Call for Papers

The workshop will bring together researchers in Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, two areas which have traditionally been interrelated, but which have been developing somewhat independently in recent years. It is also addressed at language technology researchers working with language resources based on Frame Semantics or Construction Grammar.  The workshop follows on from similar joint meetings in Berkeley, California in 2013  (sponsored by the Swedish FrameNet group) and in Juiz de Fora, Brazil in 2016 (sponsored by FrameNet Brasil), and will cover the rapidly unfolding developments in both areas and recent research on their interconnections.

Charles J. Fillmore and Paul Kay and their students and colleagues developed the theories of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar in parallel over a period of several decades.  Both have been of interest to many linguists, psychologists, computer scientists, and others, with most people tending to be more interested in one than the other.  This workshop will attempt to bring together researchers working on Construction Grammar with those working on Frame Semantics, both from a theoretical (linguistic) and more practical (language technology) perspective, highlighting the interconnections of the two theories, their relation to other theories of semantics and syntax, as well as their deployment in concrete natural language processing applications.  This workshop will also provide a forum for reporting on cross-lingual and multilingual research on Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar around the world.

We welcome (1) submissions discussing theoretical questions related to Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar (CxnG), especially in a multilingual context, and preferably empirically based (on corpus studies and/or natural language processing applications), such as the following:

• What counts as a construction? What counts as a frame?
• Are the schemas of CxnG necessarily different from FrameNet frames? If so, how and why?  Are Frames/Schemas an adequate semantic representation for CxnG? What constructions are implicit in ordinary FrameNet-style annotation? Are relations between constructions basically the same as relations between frames?
• To what extent are semantic frames language universals? How should cross-linguistic differences in frames be represented and studied?
• To what extent are constructions the same across languages?  How can we make useful cross-linguistic comparisons between semantically similar constructions such as correlatives,  conditionals, causatives, etc.?
• How can research devoted mainly to either Frame Semantics or Construction Grammar contribute to the growth of both approaches?

We also welcome (2) reports on language resources based on Frame Semantics (FrameNets) or Construction Grammar (constructicons) being developed and made freely available in any language; this will include reports on annotation using the new Multilingual FrameNet annotation tool described below. 

In addition, we especially welcome (3) reports on applications of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, including both Frame Semantic parsers/semantic role labeling systems and Construction Grammar parsers and end-to-end systems.    

The organizers have also been developing a web-based tool for Frame Semantic annotation in any language, chosen a series of texts to be annotated in a variety of languages, and begun to annotate them.   We plan to make this system freely available well before the workshop and we will solicit papers from those who have tried annotating one of these texts.  Please contact the organizers as early as possible if you are interested in participating in this annotation project.

This will be a half-day workshop with a poster session and a small number of oral talks.  

Submission will be via the START system used for the main conference. Initial submissions should be in the form of extended abtracts (3–4 pages, excluding references) in pdf format only, and must strictly adhere to the standard format for LREC 2018 (see instructions at lrec2018.lrec-conf.org/en/submission/authors-kit/). 

Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!

Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility,  when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository.  This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2018 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers  will be offered at submission time.