CogAlex-III, a SIGLEX endorsed, post - COLING Workshop devoted to

Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon

Enhancing the Structure and Look-up Mechanisms
of Electronic Dictionaries

Workshop: December 15, 2012, (Mumbai, India)

Aims and Target Audience

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.

Motivation

The way we look at dictionaries, their creation and use, has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. (1) While being considered as an appendix to grammar in the past, they have in the meantime moved to centre stage. Indeed, there is hardly any task in NLP which can be conducted without them. (2) Also, many lexicographers work nowadays with huge digital corpora, using language technology to build and to maintain the lexicon. (3) Last, but not least, rather than being static entities (data-base view), dictionaries are now viewed as graphs, whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time. Interestingly, properties concerning topology, clustering and evolution known from other disciplines (society, economy, human brain) also apply to dictionaries: everything is linked, hence accessible, and everything is evolving. Given these similarities, one may wonder what we can learn from these disciplines.

In this 3rd edition of the CogALex workshop we therefore intend to also invite scientists working in these fields, our goals being to broaden the picture, i.e. to gain a better understanding concerning the mental lexicon and to integrate these findings into our dictionaries in order to support navigation. Given recent advances in neurosciences, it appears timely to seek inspiration from neuroscientists studying the human brain. There is also a lot to be learned from other fields studying graphs and networks, even if their object of study is something else than language, for example biology, economy or society.

Topics

This workshop is about possible enhancements of existing electronic dictionaries. To perform the groundwork for the next generation of electronic dictionaries we invite researchers involved in the building of such dictionaries. The idea is to discuss modifications of existing resources by taking the users' needs and knowledge states into account, and to capitalize on the advantages of the digital media. For this workshop we invite papers including but not limited to the following topics which can be considered from various points of view: linguistics, neuro- or psycholinguistics (associations, tip-of-the-tongue problem), network-related sciences (complex graphs, network topology, small-world problem), etc.

For this workshop we invite papers including but not limited to the following topics:

1. Analysis of the conceptual input of a dictionary user: (a) What does a language producer start from (bag of words)? (b) What is in the authors' minds when they are generating a message and looking for a word? (c) What does it take to bridge the gap between this input and the desired output (target word)?


2. The meaning of words. (a) Lexical representation (holistic vs. decomposed); (b) Meaning representation (concept based, primitives); (c) Revelation of hidden information (vector-based approaches: LSA/HAL); (d) Neural models, neurosemantics, neurocomputational theories of content representation.


3. Structure of the lexicon (a) Discovering structures in the lexicon: formal and semantic point of view (clustering, topical structure); (b) Creative ways of getting access to and using word associations; (c) Evolution, i.e. dynamic aspects of the lexicon (changes of weights); (d) Neural models of the mental lexicon (distribution of information concerning words, organisation of the mental lexicon).


4. Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes (a) Manual, automatic or collaborative building of dictionaries and indexes (distributional semantics, crowd-sourcing, serious games, etc.); (b) Impact and use of social networks (Facebook, Twitter) for building dictionaries, for organizing and indexing the data (clustering of words), and for allowing to track navigational strategies, etc.; (c) (Semi-) automatic induction of the link type (e.g. synonym, hypernym, meronym, association, collocation, ...); (d) Use of corpora and patterns (data-mining) for getting access to words, their uses, and combinations (associations).


5. Dictionary access (navigation and search strategies), interface issues: (a) Conceptual- or semantic-based search; (b) Search (simple query vs multiple words); (c) Context-dependent search (modification of users' goals during search); (d) Recovery; (e) Navigation (frequent navigational patterns or search strategies used by people); (f) Interface problems, data-visualisation.

Program

Information concerning the Visa

For visa requirements take a look at the following link, or download the following two documents : ConferenceVisa and TVisa. Bear in mind that all foreign nationals intending to participate in this event (except those of Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives) are required to obtain an Indian VISA. There is no provision for 'VISA on Arrival'.

Registration + submission policy

For each accepted paper, at least one author must register for this workshop before the deadline. Otherwise, the paper cannot be published in the proceedings.

Double submission policy: Authors may submit the same paper at several meetings, but a paper published at this workshop cannot be published elsewhere. In case of double submission, you must notify the workshop organizers in a separate e-mail immediately when you decide about the double submission, so we know that the paper might be withdrawn depending on the results elsewhere.

Prior workshops

The 1st and 2nd CogALex workshops were co-located with COLING: Manchester (UK, 2008) and Beijing (China, 2010). The resulting proceedings are available as pdf files (4MB) and can be downloaded either from here (CogALex-I), here (CogALex-II), or from the ACL Anthology (2008) or (2010). A similar event took place in Geneva (Coling, 2004), title: Enhancing and using electronic dictionaries. The corresponding publications are available at the following address.

Program Committee

• Barbu, Eduard (Universidad de Jaén, Spain)
• Barrat, Alain (Centre de physique théorique, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université, France)
• Bilac, Slaven (Google Tokyo, Japan)
• Bel-Enguix, Gemma (LIF, Aix-Marseille Université, France)
• Bouillon, Pierrette (TIM, Faculty of Translation and Interpretating, Geneva, Switzerland)
• Cook, Paul (The University of Melbourne, Australia)
• Cristea, Dan (University of Iasi, Romania)
• Fairon, Cedrick (CENTAL, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
• Fazly, Afsaneh (University of Toronto, Canada)
• Fellbaum, Christiane (University of Princeton, USA)
• Ferret, Olivier (CEA LIST, Palaiseau, France)
• Fontenelle, Thierry (Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union, Luxemburg)
• Granger, Sylviane (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
• Grefenstette, Gregory (3DS Exalead, Paris, France)
• Hansen-Schirra, Silvia (University of Mainz, FTSK, Germany)
• Heid, Ulrich (University of Hildesheim, Germany)
• Hirst, Graeme (University of Toronto, Canada)
• Hovy, Ed (ISI, Los Angeles, USA)
• Joyce, Terry (Tama University, Kanagawa-ken, Japan)
• Kwong, Olivia (City University of Hong Kong, China)
• L'Homme, Marie Claude (OLST, University of Montreal, Canada)
• Lapalme, Guy (RALI, University of Montreal, Canada)
• Mititelu, Verginica (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)
• Pirrelli, Vito (ILC, Pisa, Italy)
• Polguère, Alain (Université de Lorraine & ATILF CNRS, France)
• Rapp, Reinhard (University of Leeds, UK)
• Ruette, Tom (KU Leuven, Belgium)
• Schwab, Didier (LIG, Grenoble, France)
• Sérasset, Gilles (IMAG, Grenoble, France)
• Sharoff, Serge (University of Leeds, UK)
• Sinopalnikova, Anna (FIT, BUT, Brno, Czech Republic)
• Sowa, John (VivoMind Research, LLC, USA)
• Tiberius, Carole (Institute for Dutch Lexicology, The Netherlands)
• Tokunaga, Takenobu (TITECH, Tokyo, Japan)
• Tufis, Dan (RACAI, Bucharest, Romania)
• Valitutti, Alessandro (University of Helsinki and HIIT, Finland)
• Vossen, Piek (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Wehrli, Eric (LATL, University of Geneva, Switzerland)
• Zock, Michael (LIF, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université, France)
• Zweigenbaum, Pierre (LIMSI - CNRS, Orsay & ERTIM - INALCO, Paris, France)

Workshop organizers and contact persons

• Michael Zock (LIF-CNRS, Marseille, France), michael.zock {at} lif.univ-mrs.fr
• Reinhard Rapp (University of Leeds, UK), reinhardrapp {at} gmx.de