Connectionists: 3d and final cfp of CogALex (a COLING workshop)

[Michael Zock]

*CogALex-VI*(*Cog*nitive *A*spects of the *Lex*icon)

workshop co-located with COLING 2020 (12/12/2020)

Paper submission *deadline*: September 1st, 2020

https://sites.google.com/view/cogalex-2020


*1 BACKGROUND *

Supporting us in many tasks (thinking, searching, memorising and 
communicating) words are important. Hence, one may wonder how to build 
tools supporting its learning and usage (access/navigation). Alas the 
answer is not quite as straightforward as it may seem. It depends on 
various factors: the questioner's background (lexicography, psychology, 
computer science), the task (production/reception), and the material 
support (hardware). Words in books, computers and the human brain are 
not the same. Obviously, being aware of this, different communities have 
focused on different issues —(dictionary building; creation of 
navigational tools; representation and organisation of words; time 
course for accessing a word, etc.)— yet,  their views and  respective 
goals have changed considerably over time.

Rather than considering the lexicon as a static entity, where discrete 
units (words) are organised alphabetically (database view), dictionaries 
are now viewed dynamically, i.e., as lexical graphs, whose entities are 
linked in various ways (topical relations; associations) and whose 
weight links may vary over time. While lexicographers view words as 
products (holistic entities), psychologists and neuroscientists view 
them as processes (decomposition), involving various steps or layers 
(representations) between an input and an output.

Computational linguists have their own ways to look at words, and their 
proposals have also changed quite a bit during the last decade. Discrete 
count-based vector representations have successively been replaced by 
continuous vectors (i.e., word embeddings) and then by 
language-model-based contextualised representations. These latter are 
more powerful than any of the other forms, as they are able to account 
for context ambiguity, outperforming the static models (including 
word-embeddings) in a broad range of tasks.

As one can see, different communities look at words from different 
angles, which can be an asset, as complementary views may help us to 
broaden and deepen our understanding of this fundamental cognitive 
resource. Yet, this diversity of perspectives can also a problem, in 
particular if the field is rapidly moving on, as in our case. Hence it 
becomes harder and harder for everyone, including experts, to remain 
fully informed about the latest changes (state of the art). This is one 
of the reasons why we organise this workshop. More precisely, our goal 
is not only to keep people informed without getting them crushed by the 
information glut, but also to help them to perceive clearly what is new, 
relevant, hence important. Last, but not least, we would like to connect 
people from different communities in the hope that this may help them to 
gain new insights or inspirations.
*
2 SCOPE and TOPICS*

This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources 
(representation, organisation of the data, etc.). To allow for this we 
invite researchers to submit their contributions. The idea is to discuss 
the limitations of existing resources and to explore possible 
enhancements that take into account the users’ and the engineers' needs 
(computational aspects).

Also, given the success of the shared task devoted to the corpus-based 
identification of semantic relations (CogALex-V., 2016), we propose 
anotheredition byadding this time a multilingual component. Our special 
focus will be on paradigmatic semantic relations, such as synonymy, 
antonymy and hypernymy, which are notoriously difficult to be 
distinguished by the classical word embedding models.

For this workshop we solicit papers including but not limited to the 
following topics, each of which can be considered from various points of 
view: linguistics (lexicography, computational- or corpus linguistics), 
neuro- or psycholinguistics (tip-of-the-tongue problem, word 
associations), network-related sciences (vector-based approaches, graph 
theory, small-world problem), and so on.

*Organization, i.e. structure of the lexicon
*
- Micro- and macrostructure of the lexicon;
- Indexical categories (taxonomies, thesaurus-like topical structures, 
etc.);
- Map of the lexicon (topology) and relations between words (word 
associations).

*The meaning of words and how to reveal it*

- Lexical representation (holistic, decomposed);
- Meaning representation (concept based, primitives);
- Distributional semantics (count models, neural embeddings, etc. )

***Analysis of the conceptual input given by a dictionary user*

- What information do language producers typically provide when looking 
for a word (terms, relations)?
- What kind of relational information do they give: typed or untyped 
relations?
- Which relations are typically used?

*Methods for crafting dictionaries or indexes
*
- Manual, automatic or collaborative building of dictionaries and 
indexes (crowdsourcing, serious games, etc.);
- Extraction of associations from corpora to build semantic networks 
supporting navigation;
- (Semi-) automatic induction of the link type (e.g., synonym, hypernym, 
meronym, ...).

***Creation of new types of dictionaries**
*
- Concept dictionary;
- Dictionary of larger segments than words (clauses, phrasal elements);
- Dictionary of patterns or concept-patterns;
- Dictionary of syllables.

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

- Search based on sound (rhymes), meaning or contextually related words 
(associations);
- Determination of appropriate search space based on the user’s 
cognitive state (information available at the onset: query) and 
meta-knowledge (knowledge concerning the relationship between the input 
and the target word), ...
- Identification of typical word access strategies (navigational 
patterns) used by people;
- Interface problems, data visualisation.


*3  WORKSHOP SUBMISSIONS*

The workshop features two tracks:

- A regular research track, where the submissions must be substantially 
original.
For details, see: 
https://sites.google.com/view/cogalex-2020/home/submissions

- A shared task track, with submissions consisting of system description 
papers.
   For details see :

https://sites.google.com/view/cogalex-2020/home/shared-task

https://sites.google.com/site/cogalexvisharedtask/

**

*4 IMPORTANT DATES*

Workshop papers

- Paper submission deadline: September 1, 2020
- Notification of acceptance: October 10, 2020
- Camera-ready papers due: October 25, 2020

Shared task

- Release of development data : August 1st, 2020
- Release of test data : September 1st, 2020
- Announcement of winners : October 1st, 2020
- Shared task papers due: October20, 2020
**

*5 INVITED SPEAKER*

Alex Arenas (http://deim.urv.cat/~alexandre.arenas/ 
<http://deim.urv.cat/%7Ealexandre.arenas/>)

     Alephsys Lab, Computer Science & Mathematics,
     Universidad Rovira i Virgili, 43007 Tarragona, Spain

*6 WORKSHOP ORGANISERS*

- Michael Zock (LIS, CNRS, AMU, Marseille, France)
- Alessandro Lenci (Comput. Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pisa, 
Italy)
- Enrico Santus (Bayer, Whippany, NJ, 07981, USA)
- Emmanuele Chersoni (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China)

*7 PROGRAM COMMITTEE*

see : https://sites.google.com/view/cogalex-2020/home/programme-committee

*8 CONTACTS*

For general questions, please get in touch with Michael Zock 
(michael.zock at lis-lab.fr <mailto:michael.zock at lis-lab.fr>).

Concerning the shared task, contact Rong Xiang 
(csrxiang at comp.polyu.edu.hk <mailto:csrxiang at comp.polyu.edu.hk>)or 
Emmanuele Chersoni (emmanuelechersoni at gmail.com) 
<mailto:emmanuelechersoni at gmail.com>






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