====== Lexical Semantics Workshop (ESSLLI 2008)  ======

[[start|Start page]] --
**Background** --
[[proceedings|Programme and proceedings]] --
[[task|Shared tasks]] --
[[cfp|Call for papers]]

===== Background and motivation =====

[[http://wordspace.collocations.de/lib/exe/fetch.php/workshop:esslli:lexical_semantics_workshop_-_motivational_poster.pdf?id=esslli%3Astart&cache=cache|{{ motivational_poster_thumb.jpg|Motivational Poster}}]]

Corpus-based distributional models (such as LSA or HAL)
have been claimed to capture interesting aspects of word meaning
and provide an explanation for the rapid acquisition of semantic
knowledge by human language learners. 
However, although these models have been proposed as
plausible simulations of human semantic space organization,
careful and extensive empirical tests of such claims are still lacking.

Systematic evaluations typically focus on large-scale
quantitative tasks, often more oriented towards engineering
applications (see, e.g., the recent SEMEVAL evaluation campaign) than
towards the challenges posed by linguistic theory,
philosophy and cognitive science.  This has resulted in a great divide 
between corpus-driven computational approaches to semantics on the one
hand and theory-driven symbolic approaches on the other -- a situation that
is characteristic of the linguistic and of most
of the cognitive tradition.
Moreover, whereas human lexical semantic competence is obviously
multi-faceted -- ranging from free association to taxonomic judgments to
relational effects -- tests of distributional models tend to focus on a
single aspect (most typically the detection of semantic similarity),
and few if any models have been tuned to tackle
different facets of semantics in an integrated manner.

Our workshop purports to fill these gaps by inviting research teams and
individual scholars to test their computational models on a variety of small but
carefully designed tasks that aim to bring out linguistically and
cognitively interesting aspects of semantics
([[#Tasks and data sets|see below]] for details).  To this effect, annotated
datasets are available to the participants, who are
encouraged to explore them and highlight interesting aspects of their
models' performance, conduct quantitative and qualitative error analysis, etc.

The focus is NOT on competition, but on understanding how different
models highlight different semantic aspects, how far we are from
an integrated model, and which aspects of semantics are beyond the
reach of purely distributional approaches. 
In fact, we believe that at the current state of the art in
computational and distributional semantics, our goal should not be
to develop the best-performing model for a specific application, but rather
to enlarge our understanding of the limits and potentialities 
of different approaches when confronted with cognitively realistic tasks. 

In addition to these practical tasks, theoretical and experimental papers
discussing the relation between distributional and symbolic approaches to meaning
are also invited.  We are particularly interested in papers that analyze our
task data sets from a theoretical perspective or that discuss simulation results
and their implications for semantic and cognitive theory.

Through collaborative preparatory work on the Word Space wiki ([[http://wordspace.collocations.de/|wordspace.collocations.de]]) and thanks to the ESSLLI multiple-day workshop format, we hope that this initiative will foster
collaboration among the nascent community of researchers interested in computational semantics from a theoretical rather than engineering-oriented point of view.
