(MWE 2014 - EACL) The 10th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2014)
26 Apr 2014 to 27 Apr 2014
Under the denomination "multiword expression", one assumes 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-word text, and this problem of coverage may impact the performance of many NLP tasks. Moreover, treating MWEs also involves problems like determining their semantics, which is not always compositional (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 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 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, share resources and tools and collaborate on efforts for advancing the computational treatment of MWEs. Additionally, special issues on MWEs have been published by leading journals in computational linguistics. The latest such effort is the special issue on “Multiword Expressions: from Theory to Practice and Use”, which has recently been published by the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing.
