Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing

This is the proceedings of the second ACL workshop on multiword expressions (MWEs). MWEs are increasingly being singled out as a problem for NLP, particularly for the many applications which require some degree of semantic interpretation and require tasks such as parsing and word sense disambiguation. In the call for papers we solicited papers that especially laid emphasis on integrating analysis, acquisition and treatment of various kinds of multiword expressions in natural language NLP. For example, research that combines a linguistic analysis with a method of automatically acquiring the classes described, work that combines the computational treatment of a class of MWEs with a solid linguistic analysis and research that extracts MWEs and either classifies them or uses them in some task. We received 23 submissions (3 from Asia, 11 from Europe and 9 from the Americas), and accepted 11 of them for presentation, with two reserves. Each submission was reviewed by three members of the program committee, who not only judged each submission but also gave detailed comments to the authors. The overall quality of submissions was high, making the final selection very difficult. The papers in these proceedings are those which were finally selected for presentation. Many of the papers deal with MWEs in general, rather than aiming at specific subtypes, with examples from a wide range of languages (Basque, English, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish). There were also a variety of formalisms considered (dependency grammar, finite state machines, lexical conceptual structure, HPSG, . . . ) as well as more descriptive papers. The main applications targeted were machine translation and information retrieval.