First call for papers

NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity 2010 (CALC-10)

Los Angeles, June 5 or 6, 2010

http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=CALC-10

Workshop description:

It is generally agreed upon that creativity is an important property of human language. For example, speakers routinely coin new words, employ novel metaphors, and play with words through puns. Indeed, such creative processes take place at all levels of language from the lexicon, to syntax, semantics, and discourse. Creativity allows speakers to express themselves with their own individual style. It provides new ways of looking at the world, by describing something through the use of unusual comparisons for effect, emphasis, or interest, and thus making language more engaging and fun. Listeners are typically able to understand creative language without any difficulties. On the other hand, generating and recognizing creative language presents a tremendous challenge for natural language processing (NLP) systems.

The recognition of instances of linguistic creativity, and the computation of their meaning, constitute one of the most challenging problems for a variety of NLP tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, dialog systems, and sentiment analysis. Moreover, models of linguistic creativity are necessary for systems capable of generating story narratives, jokes, or poetry. Nevertheless, despite the importance of linguistic creativity in many NLP tasks, it still remains unclear how to model, simulate, or evaluate linguistic creativity. Furthermore, research on topics related to linguistic creativity has not received a great deal of attention at major computational linguistics conferences in recent years.

The NAACL HLT 2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity (CALC-09) was the first venue to present research on a wide range of topics related to linguistic creativity including computational models of metaphor, generation of creative texts, and measuring morphological and constructional productivity. CALC-10 provides a venue for publication of further research on these topics, and other aspects and modalities of linguistic creativity. Within the scope of the workshop, the event is intended to be interdisciplinary. Besides contributions from an NLP perspective, we also welcome the participation of researchers who deal with linguistic creativity from perspectives such as cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, the arts, and human-computer interaction.

Topics:

We are particularly interested in work on the automatic detection, classification, understanding, or generation of:

* neologisms;
* creative use of figurative language, including metaphor, metonymy, personification, and idioms;
* new or unconventional syntactic constructions (e.g., "May I serve who's next?");
* indirect speech acts (such as curses, insults, sarcasm, and irony), verbally expressed humor, poetry, and fiction;
* other phenomena illustrating linguistic creativity (e.g., eggcorns such as "once and a while" for "once in a while"; new and emerging forms found in computer-mediated communication).

We also welcome descriptions and discussions of:

* computational tools that support people in using language creatively (e.g., tools for computer-assisted creative writing, intelligent thesauri);
* computational and/or cognitive models of linguistic creativity;
* metrics and tools for evaluating the performance of creativity-aware systems;
* specific application scenarios of computational linguistic creativity;

Related topics, including corpora collection, elicitation, and annotation of creative language usage, will also be considered, as long as their relevance to automatic systems is clearly demonstrated.

Submission information:

Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Papers are limited to 8 pages. Please use the NAACL HLT 2010 style files, available here: http://naaclhlt2010.isi.ed/authors.html No author information should be included in the papers, since reviewing will be blind. Papers not conforming to these requirements are subject to rejection without review. Papers should be submitted via START; more information on this will be available soon on the workshop website (http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=CALC-10).

Location:

The CALC-10 workshop will be held in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2010 in Los Angeles.

Dates:

Mar 1, 2010: Paper submission deadline
Mar 30, 2010: Notification of acceptance
Apr 12, 2010: Camera-ready paper deadline
Jun 5 or 6, 2010: CALC-10

Workshop chairs:

Paul Cook, University of Toronto (pcook@cs.toronto.edu)
Anna Feldman, Montclair State University (anna.feldman@montclair.edu)

Program committee:

Roberto Basili, University of Roma, Italy
Beata Beigman Klebanov, Northwestern University
Amilcar Cardoso, Coimbra, Portugal
Mona Diab, Columbia University
Afsaneh Fazly, Shiraz University, Iran
Eileen Fitzpatrick, Montclair State University
Pablo Gervas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Roxana Girju, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sid Horton, Northwestern University
Diana Inkpen, University of Ottawa, Canada
Mark Lee, Birmingham, UK
Birte Loenneker-Rodman, University of Hamburg
Xiaofei Lu, Penn State
Ruli Manurung, University of Indonesia
Katja Markert, University of Leeds, UK
Saif Mohammad, National Research Council, Ottawa, Canada
Anton Nijholt, Twente, The Netherlands
Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota in Duluth
Vasile Rus, The University of Memphis
Gerard Steen, Vrije Universiteit,The Netherlands
Juergen Trouvain, Saarland, Germany