Figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms, personification, simile among others, is in abundance in natural discourse. It is an effective apparatus to heighten effect and convey various meanings, such as humor, irony, sarcasm, affection, etc. Figurative language can be found not only in fiction, but also in everyday speech, newspaper articles, research papers, and even technical reports. The recognition of figurative language use and the computation of figurative language meaning constitute one of the hardest problems for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, and question answering. Resolution of this problem involves both a solid understanding of the distinction between literal and non-literal language and the development of effective computational models that can make the appropriate semantic interpretation automatically.

As natural language processing moves to an unprecedented new stage, it has become more urgent than ever to tackle the bottleneck presented by figurative language. There has been an increasing amount of work in this area in the past few years (e.g. theoretical semantic/pragmatic analyses of non-compositional phenomena, research on psychological/neuro-linguistic modeling of figurative language comprehension and production, research on the structure of the lexicon, knowledge representation and figurative language comprehension, domain-specific figurative language detection, computational corpus studies of figurative language), but much more work needs to be done (e.g. large-scale automatic figurative language detection, automatic extraction of idioms and non-compositional phrases from large corpora, automatic semantic interpretation of figurative language, automatic figurative language generation, machine translation of non-literal phenomena, etc.). The goal of this workshop is to provide a venue for researchers in this area to inform each other and the natural language processing community at large of the state of the art of current systems and to reach a better understanding of the new issues and challenges that need to be tackled.

The workshop is intended to be highly interdisciplinary. We encourage the participation of people whose research deals with figurative language from different perspectives, including (but not limited to) applied linguistics, psychology, corpus linguistics, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, etc.

University of North Texas. Her research interests are in lexical
semantics, graph-based algorithms for natural language processing,
minimally supervised natural language learning, and multilingual natural
language processing. She is currently involved in a number of research
projects, including knowledge-based word sense disambiguation,
(non-traditional) methods for building annotated corpora with volunteer
contributions over the Web, graph-based algorithms for text processing,
opinion and sentiment analysis, and computational humour. She has
published a number of articles in books, journals, and proceedings, in
these and related areas. She is the president of the ACL Special Group on
the Lexicon (SIGLEX), and a board member for the ACL Special Group on
Natural Language Learning (SIGNLL). She serves on the editorial boards of
the journal of Computational Linguistics, the journal of Language
Resources and Evaluations, the Journal of Natural Language Engineering,
the Journal of Research on Language and Computation, and the recently
established journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language
Processing and Machine Learning.