NAACL HLT 2010 Second Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity

ii Introduction It is generally agreed upon that creativity is an important property of human language. For example, speakers routinely coin new words, employ novel metaphors, and play with words through puns. Indeed, such creative processes take place at all levels of language from the lexicon, to syntax, semantics, and discourse. Creativity allows speakers to express themselves with their own individual style. It further provides new ways of looking at the world, by describing something through the use of unusual comparisons for effect or emphasis, and thus making language more engaging and fun. Listeners are typically able to understand creative language without any difficulties. On the other hand, generating and recognizing creative language presents a tremendous challenge for natural language processing (NLP) systems. The recognition of instances of linguistic creativity, and the computation of their meaning, constitute one of the most challenging problems for a variety of NLP tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, dialog systems, and sentiment analysis. Moreover, models of linguistic creativity are necessary for systems capable of generating story narratives, jokes, or poetry. Nevertheless, despite the importance of linguistic creativity in many NLP tasks, it still remains unclear how to model, simulate, or evaluate linguistic creativity. Furthermore, research on topics related to linguistic creativity has not received a great deal of attention at major computational linguistics conferences in recent years. CALC-09 was the first venue to present research on a wide range of topics related to linguistic creativity including computational models of metaphor, generation of creative texts, and measuring morphological and constructional productivity. CALC-10 is the continuation of our efforts to provide a venue for research on all aspects and modalities of linguistic creativity. For CALC-10, we received a total of nine submissions. Six papers were accepted for oral presentation. The topics range from understanding to generating creative language to tools for creative writing. 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 support of the workshop which allowed us to invite Pablo Gervás to give a keynote talk, and whose paper is included in this volume. Pablo Gervás is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Artificial Intelligence at The Complutense University of Madrid. In his paper, he reviews recent research and implementation efforts in …