17.474 workshop on linguistic creativity (LREC 2004, Lisbon, 5/04)

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Dec 19 2003 - 05:11:41 EST

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 474.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                            www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 09:11:38 +0000
             From: Francisco <camara@dei.uc.pt>
             Subject: workshop on linguistic creativity

    Call For Papers:
    LREC 2004 Workshop on Language Resources for Linguistic Creativity
    A half-day workshop held as part of LREC 2004 in Lisbon, Portugal (24th-30th
    May).
    Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal

    Schedule:
    Submission Deadline: March 1st, 2004
    Acceptance Notification: March 17th, 2004
    Workshop held: May 29th, 2004 (afternoon)

    Research Context:

    Linguistic creativity is a decidedly knowledge-hungry process. Metaphors,
    poems and jokes, to name just three archetypal forms of linguistic
    creativity, can all be meaningfully studied by limiting our analysis to
    certain sub-types with rigid forms (such as X is Y metaphors, Petrarchian
    sonnets, light-bulb jokes, etc.), but the form is merely the vehicle through
    which the substance is conveyed, and this substance is essentially
    unlimited. A light-bulb joke is funny not because of its form but because of
    the concepts it employs; a metaphor is meaningful not because it juxtaposes
    two different concepts to achieve a frisson of semantic tension, but because
    the juxtaposition reveals something deep about the relationship between
    those concepts; and a poem is not creative merely because it rhymes, but
    because it tells us something about the world in a way that is striking and
    original.

    Creative language thus requires a mastery of both form and substance,
    inasmuch as a linguistically creative system must not only discover
    innovative language artefacts (metaphors, analogies, poems, stories, jokes,
    riddles, etc.) but must express these artefacts in a way that respects the
    constraints imposed by the form. Constraints on form usually constitute a
    closed system and are thus the easiest to encode, but constraints on
    substance are essentially open-ended. Thus, while it is feasible that
    systems can be given their knowledge about form via hand-coding, of
    grammars, lexicons and so forth, it is not clear that hand-coding offers a
    scalable solution to the problem of substance in producing anything more
    than toy systems.

    The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in
    linguistic creativity, to consider how questions of conceptual substance can
    be framed, advanced, resolved or reformulated in terms of existing (or
    anticipated) language resources. For instance, can existing lexical systems
    like WordNet, or general ontologies like CYC or Mikrokosmos, be used to
    provide conceptual substance to linguistically creative systems? If so, to
    what extent are these systems creative? What new structures can be mined
    from these resources to enable linguistic creativity? Can text-mining over
    large corpora or the World Wide Web yield the structures needed to drive
    linguistic creativity. Are there databases or case-bases available that have
    been, or can be, instrumental in driving linguistic creativity, in
    generating metaphors, analogies, poems, jokes, riddles and so on?

    We welcome thought-provoking papers on the computational treatment of any
    aspect of linguistic creativity. We especially welcome papers that address
    the role of language resources, such as dictionaries, ontologies, databases,
    case-bases and corpora, in creative language processing. Topics of
    discussion can include, but are not limited to, the following:

    Metaphor processing (comprehension and generation)
    Analogical reasoning (comprehension, generation, use in argumentation, etc.)
    Poetry generation
    Jokes and humour comprehension/generation
    Natural Language Generation
    Story/Plot Generation
    Puzzles and word-game generation
    Natural Language for Games
    Theories of Linguistic Creativity
    Ontology creation, boot-strapping and/or augmentation

    Submission:
    Authors should submit an abstract of between 500 ­ 1000 words to the
    following address:
    Tony.Veale@UCD.ie
    Submission emails should have a subject header that states “LREC Creativity
    Workshop”

    Workshop Program Committee:
    Tony Veale,
    Dept. of Computer Science,
    University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
    Amílcar Cardoso,
    Departamento de Engenharia Informática,
    Universidade de Coimbra, Polo II, Portugal.
    Francisco Câmara Pereira,
    Departamento de Engenharia Informática,
    Universidade de Coimbra, Polo II, Portugal.
    Pablo Gervás,
    Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Programación
    Facultad de Informática
    Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
    Costs:
    The workshop registration fee is 50 EURO for participants in the main LREC
    conference and 85 EURO for all others. Please visit the official LREC
    website at:
    http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php



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