Motivation for the Special Issue

In recent years, fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics (CL) have come into stagnation. Within a massive number of papers published in those fields, only a small number present methods that are truly creative and ground-breaking, or analyze deeper and more sophisticated aspects of language such as metaphors, metonymy, irony, or other figurative uses of language, and their recent applications, for example, in an overwhelming flood of online slang, harassment, cyberbullying, or fake news.

On the other hand, the need for the research dealing with the creative use of language begins to grow exponentially, giving birth to scientific sub-fields such as the science of emoticons, automatic cyberbullying detection, or humor processing. This proves that researchers are evolving from imitative research focused on optimizing the parameters of machine learning classifiers into the application of previously developed methods to actual deep and profound studies on language phenomena. This brought us to the decision to propose this Special Issue for studies addressing such up-to-date and crucial topics. Below we describe the proposal for the Special Issue on Recent Developments in Creative Language Processing.

In general, the Special Issue (SI) will focus on two kinds of research. Firstly, processing of creative language phenomena (defined semantically as: [[Creative Language] Processing]), such as those mentioned above, and others (explained in more detail below). Secondly, the SI will also address creative methods for the processing of language (defined semantically as: [Creative [Language Processing]]).

Recent advancements in the fields of NLP and CL show a stagnation, and a lack of creativity, with the same methods being applied to similar problems, and thus resulting in publication of a multitude of overlapping and redundant publications. With the proposed SI we plan to strictly reject such papers. In particular, the scope of the SI does not include research focused on well-established topics such as miniscule improvements of part-of-speech tagging, or parameter optimization of a machine learning algorithm applied in sentiment analysis, as well as other non-creative methods for the processing of language in general. This will give room for novel and creative research that is so greatly needed in the present post-truth reality.

Aims and Scope

The SI will focus on topics deepening the knowledge on the creative use of language. Instead of taking up basic topics from the fields of CL and NLP such as the improvement of part-of-speech tagging, we will promote research focused on such creative topics as humor processing, deceptive language processing, or figurative language processing, for which the generally perceived state-of-the-art has not yet been established.

Target Audience

The SI is geared towards the audience of scientists, researchers, scholars, and students performing research in the analysis or generation of language, with a specific focus on studies about the creative use of language and the creative methods for the processing of language. The Special Issue will not accept research on basic topics for which the field has been well established, such as improvement of part-of-speech tagging, etc., unless they directly contribute to the idea of creative processing of language phenomena.

Size of the Target Market

Recent major ACL conferences host an increasingly growing number of authors. For example, for the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, which took place on 15–20 July 2018 in Melbourne, Australia, there was an overall number of 427 papers, with a total of 1318 authors. The acceptance rate was 24.9%. Even if there were authors who submitted more than one paper, this suggests that there is presently roughly over 5000 specialists performing studies in the areas of CL and NLP. Although not all of them at present perform specifically the research on the creative use of language, the hope is that the proposed SI will help those who are still performing non-creative studies to engage in more valuable and groundbreaking research.

Prof. Dr. Michal Ptaszynski
Prof. Rafal Rzepka
Dr. Pawel Dybala
Guest Editors

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