Multi-word-expressions in a multilingual context

http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/EACL06MWEmc/

In Trento, Italy with EACL 2006

Endorsed by SIGLEX.

For many years, interest in the natural language processing community of the problems that multiword-expressions (MWE) posed was focused mainly on English. Recently, for example, at the ACL2004 workshop on multiword expressions, attention has begun to expand to other languages such as Japanese, Russian, Basque and Turkish. This necessitates a re-evaluation of earlier rule-based, statistical and hybrid techniques for MWE identification and classification. In English, MWE types such as phrasal verbs, noun phrases, proper names, and true non-compositional idioms, are considered. However, in other languages MWE types can be represented as single words, e.g. phrasal verbs in English are generally expressed as verbs with a prefix in Russian. At the same time, research on MWEs for languages other than English is confronted with new problems, such as the number of word forms per lemma or free word order. In the call for papers for this workshop, we invited submissions incorporating the requirements from different areas such as translation, language engineering and those studying computational techniques for the processing of MWE of language learners and how all these requirements differ across languages. This had a deliberately wide scope to enable cross-disciplinary contact between descriptive, contrastive, educational and computational approaches. The papers presented here deal with a number of themes, from translation, extraction of MWEs, language description and modelling of dictionaries and lexicons.