2nd SIGLEX endorsed COLING Workshop on
COLING 2010
pre-conference workshop (Beijing, August 22, 2010),
following the 7th Intern. Conference on Cognitive Science
Eduard Hovy (Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California), Resume of the talk and Extended Abstract.
Whenever we read a book, write a letter or launch a query on a search engine, we always use words, the shorthand labels and concrete forms of abstract notions (concepts, ideas and more or less well specified thoughts). Yet, words are not only vehicles to express thoughts, they are also means to conceive them. They are mediators between language and thought, allowing us to move quickly from one idea to another, refining, expanding or illustrating our possibly underspecified thoughts. Only words have these unique capabilities, which is why they are so important.
Obviously, a good dictionary should contain many entries and a lot of information associated with each one of them. Yet, the quality of a dictionary depends not only on coverage, but also on accessibility of information. Access strategies vary with the task (text understanding vs. text production) and the knowledge available at the moment of consultation (word, concept, speech sounds). Unlike readers who look for meanings, writers start from them, searching for the corresponding words. While paper dictionaries are static, permitting only limited strategies for accessing information, their electronic counterparts promise dynamic, proactive search via multiple criteria (meaning, sound, related words) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes place in a huge conceptual lexical space, and the results are displayable in a multitude of forms (e.g. as trees, as lists, as graphs, or sorted alphabetically, by topic, by frequency).
Many lexicographers work nowadays with huge digital corpora, using language technology to build and to maintain the lexicon. But access to the potential wealth of information in dictionaries remains limited for the common user. Yet, the new possibilities of electronic media in terms of comfort, speed and flexibility (multiple inputs, polyform outputs) are enormous. Computational resources are not prone to the same limitations as paperbound dictionaries. The latter were limited in scope, being confined to a specific task (translation, synonyms, ...) due to economical reasons, but this limitation is not justified anymore.
Today we can perform all tasks via one single resource, which may comprise a dictionary, a thesaurus and even more. The goal of this workshop is to perform the groundwork for the next generation of electronic dictionaries, that is, to study the possibility of integrating the different resources, as well as to explore the feasibility of taking the user's needs, knowledge and access strategies into account.
For this workshop we invite papers including but not limited to the following topics:
The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers involved in the construction and application of electronic dictionaries to discuss modifications of existing resources in line with the users' needs, thereby fully exploiting the advantages of the digital form. Given the breadth of the questions, we welcome reports on work from many perspectives, including but not limited to: computational lexicography, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, language learning and ergonomics.
August 22, 2010 | Cogalex Workshop |
Asap | Please register here ! |
9:00-9:15 Welcome to participants | |||||
09:15 | E. Hovy (invited keynote address) | Distributional Semantics and the Lexicon | |||
10:30-11:00 coffee break | |||||
Session 1: Semantics and Cognition | |||||
11:00 | A. Das & S. Bandyopadhyay | SemanticNet-Perception of Human Pragmatics | |||
11:30 | G. E. Lebani & E. Pianta | Exploiting Lexical Resources for Therapeutic Purposes: the Case of WordNet and STaRS.sys | |||
12:00 | Y. Muramatsu, K. Uduka & K. Yamamoto | Textual Entailment Recognition Using Word Overlap, Mutual Information and Subpath Set | |||
12:30 | C. Strapparava & G. Ozbal | The Color of Emotions in Texts | |||
13:00-14:00 Lunch break | |||||
Session 2: Lexicography | |||||
14:00 | N. Béchet & M. Roche | How to Expand Dictionaries by Web-Mining Techniques | |||
14:30 | N. Curteanu, A. Moruz & D. Trandabat | An Optimal and Portable Parsing Method for Romanian, French, and German Large Dictionaries | |||
15:00 | E. Lavagnino & J. Park | Conceptual Structure of Automatically Extracted Multi-Word Terms from Domain Specific Corpora: a Case Study for Italian | |||
15:30-16:00 Coffee break | |||||
Session 3: Word Access and Language Learning | |||||
16:00 | H. Gao | Computational Lexicography: A Feature-based Approach in Designing an E-dictionary of Chinese Classifiers | |||
16:30 | S. Markantonatou, A. Fotopoulou, M. Alexopoulou & M. Mini | In Search of the 'Right' Word | |||
17:00 | M. Zock, D. Schwab & N. Rakotonanahary | Lexical Access, a Search-Problem (key note presentation) | |||
17:30-18:00 Wrap Up Discussion | |||||
18:00 End of the workshop |
The 1st COGALEX workshop was co-located with COLING 2008 in Manchester (UK). The workshop proceedings are available as pdf files (4MB) and can be downloaded either from here, or from the ACL Anthology. A similar workshop, entitled Enhancing and using electronic dictionaries was held at COLING-2004 (Geneva).
Next to COLING 2010 there are two conferences workshop participants may be interested in: