Call for papers

SLTC 2010 Workshop on Compounds and Multiword Expressions
October 29, Linköping, Sweden.

Workshop webpage: http://www.ida.liu.se/~sarst/compound-ws/


Compounds and Multiword Expressions (MWEs) - for example, nominal compounds
("frying pan"), verb-particle constructions ("take off"), and idiomatic
expressions ("break the ice") - constitute a highly frequent phenomenon in
natural language, yet one that provides a challenge to the traditional
division between lexicon and grammar in linguistics and language technology.

The goal of this workshop is to discuss current activities and outstanding
problems in the area of compounds and MWEs from a theoretical and/or
applications-oriented perspective. Reports about on-going work and original
research are thus equally welcome. We believe that the relevant area can be
broadly structured as follows:
* Identification: Although much compound identification can be
carried out with high accuracy, identifying MWEs in running text is
still a challenging problem, which might require combinations of
traditional techniques such as static lists and rules with novel
techniques based on machine learning.
* Interpretation: Semantic interpretation of compounds and MWEs is a
central problem. Supervised approaches might be based on specifying the
semantics of compounds and MWEs using a pre-defined, static set of
semantic relations, whereas unsupervised approaches might be based on
charting their distributions in word space.
* Disambiguation: Most compounds and MWEs are ambiguous in various
ways. A key problem for MWEs is to determine whether it is used
non-compositionally (idiomatically) or compositionally (literally) in a
particular context.
* Applications: Identifying compounds and MWEs in context and
understanding their syntax and semantics is crucial for many natural
language applications. For example, in the area of terminology, nearly
all instances of "unknown" words turn out to be compounds. In
information retrieval, an important issue is the relative informational
contribution of compound components. In translation, one issue is the
choice of whether a word sequence constitutes a MWE and should be
translated as such, or if the component words should be translated
literally.


Submission
-----------------
Submissions are invited as two-page abstracts, following the formatting
guidleines of SLTC. For further details see the workshop page:
http://www.ida.liu.se/~sarst/compound-ws/

Important dates
---------------------
Submission deadline: September 20
Notification: September 27
Workshop: October 29

Location
-------------
Linköping University in cooperation with
SLTC 2010, Linköping, Sweden.

Organizers
----------------
Magnus Merkel (LiU)
Magnus Sahlgren (SICS)
Sara Stymne (LiU)
Mats Wirén (SU)
Robert Östling (SU)