Connectionists: deadline extension for 'Cogalex' (Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon), October 2nd, 2016

Michael Zock Michael.Zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr
Thu Sep 22 12:42:56 EDT 2016


*** EXTENDED DEADLINE**
*

Last andFinal Call forCogALex-V
**

*New **Paper Submission Deadline: October 2nd *

*New **notification date: October 21st
*



Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-V)
https://sites.google.com/site/cogalex2016/home

Workshop co-lated with COLING (the 26th International Conference on
Computational Linguistics, Osaka, Japan), December 12, 2016


Invited speaker: Chris Biemann (LT + HCC, Universität Hamburg , Germany)



We are pleased to announce the 5th Workshop on 'Cognitive Aspects of the 
Lexicon' (Cogalex-V), taking place just before COLING (Osaka, Japan), 
December 12, 2016.


1 Context and background

The way we look at the lexicon (creation and use) has changed 
dramatically over the past 30 years. While in the past being considered 
as an appendix to grammar, the lexicon has now moved to centre stage. 
Indeed, there is hardly any task in NLP which can be conducted without 
it. Also, rather than considering it as a static entity (database view), 
dictionaries are now viewed as dynamic networks, akin to the human 
brain, whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time.

   Linguists work on products, while psychologists and computer 
scientists deal with processes. They decompose the task into a set of 
subtasks, i.e. modules between  which information flows. There are 
inputs, outputs and processes in between. A typical task in language 
processing is to go from meanings to sound or vice versa, the two 
extremes of language production and language understanding. Since this 
mapping is hardly ever direct, various intermediate steps or layers 
(syntax, morphology) are necessary.

   Most of the work done by psycholinguists has dealt with the 
information flow from meaning (or concepts) to sound or the other way 
around. What has not been addressed though is the creation of a map of 
the mental lexicon, that is a  represention of the way how words are 
organized or connected.
In this respect WordNet and Roget's Thesaurus are probably closest to 
what one can expect these days. This being said, to find a word in a 
resource one has to reduce the search space (entire lexicon) and this is 
done via the knowledge one has at the onset of search. While the 
information stored in the lexicon is a product, its access is clearly a 
(cognitive, i.e. knowledge-based) process.


1.1 Goal

The goal of COGALEX is to provide a forum for researchers in NLP, 
psychologists, computational lexicographers and users of lexical 
resources to share their knowledge and needs concerning the 
construction, organization and use of a lexicon by people (lexical 
access) and machines (NLP, IR, data-mining).

   Like in the past (2004, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014), we will invite 
researchers to address various unsolved problems, by putting this time 
stronger emphasis though on distributional semantics (DS). Indeed, we 
would like to see work showing the relevance of DS as a cognitive model 
of the lexicon. The interest in distributional approaches has grown 
considerably over the last few year, both in computational linguistics 
and cognitive sciences. A further boost has been provided by the recent 
hype around deep learning and neural embeddings. While all these 
approaches seem to have great potential, their added value to address 
cognitive and semantic aspects of the lexicon still needs to be shown.

   This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources and 
electronic dictionaries, as well as on any aspect relevant to the 
achieve a better understanding of the mental lexicon and semantic 
memory.We solicit contributions including but not limited to the topics 
listed here below, topics, which can be considered from any of the 
following points of view:

  * (computational, corpus) linguistics,
  * neuro- or psycholinguistics (tip of the tongue problem, associations),
  * network related sciences (sociology, economy, biology),
  * mathematics (vector-based approaches, graph theory, small-world
    problem), etc.

   We also plan to organize a “friendly competition” for corpus-based 
models of lexical networks and navigation, i.e. lexical access (see below).


1.2 Possible Topics

1.2.1 Analysis of the conceptual input of a dictionary user

  * What does a language producer start out with and how does this input
    relate to the target form? (meaning, collocation, topically related,
    etc.)
  * What is in the authors' minds when they are generating a message and
    looking for a word?
  * What does it take to bridge the gap between this input and the
    desired output (target word)? 

1.2.2 The meaning of words

  * Lexical representation (holistic, decomposed)
  * Meaning representation (concept based, primitives)
  * Distributional semantics (count models, neural embeddings, etc. )
  * Neurocomputational theories of content representation.

1.2.3 Structure of the lexicon

  * Discovering structures in the lexicon: formal and semantic point of
    view (clustering, topical structure)
  * Evolution, i.e. dynamic aspects of the lexicon (changes of weights)
  * Neural models of the mental lexicon (distribution of information
    concerning words, organization of words)

1.2.4 Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes

  * Manual, automatic or collaborative building of dictionaries and
    indexes (crowd-sourcing, serious games, etc.)
  * 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.
  * (Semi-) automatic induction of the link type (e.g. synonym,
    hypernym, meronym, association, collocation, ...)
  * Use of corpora and patterns (data-mining) for getting access to
    words, their uses, combinations and associations 

1.2.5 Dictionary access (navigation and search strategies), interface 
issues,

  * Search based on sound, meaning or associations
  * Search (simple query vs. multiple words)
  * Search-space determination based on user's knowledge, meta-knowledge
    and cognitive state (information available at the onset, knowledge
    concerning the relationship between the input and the target word, ...)
  * Context-dependent search (modification of users’ goals during search)
  * Navigation (frequent navigational patterns or search strategies used
    by people)
  * Interface problems, data-visualization
  * Creative ways of getting access to and using word associations
    (reading between the lines, subliminal communication).


2 Description of the shared tasks associated with the workshop.

As part of the workshop, we propose a shared task concerning the 
corpus-based identification of semantic relations. The goal of this 
“competition between gentlemen" is less the discovery of the best 
system, as the testing of the relative efficiency of different 
distributional models and other corpus-based approaches on a 
challenging  semantic task. We will provide the training and test data, 
and the participants are expected to submit a short paper (4 pages) 
describing their approach and evaluation results (using the official 
scoring scripts), together with the output produced by their system on 
the test data.

For more details see : 
<https://sites.google.com/site/cogalex2016/home/shared-task>https://sites.google.com/site/cogalex2016/home/shared-task



3 INVITED SPEAKER

/Chris Biemann/, well known (among things) for his work on graph-based 
NLP, has kindly accepted to give the invited talk. Leader of the LT 
research group in Darmstadt, Chris is now affiliated with the Language 
Technology group of the university of Hamburg.


4 Deadlines.

Workshop papers

  * October, 2nd: Submission deadline forpapers
  * October 21:        Author notification
  * October 30:        Camera ready due by Authors
  * November 6:      Proceedings due by Workshop Organisers to Workshop
    & Publication Chairs.
  * December 12 :   Workshop

Shared task

  * <mailto:esantus at gmail.com>September 26:   Expression ofinterest
    (send message to : esantus at gmail.com)
  * October 15: Submission of system description (4+1 pages) and system
    output
  * October 25:        Author notification
  * October 30:        Camera ready due by Authors


5 Submission

The submissions should be written in English and be anonymized for 
review. They must comply with the style-sheets provided by Coling: 
http://coling2016.anlp.jp/#instructions

  * Long papers may consist of 8 pages of content, plus 2 pages for
    references;
  * Short paper may consist of up to 4 pages of content, plus 2 pages
    for references
  * The respective final versions may be up to 9 pages for long papers
    and 5 pages for short ones. In both cases the number of pages for
    references is limited to 3 pages.

Papers should be in PDF format and have to be submitted electronically 
via the START submission system (https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/ 
CogALex-V/). You probably have to register first, and then choose: 
submission, i.e. 
(https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/CogALex-V/user/scmd.cgi?scmd=submitPaperCustom&pageid=0).

6 Organizers.

  * Michael Zock (LIF, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France)
  * Alessandro Lenci (Computational Linguistics Laboratory, University
    of Pisa, Italy)
  * Stefan Evert (FAU, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)


7 Contact persons

For general questions, please get in touch with Michael Zock 
(michael.zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr), for questions concerning the shared 
task, send an e-mail to Stefan Evert (stefan.evert at fau.de).

8 Program committee

For  details see : 
<https://sites.google.com/site/cogalex2016/home/shared-task>https://sites.google.com/site/cogalex2016/home/
**




-- 
------------------------------------------------
Michael ZOCK

Aix-Marseille Université,
CNRS & LIF, UMR 7279,
163 Avenue de Luminy
F-13288 Marseille / France

Mail:  michael.zock at lif.univ-mrs.fr
Tel.:  +33 (0) 4 91 82 94 88

Secr.:        +33 (0) 4 91 82 90 70
Fax:          +33 (0) 4 91 82 92 75

Web:   http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~michael.zock/
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