Constructicography in Practice: Constructions, Challenges, and Opportunities
Co-located with EURALEX 2026 - 29.09.2026 - Vienna, Austria
Constructicography (Lyngfelt et al. 2018), the systematic description of constructions in Constructicons and construction-based lexicographic resources, has emerged as a key area at the intersection of Construction Grammar (i.e., Croft 2001), lexicography, and computational linguistics. While constructions have long been acknowledged as central units of linguistic knowledge, their consistent representation, annotation, and integration into lexicographic resources remain methodologically and technologically challenging.
The workshop aims to bring together researchers working on theoretical, descriptive, and computational aspects of constructicography. It will focus on how constructions are identified, modeled, represented, and linked to lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information across languages and resource types. Particular attention will be paid to challenges such as construction granularity, variation, productivity, cross-linguistic comparability, corpus-driven discovery, and interoperability with existing lexical resources.
At the same time, the workshop highlights emerging opportunities offered by large corpora, annotation frameworks, and NLP techniques, including construction mining, semi-automatic Constructicon building, and the use of large language models in constructional analysis. Moreover, the workshop will explore applications of Constructicons, particularly in language teaching and learning.
By fostering dialogue among linguists, lexicographers, educational experts, and computational researchers, the workshop seeks to advance constructicography as a mature, practically applicable field within lexicography.
At the same time, the workshop highlights emerging opportunities enabled by large corpora, annotation frameworks, and NLP techniques, including construction mining, semi-automatic Constructicon development, and the use of large language models in constructional analysis. In addition, the workshop will explore applications of Constructicons, particularly in language teaching and learning.
We invite submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Theoretical foundations of constructicography
- Methods for Constructicon (and FrameNet) development
- Frame-based approaches to constructional meanings
- Corpus-based identification and annotation of constructions (and, possibly frames)
- Defining and delimiting constructions
- (Limits of) capturing constructional meanings by frames
- Comparing frame-based to other approaches to constructicon building
- Construction annotation in treebanks
- Construction annotation in treebanks - universality of constructions
- Constructions and Multiword Expressions
- Constructions and frames
- Computational approaches to constructicography
- Constructicons, constructions, frames, and LLMs
- Applications in language learning, teaching, downstream NLP applications, and beyond
Invited Speaker: We are pleased to announce that Jelena Kallas (PHD) will give an invited talk about Constructicography in Practice: The Case of the Estonian Constructicon
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit full papers for inclusion in a dedicated volume after the workshop.
Preliminary programme
| 9:00 – 9:10 | Opening and welcome Voula Giouli, Athina Sioupi, Nina Böbel, Alexander Ziem |
| 9:10 – 10:00 | Keynote Jelena Kallas |
| 10:00 – 10:20 | The CASA-ConstructiCon of the English language – the project at present and plans for the future Thomas Herbst |
| 10:20 – 10:40 | Building a Constructicon for an Ancient Language: Challenges and Prospects from ConNetGk Chiara Zanchi |
| 10:40 – 11:00 | The Research Constructicon Elodie Winckel, Peter Uhrig, Stephanie Evert |
| 11:00 – 11:30 | BREAK |
| 11:30 – 11:50 | Cross-Linguistic Comparability in MoCCA: Aligning English, German, and Russian Constructions via Comparative Concepts Elizaveta Petrenko, Elodie Winckel, Peter Uhrig |
| 11:50 – 12:10 | From Constructions to Constructs, and Back Again: Linking Constructional Representation and Corpus Data in the Italian Constructicon Architecture Francesca Masini, Ludovica Pannitto, Francesco Massidda, Flavio Pisciotta, Elisa Chierchiello, Cristina Bosco, Bruno Guillaume |
| 12:10 – 12:30 | The relevance of constructicons for lexical typology: synchronic and diachronic evidence from variation in argument structure constructions Silvia Luraghi |
| 12:30 – 12:50 | Illustrating filler-slot relations Bálint Sass |
| 12:50 – 13:00 | BREAK |
| 13:00 – 13:20 | Telling Memory and Commitment in Italian: A Constructicographic Approach to linking concepts of memoria e impegno in Social Antimafia Discourse Paul Sambre |
| 13:20 – 13:40 | A data-driven information-theoretic approach to constructicon building: the mMERGE algorithm and Norwegian multiword expressions Anna Endresen, Olaf Mikkelsen, Chadi Ben Joussef |
| 13:40 – 14:00 | Identifying multiword units for communicative language teaching: Insights from covarying collexeme analysis and masked language modelling Eleni Kanli, Evelyn Wiesinger |