Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019)

ACL 2019 (Florence, Italy), August 2nd, 2019
http://multiword.sourceforge.net/mwewn2019
Final call for papers

Organised, sponsored and endorsed by SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the ACL Endorsed by GWN, Global Wordnet Association

As a joint event, this workshop addresses two domains – multiword expressions and Wordnets – with partly overlapping communities and research interests, but relatively divergent practices and terminologies.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are word combinations, such as all of a sudden, a hot dog, to pay a visit or to pull one’s leg, which exhibit lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and/or statistical idiosyncrasies. MWEs encompass closely related linguistic objects such as idioms, compounds, light verb constructions, rhetorical figures, institutionalised phrases or collocations. Modelling and computational aspects of MWEs have been covered by the Multiword Expression Workshop, organised over the past years by the MWE section of SIGLEX. Because of their unpredictable behavior, and most prominently their non-compositional semantics, MWEs pose special problems in linguistic modelling (e.g. treebank annotation and grammar engineering), in NLP pipelines (e.g. when their orchestration with parsing is concerned), and in end-use applications (e.g. information extraction or machine translation).

From its very beginning, Princeton WordNet has included MWEs, and linked their meanings into a shared network: talk, blab, sing, spill the beans, let the cat out of the bag, tattle, peach, babble, babble out, blab out “divulge confidential information or secrets”. Indeed, over 50% of entries in the Princeton WordNet of English are MWEs and most other wordnets have a similarly high percentage. However, MWEs are generally encoded as a string, with no internal information about syntactic structure or compositionality. Many suggestions for richer encodings have been made but not yet widely adopted, partly because of the cost of adding richer data to already large lexicons.

For the above reasons, the MWE and WN communities are organizing this joint event, which should allow better convergences and scientific innovation. We call for papers focusing on research related (but not limited) to the following topics.

Joint topics on MWEs and Wordnets

• Encoding MWEs in wordnets — how can we take advantage of the existing rich structure of wordnets?
• Encoding MWEs in wordnets — consequences for a lexical-semantic organization of MWEs
• Linking wordnets with existing MWE lexicons
• Word sense disambiguation for single-word and multiword expressions
• Cross-wordnet and cross-language comparisons of MWEs
• MWEs in sense-annotated corpora
• Semantic relations in wordnets related to MWEs

MWE-specific topics

• Computationally-applicable theoretical studies on MWEs and constructions in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and formal grammars
• MWE and construction annotation in corpora and treebanks
• MWE and construction representation in manually/automatically constructed lexical resources
• Processing of MWEs and constructions in syntactic and semantic frameworks (e.g. CCG, CxG, HPSG, LFG, TAG, UD, etc.), and in end-user applications (e.g. information extraction, machine translation and summarization)
• Original discovery and identification methods for MWEs and constructions
• MWEs and constructions in language acquisition and in non-standard language (e.g. tweets, forums, spontaneous speech)
• Evaluation of annotation and processing techniques for MWEs and constructions
• Retrospective comparative analyses from the PARSEME shared tasks on automatic identification of MWEs

Note that, with the intention to also perpetuate previous converging effects with the Construction Grammar community (see the LAW-MWE-CxG 2018 workshop), we extend the traditional MWE scope to include grammatical constructions.

SUBMISSION MODALITIES

There are two tracks:

• Regular research track, where the submissions must be substantially original.
• Dissemination track, which welcomes recent previously published work (or work accepted for publication), dedicated explicitly both to MWEs and WordNet. This will be presented to encourage discussion, but only the abstract will appear in the proceedings.

The regular research track submissions should follow one of the 2 formats:

• Long papers (8 content pages + references): Long papers should report on solid and finished research including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques.
• Short papers (4 content pages + references): Short papers should report on small experiments, focused contributions, ongoing research, negative results and/or philosophical discussion.

The decisions as to oral or poster presentations of the selected papers will be taken by the PC chairs. No distinction between papers presented orally and as posters is made in the workshop proceedings. There is no limit on the number of reference pages. Authors will be granted an extra page for the final version of their papers. The submission will be double-blind, as understood by the ACL 2019 submission policy. The reported research should be substantially original. Papers available as preprints can also be submitted provided that they fulfil the conditions defined by the new ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation. For both types of submissions in this track, the ACL 2019 templates should be used.

The dissemination track submissions are not anonymous, and they should not exceed one page, including the authors’ names and affiliations, the mention of the original venue, the link to the original paper and a short explanation why the paper is relevant to MWEs and Wordnets workshop. If the original paper is not publicly available, it should also be submitted in a separate .pdf file but it does not have to follow the ACL 2019 template.

All papers should be submitted via the following START space: https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/mwewn

Please choose the appropriate track (research/dissemination) and for research papers the submission modality (long/short). Multiple submissions A paper that has been or will be submitted to other venues can be submitted to the MWE-WN workshop but the authors must indicate this fact in the submission form. The paper must be withdrawn from the other venue if accepted by the workshop. Conversely, if the paper has been accepted by another venue before being accepted by the MWE-WN workshop, it must be withdrawn from the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES

We follow the the ACL 2019 workshop schedule:

• May 1, 2019 Extended paper submission deadline
• May 24, 2019 Notification of acceptance
• Jun 3, 2019 Camera-ready papers due
• Aug 2, 2019 Workshop dates

WROKSHOP ORGANIZERS

• Agata Savary, Université François Rabelais Tours (France)
• Carla Parra Escartín, ADAPT Centre / Dublin City University (Ireland)
• Francis Bond, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
• Jelena Mitrović, University of Passau (Germany)
• Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Romanian Academy Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Romania)

The organizers will also chair the program committee. The full committee is shown on http://multiword.sourceforge.net/mwewn2019/.

CONTACT

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to mwewn2019@gmail.com

ANTI-HARASSMENT POLICY

The workshop supports the ACL anti-harassment policy.