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

 


   

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.

Amilcar Cardoso,

Departamento de Engenharia Informática,

Universidade de Coimbra, Polo II, Portugal.

Francisco Camara 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