The Lexicon and Figurative Language

Post-Conference Workshop in Conjunction with ACL 2003

endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group on the Lexicon (SIGLEX)

July 11 2003, Sapporo, Japan

ACL2003

Call for Papers

Workshop Description

The problem of word-sense disambiguation is currently one of the central concerns of natural language processing. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that WordNet type approaches that list the different polysemous senses of a word without saying anything about how they relate to each other lead to considerable problems. Novel uses of words occur frequently and the problem is particularly acute when figurative language is being used. Figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms and so on, is pervasive in normal discourse, but the source meaning of a word being used metaphorically is often far removed from the intended, target, meaning.

One possibility is not to just list all the different senses but to have fewer senses and employ a different mechanism for generating new senses and treating the relations between them. The Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) assumes a structure to the lexicon and much richer representations that determine how different senses combine in context. Whilst some success has been achieved with some of the more simple cases of metonymy, the question of how well the approach copes with metaphor is open to debate. Furthermore, the distinction between metonymy and metaphor is not always easy to make.

An alternative would be to treat computationally the claim from Cognitive Linguistics that metaphor is not a matter of linguistic expression. Instead, the meanings of many different words are best related in terms of an underlying conceptual metaphor. However, if metaphor is a cognitive rather than a linguistic phenomenon, and word senses are related solely in terms of their underlying conceptual domains, then this implies that there need be no structure specifically in the lexicon. Instead the lexicon can be a list of items, but metaphorical extensions of words would not be listed as a matter of course. The list approach is compatible with WordNet approaches, but puts the approach in conflict with that of the generative lexicon, and so the question is raised as to how much structure is needed in the lexicon in order to cope with figurative language.

We therefore have three different approaches to the lexicon and the problems that figurative language poses for word-sense disambiguation, and the major theme of this workshop is to explore means for tackling these problems, particularly means that could be used in practical NLP applications.

However, papers that computationally address other aspects of figurative language will also be welcomed. In particular, since word meanings do not come marked with the information that they are metaphorical, metonymical, or not, papers that address the issue of how to distinguish literal from non-literal language will be very welcome, especially if this can be done automatically. Likewise, much work on figurative language has relied on intuitions and handcrafted relations, and in this respect research on figurative language has lagged behind recent work in the rest of computational linguistics. Consequently, there is an urgent need for computational corpus studies of figurative language.

The relationship between discourse issues and figurative language, such as the interaction of anaphora and metonymy has been addressed in the past, but more studies are needed using other types of figurative language such as metaphor. Indeed the issue of how metaphor and metonymy relate to each other may benefit from computational study. There has been some work (notably by Dan Fass and Jerry Hobbs) on bringing them into a common computational framework, but this is largely with the aim of coping with mixtures rather helping with the other problems.


Submission

Please submit full papers of 4 to 8 pages (including references, figures etc). Authors should follow the main conference ACL style format. Electronic submission only. As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to the requirements above are subject to be rejected without review.

Send the pdf, postscript, or MS Word form of your submission to: Alan Wallington (A.M.Wallington@cs.bham.ac.uk ), who will also answer any queries regarding the submission.


Important Dates



Workshop Organizers

John Barnden School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.		 J.A.Barnden@cs.bham.ac.uk
Sheila Glasbey School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.		 S.R.Glasbey@cs.bham.ac.uk
Mark Lee School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.		 M.G.Lee@cs.bham.ac.uk
Alan Wallington School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.		 A.M.Wallington@cs.bham.ac.uk



Programme Committee



Workshop contact person

Alan Wallington
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B152TT, UK.

phone: (+44)(0)121 4142795
email: A.M.Wallington@cs.bham.ac.uk
fax: (+44) (0)121 4144281


last modified 30th April 2003 by
A.M.Wallington@cs.bham.ac.uk