MWE 2016 (ACL) - The 12th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2016)
11 Aug 2016 to 11 Aug 2016
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-world 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 which 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. 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. Also in 2013, there was a special issue of Natural Language Engineering on the “Semantics of Noun Compounds”.
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 the theoretical and the 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
Annotating MWEs 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
