Universals of Linguistic Idiosyncrasy in Multilingual Computational Linguistics

• Computational linguistics builds models that can usefully process and produce language and thatcan increase our understanding of linguistic phenomena. From the computational perspective,language data are particularly challenging notably due to their variable degree of idiosyncrasy(unexpected properties shared by few peer objects), and the pervasiveness of non-compositionalphenomena such as multiword expressions (whose meaning cannot be straightforwardly deducedfrom the meanings of their components, e.g. red tape, by and large, to pay a visit and to pullone’s leg) and constructions (conventional associations of forms and meanings). Additionally, ifmodels and methods are to be consistent and valid across languages, they have to face specificitiesinherent either to particular languages, or to various linguistic traditions.These challenges were addressed by the Dagstuhl Seminar 21351 entitled “Universals ofLinguistic Idiosyncrasy in Multilingual Computational Linguistics”, which took place on 30-31 August 2021. Its main goal was to create synergies between three distinct though partlyoverlapping communities: experts in typology, in cross-lingual morphosyntactic annotation and inmultiword expressions. This report documents the program and the outcomes of the seminar. Wepresent the executive summary of the event, reports from the 3 Working Groups and abstracts ofindividual talks and open problems presented by the participants.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Datorlingvistik

Computational Linguistics

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)