PACLIC Workshop on Multiword Expressions in Asian languages

• Workshop Program
• Call for papers
• Important dates
• Paper submission
• Organizers

Workshop Program

Oct 26, 2020

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 linguistic and NLP resources as they are in real­ world texts, and this problem of coverage may impact the performance of many language technology 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.

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 and linguistic analysis 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 linguistics and computational linguistics communities.

We will be interested in major challenges in the overall process of MWE treatment on Asian or other languages from both a theoretical and a computational viewpoint, focusing on original research related but not limited to the following topics:

• Lexicon­-grammar interface for MWEs
• Parsing techniques for 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
• Integration of MWEs into NLP applications
• Evaluation of MWE treatment techniques
• Lexical, syntactic or semantic aspects of MWEs

Important dates

• Workshop date: October 26, 2020
• Paper submission deadline: 23:59 (PST), June 13 June 30 July 19, 2020
• Notification of acceptance for main conference: July 15 July 31 August 15 September 2, 2020
• Camera-ready paper due: 23:59 (PST), August 30 September 18  September 30, 2020

Paper submission

• Template for manuscript preparation
• Submission page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mwea2020
• Both long (up to 8 pages) and short papers (up to 4 pages) are acceptable.

Publication as a special volume

In addition to the publication of workshop papers in the Scopus-indexed "Proceedings of the PACLIC", we plan to publish the extended versions as a dedicated volume on Asian MEWS for a special issue off Springer's series, SEAL (Studies in East Asian Linguistics, https://www.springer.com/series/15584)

Organizers

• Jong-Bok Kim, Kyung Hee University, Korea
• Valia Kordoni, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
• Huyen Thi Minh Nguyen, VNU University of Science, Vietnam