The 13th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2017)
First Call for Papers
Colocated with EACL 2017 - http://multiword.sf.net/mwe2017
Endorsed by ACL SIGLEX - the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the ACL
Long and short paper submission deadline: Jan 22, 2017
mwe2017workshop@gmail.com

In natural languages, there are many ways to express complex human thoughts and ideas. This can be achieved by exploiting compositionality, i.e. concatenating simplex elements of language and thus yielding a more complex meaning that can be computed from the meaning of the original parts and the way they are combined. However, non-compositional phrases are also very frequent in any human language. These complex phrases can often be decomposed into single meaningful units, but the meaning of the whole phrase cannot (or can only partially) be computed from the meaning of its parts. Such phrases are often called multiword expressions (MWEs) and display lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and/or statistical idiosyncrasies (Baldwin & Kim 2010). In addition to idiomatic constructions, MWEs encompass closely related linguistic constructs such as light verb constructions, rhetorical figures and institutionalized phrases or collocations (Sag et al. 2002). MWEs pose problems for linguistic processing, especially in language learning and natural language processing (NLP), for instance, in machine translation, syntactic and semantic parsing, just to name a few applications.

Researchers from several disciplines such as computer science, linguistics and psychology have been jointly working on MWE modeling and processing. For instance, designing guidelines for the annotation of MWEs in corpora, and prominently in treebanks, has been undertaken in various languages and linguistic frameworks (Rosén et al. 2015). Lexical resources with MWEs in dozens of languages exist and are still being developed (Losnegaard et al. 2016). Many papers describe methods to discover new MWEs in texts, applying a wide variety of tools and techniques such as association measures, distributional methods and machine learning. Interactions of MWE processing with deeper levels of linguistic analysis, notably parsing and semantic processing, are being increasingly investigated (e.g. in SEMEVAL 2016 task 10 - DiMSUM). Special issues on MWEs have been published by leading journals (CSL in 2005, LR&E in 2010, ACM TSLP in 2013). Several funded projects focusing on MWEs are indicative of the growing importance of the field within the NLP community. For instance, the EU H2020 program currently supports the COST Action PARSEME (2013-2017), that addresses the role of MWEs in parsing and gathers more than 200 researchers from 33 countries covering 30 languages. It also inspired several national spin-off projects on MWEs.

Many of these advances are described and published in the annual MWE workshop. It attracts the attention of an ever-growing community working on a variety of languages and linguistic phenomena. The workshop has been held since 2001 in conjunction with major computational linguistics conferences (ACL, COLING, LREC, EACL). It represents an important venue for the community to interact, share resources and tools, and collaborate on efforts for advancing the computational treatment of MWEs.

We invite papers on major challenges in MWE processing, both from theoretical and computational viewpoints, focusing on research related (but not limited) to the following topics:

Manually and automatically constructed lexical resources
MWE representation in lexical resources
MWE annotation in corpora and treebanks
MWEs in non-standard language (e.g. tweets, forums, spontaneous speech)
Original MWE discovery methods (e.g. using word embeddings, parallel corpora)
Original MWE in-context identification methods (e.g. using deep learning, topic models)
MWE processing in syntactic frameworks (e.g. HPSG, LFG, TAG, universal dependencies)
MWE processing in semantic frameworks (e.g. WSD, semantic parsing)
MWE processing in end-user applications (e.g. summarization, machine translation)
Orchestration of MWE processing with respect to applications
Evaluation of MWE processing techniques
Models of first and second language acquisition of MWEs
Theoretical and psycholinguistic studies on MWEs
Crosslinguistic studies on MWEs

A volume with selected papers from the workshop is planned within the book series Phraseology and MultiWord Expressions that is the MWE-dedicated book series of Language Science Press.

SPECIAL TRACK: Shared task on automatic identification of verbal MWEs
This year, there will be an extension to the traditional workshop: a special track for shared task papers. The shared task will compare and evaluate systems for the automatic identification of verbal MWEs in sentences. Participants will have the opportunity to submit shared task system description papers and present their approach and results at the workshop. For more details, see the separate call for shared task participation: http://multiword.sourceforge.net/sharedtask2017/

SUBMISSION MODALITIES
Main track sessions:
Long papers (8 content pages + references): Long papers should report on solid and finished research including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques.
Short papers (4 content pages + references): Short papers should report on small experiments, focused contributions, ongoing research, negative results and/or philosophical discussion.

Shared task track would feature system description papers:
System description papers (4 content pages + references): System description papers briefly describe the approach implemented to solve the problem. They may include references and links to more detailed descriptions in other documents.
There is no limit on the number of reference pages. Authors will be granted an extra page for the final version of their papers.

For the main track, submission will be double-blind, the reported research should be substantially original and the papers will be presented orally or as posters. The decision as to which papers will be presented orally and which as posters will be made by the program committee based on the nature rather than on the quality of the work.
The shared task system description papers will go through a separate reviewing process. Like in SEMEVAL, submissions will be double-blind and will be reviewed by the shared task organizers and participants according to the schedule below. The selected papers will be presented as posters. Participants of the shared task are not required to submit system description papers, and their acceptance depends on the quality of the paper rather than on the results obtained in the shared task.

For all types of submission, the EACL 2017 LaTeX templates should be used. In accordance to EACL 2017 submission policy, this is a condition for accepting the paper for the reviewing process. Final versions of accepted papers will be submitted both in PDF and source LaTeX formats. Templates can be retrieved from:
http://eacl2017.org/index.php/calls/call-for-papers

The link to submit a paper is https://www.softconf.com/eacl2017/mwe2017/ (also published on the website of MWE 2017).

IMPORTANT DATES
Jan 22, 2017: Submission deadline for the main track long & short papers
Feb 5, 2017: Submission deadline for shared task system description papers
Feb 11, 2017: Notification of acceptance for the main track papers
Feb 12, 2017: Notification of acceptance for the shared task papers
Feb 20, 2017: Camera-ready papers due (main track and shared task)
April 4, 2017: MWE 2017 Workshop
See also the important dates for the shared task systems.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Iñaki Alegria, University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Anna Anastasiadi-Symeonidi, Aristoteleian University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
Dimitra Anastasiou, Luxemburg Institute of Science and Technology (Luxembourg)
Doug Arnold, University of Essex (UK)
Tim Baldwin, University of Melbourne (Australia)
Eduard Bejček, Charles University (Czech Republic)
Francis Bond, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Antonio Branco, University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Miriam Butt, Universität Konstanz (Germany)
Marie Candito, Paris Diderot University (France)
Fabienne Cap, Uppsala University (Sweden)
Marine Carpuat, University of Maryland (USA)
Helena Caseli, Federal University of Sao Carlos (Brazil)
Anastasia Christofidou, Academy of Athens (Greece)
Ken Church, IBM Research (USA)
Matthieu Constant, Université de Lorraine (France)
Silvio Cordeiro, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
Béatrice Daille, Nantes University (France)
Koenraad de Smedt, University of Bergen (Norway)
Mona Diab, Columbia University (USA)
Gaël Dias, University of Caen Basse-Normandie (France)
Gülşen Eryiğit , Istanbul Technical University (Turkey)
Stefan Evert, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
Meghdad Farahmand, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Joaquim Ferreira da Silva, New University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Dan Flickinger, Stanford University (USA)
Aggeliki Fotopoulou, ILSP/RC "Athena" (Greece)
Voula Giouli, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (Greece)
Antton Gurrutxaga, Elhuyar Foundation (Basque Country, Spain)
Chikara Hashimoto, Yahoo!Japan (Japan)
Kyo Kageura, University of Tokyo (Japan)
Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Dimitris Kokkinakis, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)
Ioannis Korkontzelos, Edge Hill University (UK)
Brigitte Krenn, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Austria)
Cvetana Krstev, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Tita Kyriakopoulou, University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee (France)
Eric Laporte, University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee (France)
Evita Linardaki, Hellenic Open University (Greece)
Ismail el Maarouf, Adarga Ltd (UK)
Hector Martínez Alonso, INRIA (France)
Diana McCarthy, University of Cambridge (UK)
Johanna Monti, "L'Orientale" University of Naples (Italy)
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU (Qatar)
Joakim Nivre, Uppsala University (Sweden)
Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, University of Cambridge (UK)
Michael Oakes, University of Wolverhampton (UK)
Jan Odijk, University of Utrecht (The Netherlands)
Petya Osenova , Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)
Haris Papageorgiou, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (Greece)
Yannick Parmentier, Université d'Orléans (France)
Carla Parra Escartín, Dublin City University (Ireland)
Agnieszka Patejuk, Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
Pavel Pecina, Charles University (Czech Republic)
Scott Piao, Lancaster University (UK)
Thierry Poibeau, CNRS and École Normale Supérieure (France)
Martin Riedl, University of Hamburg (Germany)
Mike Rosner, University of Malta (Malta)
Manfred Sailer, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (Germany)
Magali Sanches Duran, University of São Paulo (Brazil)
Federico Sangati, Independent researcher (Italy)
Nathan Schneider, Georgetown University (USA)
Sabine Schulte im Walde, University of Stuttgart (Germany)
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds (UK)
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)
Sara Stymne, Uppsala University (Sweden)
Stan Szpakowicz, University of Ottawa (Canada)
Beata Trawinski, Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim (Germany)
Yulia Tsvetkov, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Yuancheng Tu, Microsoft (USA)
Ruben Urizar, University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Lonneke van der Plas, University of Malta (Malta)
Gertjan van Noord, University of Groningen (The Netherlands)
Aline Villavicencio, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
Tom Wasow, Stanford University (USA)
Eric Wehrli, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Marion Weller-Di Marco, University of Stuttgart (Germany)
Shuly Wintner, University of Haifa (Israel)


ORGANIZERS
Stella Markantonatou - Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) / R.C. "Athena"
Carlos Ramisch - Aix Marseille University (France)
Agata Savary - Université François Rabelais Tours (France)
Veronika Vincze - University of Szeged (Hungary)

CONTACT
For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to mwe2017workshop@gmail.com