MWE 2011 will be the 8th event in the series, and the time has come to move from basic preliminary research and theoretical results to actual applications in real-world NLP tasks. Therefore, following further the trend of previous MWE workshops, we propose a turn towards MWEs on NLP applications, specifically towards Parsing and Generation of MWEs, as there is a wide range of open problems that prevent MWE treatment techniques to be fully integrated in current NLP systems. We will be asking for original research related (but not limited) to the following topics:

• Lexical representations: In spite of several proposals for MWE representation ranging along the continuum from words-with-spaces to compositional approaches connecting lexicon and grammar, to date, it remains unclear how MWEs should be represented in electronic dictionaries, thesauri and grammars. New methodologies that take into account the type of MWE and its properties are needed for efficiently handling manually and/or automatically acquired expressions in NLP systems. Moreover, we also need strategies to represent deep attributes and semantic properties for these multiword entries.
• Application-oriented evaluation: Evaluation is a crucial aspect for MWE research. Various evaluation techniques have been proposed, from manual inspection of top-n candidates to classic precision/recall measures. However, only application-oriented techniques can give a clear indication of whether the acquired MWEs are really useful. We call for submissions that study the impact of MWE handling in applications such as Parsing, Generation, Information Extraction, Machine Translation, Summarization, etc.
• Type-dependent analysis: While there is no unique definition or classification of MWEs, most researchers agree on some major classes such as named entities, collocations, multiword terminology and verbal expressions. These, though, are very heterogeneous in terms of syntactic and semantic properties, and should thus be treated differently by applications. Type-dependent analyses could shed some light on the best methodologies to integrate MWE knowledge in our analysis and generation systems.
• MWE engineering: Where do my MWEs go after being extracted? Do they belong to the lexicon and/or to the grammar? In the pipeline of linguistic analysis and/or generation, where should we insert MWEs? And even more important: HOW? Because all the effort put in automatic MWE extraction will not be useful if we do not know how to employ these rich resources in our real-life NLP applications!