A construction is a recurring, or otherwise noteworthy congregation of linguistic entities. Examples include collocations ("hermetically sealed"), (idiomatic) expressions with fixed constituents ("kick the bucket"), expressions with (semi-)optional constituents ("hungry as a X"), and sequences of grammatical categories ([det][adj][noun]). As can be seen by these examples, constructions are a diverse breed, and what constitutes a linguistic construction is largely an open question.
Despite (or perhaps due to) the inherent vagues of the concept, constructions enjoy increasing interest in both theoretical linguistics and in natural language processing. A symptom of the former is the Construction grammar framework, and a symptom of the latter is the growing awareness of the impact of constructions on different kinds of information access applications. Constructions are an interesting phenomenon because they constitute a middleway in the syntax-lexicon continuum, and because they show great potential in tackling infamously difficult NLP tasks.
We encourage submissions in all areas of constructions-based research, with special focus on:
Theoretical discussions on the nature and place within linguistic theory of the concept of linguistic constructions.
Methods and algorithms for identifying and extracting linguistic constructions.
Uses and applications of linguistic constructions (information access, sentiment analysis, tools for language learning etc.).
Extended submission deadline: April 6
First review: April 20
Final papers due: May 4
Workshop: May 14
Location:
NoDaLiDa 2009, Odense, Denmark. Workshop
participants must register for the main conference. Please see the
conference website for more information regarding fees and
registration.
The workshop will be in room 0-98. For more
details regarding the venue, please see the NoDaLiDa
2009 website.
Proceedings are available here.
Organizers:
Magnus Sahlgren, SICS (mange@sics.se)
Ola Knutsson, KTH (knutsson@csc.kth.se)
Benjamin Bergen, University of Hawaii
Stefan Evert, University of Osnabrück
Auður Hauksdóttir, University of Iceland
Emma Sköldberg, University of Gothenburg
Jan-Ola Östman, University of Helsinki
09:00-09:10 Opening remarks
09:10-09:45 Jussi Karlgren: Constructions, patterns, and finding
features more sophisticated than term occurrence in text (Keynote).
09:50-10:10 Sara Stymne: Definite Noun Phrases in Statistical Machine
Translation into Danish.
10:10-10:30 Katja Keßelmeier, Tibor Kiss, Antje Müller, Claudia Roch,
Tobias Stadtfeld and Jan Strunk: Mining for Preposition-Noun
Constructions in German.
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-11:20 Krista Lagus, Oskar Kohonen and Sami Virpioja: Towards
Unsupervised Learning of Constructions from Text.
11:20-11:40 Kadri Muischnek and Heete Sahkai: Using collocationfinding
methods to extract constructions and to estimate their
productivity.
11:40-12:00 Robert Östling and Ola Knutsson: A corpus-based tool for
helping writers with Swedish collocations.
12:00-12:20 Gunnar Eriksson: K - A construction substitute.
12:20-13:00 Discussion.