NAACL HLT 2009 Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity

Introduction It is generally agreed upon that linguistic creativity is a unique property of human language. Some claim that linguistic creativity is expressed in our ability to combine known words in a new sentence, others refer to our skill to express thoughts in figurative language, and yet others talk about syntactic recursion and lexical creativity. Computational systems incorporating models of linguistic creativity operate on different types of data, including written text, audio/speech/sound, and video/images/gestures. Creativity-aware systems will improve the contribution Computational Linguistics has to offer to many practical areas, including education, entertainment, and engineering. The idea behind the 2009 workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity (CALC) originated in our own previous activities, including the organization of the 2007 NAACL-HLT workshop on Figurative Language Processing and work within the Story Generator Algorithms project (German Research Foundation grant ME-1546/2-1). We are well aware of the fact that each single linguistic creativity phenomenon is challenging to describe, detect, or generate on its own. Consequently, the main goal of the present workshop is to provide a venue for researchers to inform each other and the NLP community at large of the state of the art of current systems. Yet, linguistic creativity phenomena are intertwined with others, and with each other. To illustrate, metaphorical concepts are related to their lexical and syntactical surface realization; the events of a story are expressed by narrator and character speech; and humor involves semantic, situational, and cultural knowledge. With twelve peer-reviewed contributions covering a wide range of phenomena related to linguistic creativity, the workshop will thus strengthen research and foster collaboration in the field. At the same time, it will contribute to a better understanding of the new issues and challenges that need to be tackled. For CALC 2009, we received a total of 19 submissions coming from 13 different countries. Eight papers were accepted for oral presentation and four were selected for a poster session. We are especially grateful to the authors who submitted excellent papers and to our hard working program committee. We would like to express our enormous gratitude to the U.S. National Science Foundation (IIS award #: 0906244) for the generous support of the workshop which allowed many participants from three continents to attend the workshop and present their work. Particular thanks go to the invited speaker, Nick Montfort (MIT), who kindly agreed to give a talk on Interactive Fiction, and whose paper is …