MWE-LEX 2020 DEADLINE EXTENSION: Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Electronic Lexicons

Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Electronic Lexicons (MWE-LEX
2020)

COLING (Virtual conference
<https://coling2020.org/2020/08/14/virtual-conference.html>),  December
13th, 2020
http://multiword.sourceforge.net/mwelex2020
Follow us: https://twitter.com/mwe_workshop
*EXTENDED DEADLINE: September 9, 2020*


*Organised, sponsored and endorsed by:  **SIGLEX* <http://www.siglex.org/>*,
the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the **ACL*
<https://www.aclweb.org/>*ELEXIS* <https://elex.is/>* - European
Lexicographic Infrastructure*

This joint workshop addresses two domains – multiword expressions and
(electronic) lexicons – with partly overlapping communities and research
interests, but divergent practices and terminologies.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are word combinations, such as *by and
large*, *hot
dog*, *pay a visit* or *pull one's leg*, which exhibit lexical, syntactic,
semantic, pragmatic or statistical idiosyncrasies. MWEs encompass closely
related linguistic objects: idioms, compounds, light-verb constructions,
rhetorical figures, institutionalised phrases and collocations. Because of
their unpredictable behavior, notably their non-compositional semantics,
MWEs pose problems in linguistic modelling (e.g. treebank annotation,
grammar engineering), NLP pipelines (notably when orchestrated with
parsing), and end-user applications (e.g. information extraction).
Modelling and processing of MWEs has been the topic of the MWE workshop,
organised over the past years by the MWE section
<http://multiword.sourceforge.net/> of SIGLEX <http://www.siglex.org/>.

Because MWE-hood is a largely lexical phenomenon, appropriately built
electronic MWE lexicons turn out to be quite important for NLP. Their
conception opens up, among others, the issues of lemmatisation and of
standardised representation of morphological, syntactic and semantic
properties of MWEs. Large standardised multilingual, possibly
interconnected, NLP-oriented MWE lexicons prove indispensable for NLP tasks
such as MWE identification, due to its critical sensitivity to unseen data.
But the development of such lexicons is challenging and calls for tools
which would leverage, on the one hand, MWEs encoded in pre-existing
NLP-unaware lexicons and, on the other hand, automatic MWE discovery in
large non-annotated corpora.

In order to pave the way towards a better understanding of these issues,
and to foster convergence and scientific innovation, the MWE and ELEXIS
(European Union's Horizon 2020 research grant 731015) communities put
forward a joint event and call for papers on research related (but not
limited) to:

*Joint topics on MWEs and e-lexicons:*

·         Extracting and enriching MWE lists from traditional
human-readable lexicons for NLP use

·         Formats for NLP-applicable MWE lexicons

·         Interlinking MWE lexicons with other language resources

·         Using MWE lexicons in NLP tasks (identification, parsing,
translation, ...)

·         MWE discovery in the service of lexicography

·         Multiword terms in specialised lexicons

·         Representing semantic properties of MWEs in lexicons

·         Paving the way towards encoding lexical idiosyncrasies in
constructions

*MWE-specific topics:*

·         Computationally-applicable theoretical work on MWEs and
constructions in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and formal grammars

·         MWE and construction annotation in corpora and treebanks

·         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
summarisation)

·         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

Our intention is to also perpetuate previous converging effects with the
Construction Grammar and WordNet community (see the LAW-MWE-CxG 2018
<http://multiword.sourceforge.net/lawmwecxg2018/> and MWE-WN 2019
<http://multiword.sourceforge.net/mwewn2019/> workshops). Therefore, we
extend the traditional MWE scope to grammatical constructions and we
include WordNets in the scope of e-lexicons.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

The workshop features two tracks:

·         A regular *research track*, where the submissions must be
substantially original.

·         A *shared task track*, with submissions consisting of system
description papers.

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

·         *Long papers* (9 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, depending on the available infrastructure
for virtual participation. 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. The submission will be double-blind. Papers
available as preprints can also be submitted provided that they fulfil the
conditions defined by the ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation
<https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/new-policies-submission-review-and-citation>
.

All papers should be submitted via the workshop's START space
https://www.softconf.com/coling2020/MWE-LEX/

Please follow the guidelines and use the COLING 2020 style files available
at https://coling2020.org/pages/submission. Please choose the appropriate
track (research/shared task) and for research papers the submission
modality (long/short).
PARSEME SHARED TASK 1.2

MWE-LEX 2020 hosts edition 1.2 of the PARSEME shared task on
semi-supervised identification of MWEs. This is a follow-up of editions 1.0
(2017) <http://multiword.sourceforge.net/sharedtask2017>, and 1.1 (2018)
<http://multiword.sourceforge.net/sharedtask2018>. Edition 1.2 features (a)
improved and extended corpora annotated with MWEs, (b) complementary
unannotated corpora for unsupervised MWE discovery, and (c) evaluation
focusing on unseen MWEs. Following the synergy with Elexis, our aim is to
foster the development of unsupervised methods for MWE lexicon induction,
which in turn can be used for identification. Authors may submit system
description papers to the shared task track. The system evaluation phase is
now over, results and instructions for system description papers are
available at http://multiword.sf.net/sharedtask2020
IMPORTANT DATES:

All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC-12 (anywhere in the world).

·         September 2,2020 ⇒ September 9, 2020:  Workshop papers *EXTENDED*
due date (short papers, long papers, system description papers)

·         October 16, 2020: Notification of acceptance

·         November 1, 2020: Camera-ready papers due

·         December 13, 2020: Virtual workshop, colocated with COLING 2020
PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS

·         Research track, MWE-specific topics:

o    Stella Markantonatou
<http://www.ilsp.gr/en/profile/staff?view=member&task=show&id=38>,
Institute for Language and Speech Processing, R.C. "Athena" (Greece)

o    Jelena Mitrović <http://jelena.mitrovic.rs>, University of Passau
(Germany)

·         Research track, MWE-LEX topics:

o    John McCrae <http://john.mccr.ae/>, National University of Ireland
Galway (Ireland)

o    Carole Tiberius, Dutch Language Institute in Leiden (Netherlands)

·         Shared task track:

o    Carlos Ramisch <http://pageperso.lis-lab.fr/~carlos.ramisch/>, Aix
Marseille University (France)

o    Ashwini Vaidya <http://web.iitd.ernet.in/~avaidya/>, Indian Institute
of Technology in Delhi (India)
PUBLICATION CHAIRS

·         Petya Osenova <http://bultreebank.org/en/our-team/petya-osenova/>,
University of Sofia and Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)

·         Agata Savary <http://www.info.univ-tours.fr/~savary/>, Université
of Tours (France)
CONTACT

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to
mwelex2020@gmail.com.
ANTI-HARASSMENT POLICY

The workshop supports the ACL anti-harassment policy
<https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Anti-Harassment_Policy>.