Cognitive-linguistic approaches:
What can we gain by computational treatment of data?

A theme session at DGKL-06/GCLA-06
(Second International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association)

7 October 2006, Munich, Germany

Preface by the organizers

Work with empirical data is important, if not essential, to cognitive linguistics. Electronic corpora of written texts or transcriptions of speech are increasingly used and sometimes purposefully collected by linguists in their investigations of phenomena such as metaphor, metonymy, idioms, and frames. During their work, some linguists also compile -- more or less private -- electronic archives of phenomena studied in cognitive linguistics: searchable lists, classifications, databases. Moreover, they have to deal with these phenomena -- usually in cooperation with computational linguists and computer scientists -- when building general lexicon resources for the automatic treatment of language.

Problems that arise when working with corpora are connected to the way they are prepared for and processed by the corpus tools (concordancers, corpus managers). For example, in spite of some attempts in computational linguistics to detect metaphors in running texts, no corpus manager disposes of a "Show all metaphors" function. Rather, in order to search a corpus for metaphors, linguists will devise their own methods, be they theory-based or data-driven.

At a larger scale, this also applies to general linguistic resources developed for Human Language Technology applications. The decisions taken during linguistic resource-building may then be evaluated -- by the resource developers or others --, based on large quantities of data encoded in the resources themselves. Evaluations of this kind are at the same time test-beds for theories put forth in cognitive linguistics, and their results provide valuable feedback for theory development.

Against this background, we invited contributions to the theme session on Cognitive-linguistic approaches: What can we gain by computational treatment of data? One of our aims was to increase awareness of computational issues among cognitive linguists and to bring together researchers exploiting computational methodologies to investigate into cognitive issues. On the other hand, we also hoped to incite computationally oriented linguists to critically reflect on the usefulness of currently available methods and tools for practical and theoretical work in cognitive linguistics. There has been a strong response to our Call for Abstracts. Most submissions were of very high quality, and the constraint to keep the theme session within the time frame of one day forced us to select only the very best and most topic-centered ones. Therefore, the reader should be aware of the fact that the present volume of extended abstracts reflects only a part of the relevant work and projects currently going on in this field, in Europe and elsewhere.

The majority of the selected contributions to theme session discusses methods of exploiting electronic corpora for cognitive linguistic research (Chung and Ahrens; Glynn; Hanks; Lashevskaja; Stathi) as well as practical experiences with resource building (Lee). The remaining two papers evaluate the implications of data encoded in computational resources, from the viewpoint of cognitive-connectionist linguistic theory (Hiltula; Mehler and Sichelschmidt). We wish to thank the authors for making their extended abstracts available, as well as all colleagues who sent us submissions for having expressed their interest in the topic of the theme session.

Antonietta Alonge	Università di Perugia Sezione di Linguistica Dipartimento di Filosofia, Linguistica e Letterature Piazza Morlacchi, 11 Perugia 06100, Italy
Birte Lönneker-Rodman	Universität Hamburg Institut für Germanistik II Von-Melle-Park 6 20146 Hamburg, Germany
3rd August, 2006