 content pages + references)   

   * PARSEME Shared Task System papers  (4 content pages + references)

 

There is no limit on the number of reference pages. Authors will be granted an extra page for the final version of their papers. The Program Committee will determine which papers are better suited for oral or poster formats.

   

PARSEME Shared Task System papers will be concerned by specific guidelines and a separate reviewing process.

### Endorsements

This workshop has been endorsed by the following Special Interest Groups of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL):

  * Special Interest Group for Annotation (SIGANN)

  * Special Interest Group on the Lexicon (SIGLEX)

  * Special Interest Group on Computational Semantics (SIGSEM) 

### Important dates

   May 25, 2018          Submission deadline (long, short and shared task papers)

   June 20, 2018         Notification of acceptance

   June 30, 2018         Camera-ready papers due

   August 25-26, 2018        LAW-MWE-CxG 2018 workshop

   (see a separate call for the shared task deadlines)

### Contact

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to lawmwe...@gmail.com

   

### Anti-harassment policy

The LAW-MWE-CxG 2018 workshop supports the ACL anti-harassment policy.

  

### Program committee chairs

   * Chairs:   

       Jena Hwang, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (USA)

       Miriam R L Petruck, ICSI (USA)

       Sameer Pradhan, Vassar College, New York (USA)

       Carlos Ramisch, Aix Marseille University (France)

       Agata Savary, Université François Rabelais Tours (France)

       Nathan Schneider, Georgetown University (USA)

   * Members: see the workshop page at http://multiword.sourceforge.net/lawmwecxg2018

### Workshop organizers

   Nancy Ide, Vassar College (USA)

   Adam Meyers, New York University (USA)

   Carlos Ramisch, Aix Marseille University (France)

   Agata Savary, Université François Rabelais Tours (France)