COLING Workshop endorsed by SIGLEX Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon: Enhancing the Structure, Indexes and Entry Points of Electronic Dictionaries Manchester, 24 August, 2008

In connection with Coling 2008, the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 18-22 august, 2008

Preliminary program

Call for Papers

What are people looking for when they use a dictionary? What strategies do they use for search? What do people know before they start? These questions concern the cognitive aspects of the lexicon, and their answers should guide the design of online dictionaries.

Many people believe in the virtues of completeness. Yet, the quality of a dictionary depends not only on coverage (number of entries) and granularity, but also on accessibility of information. Access strategies vary with the task (text understanding vs. text production) and the knowledge available at the moment of consultation (word, concept, sound). Unlike readers who look for meanings, writers start from them, searching for the corresponding words. While paper dictionaries are static, permitting only limited strategies for accessing information, their electronic counterparts promise dynamic, proactive search via multiple criteria (meaning, sound, related word) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes place in a huge conceptual-lexical space, and the results are displayable in a multitude of forms (as trees, as lists, as graphs, or sorted alphabetically, by topic, by frequency).

Many lexicographers work nowadays with huge digital corpora, using language technology to build and to maintain the resource. But access to the potential wealth in dictionaries remains limited for the common user. Yet, the new possibilities of electronic media in terms of comfort, speed and flexibility (multiple inputs, polyform outputs) are enormous. We have not even realized their full potential yet. More than just allowing electronic versions of paper-bound dictionaries, computers provide a freedom for rethinking dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedia, etc., a distinction necessary in the past for economical reasons, but not justified anymore. The goal of this workshop is to perform the groundwork for the next generation of electronic dictionaries, that is, to study the possibility of integrating the different resources, as well as to explore the feasability of taking the user’s needs, knowledge and access strategies into account.

Submissions to the workshop should address one or more of the following:

1. Conceptual input of a dictionary user: what is present in speakers’/writers’ minds when they are generating a message and looking for a (target) word? Does the user have in mind conceptual primitives, semantically related words, some type of partial definition, something like synsets, or something completely different?


2. Access, navigation and search strategies: support search based on prior knowledge. We would like to be able to access entries by word form but also by meaning and sounds (syllables). Even if input is given in an incomplete, imprecise or degraded form. The more precise the conceptual input, the less navigation should be needed and vice versa. How can we create local search spaces, and provide a user with the tools for navigating within them?


3. Indexing words and organizing the lexicon: Words and concepts can be organized in many ways, varying according to typology and conceptual systems. For example, words are traditionally organized alphabetically in Western languages, but by semantic radicals and stroke counts in Chinese. The way words and concepts are organized affects indexing and access. Indexing must robustly allow for multiple ways of navigation and access. What efficient organizational principles allow the greatest flexibility for access? What about lexical entry standardization? Are universal definitions possible? What about efforts such as the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) and other global structures for the lexicon? Can ontologies be combined with standards for the lexicon?


4. NLP Applications: Contributors can also address the issue of how such enhanced dictionaries, once embedded in existing NLP applications, can boost performance and help solve lexical and textual-entailment problems such as those evaluated in SEMEVAL 2007, or, more generally, generation problems encountered in the context of summarization, question-answering, interactive paraphrasing or translation.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together leading researchers involved in the building of electronic dictionaries to discuss modifications of existing resources in line with the users’ needs (i.e. how to capitalize on 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: linguistics, computer science, psycholinguistics, language learning, and ergonomics. We request that contributions address computational aspects.