Conference Information

Full Title:	LREC Workshop on Merging Language Resources

Short Title:	MergingLR2012
Location:	Istanbul, Turkey
Start Date:	22-May-2012 - 22-May-2012
Contact:	MergingLR2012 Organising Committee
Meeting Email:	click here to access email
Meeting URL:	http://panacea-lr.eu/en/news/project/2011/12/19/lrec-2012-merging-lr-workshop/
Meeting Description:	The availability of adequate language resources has been a well-known bottleneck for most high-level language technology applications, e.g. Machine Translation, parsing, and Information Extraction, for at least 15 years, and the impact of the bottleneck is becoming all the more apparent with the availability of higher computational power and massive storage, since modern language technologies are capable of using far more resources than the community produces. The present landscape is characterized by the existence of numerous scattered resources, many of which have differing levels of coverage, types of information and granularity. Taken singularly, existing resources do not have sufficient coverage, quality or richness for robust large-scale applications, and yet they contain valuable information (Monachini et al. 2004 and 2006; Soria et al. 2006; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu et al. 2011). Differing technology or application requirements, ignorance of the existence of certain resources, and difficulties in accessing and using them, has led to the proliferation of multiple, unconnected resources that, if merged, could constitute a much richer repository of information augmenting either coverage or granularity, or both, and consequently multiplying the number of potential language technology applications. Merging, combining and/or compiling larger resources from existing ones thus appears to be a promising direction to take. The re-use and merging of existing resources is not altogether unknown. For example, WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) has been successfully reused in a variety of applications. But this is the exception rather than the rule; in fact, merging, and enhancing existing resources is uncommon, probably because it is by no means a trivial task given the profound differences in formats, formalisms, metadata, and linguistic assumptions. The language resource landscape is on the brink of a large change, however. With the proliferation of accessible metadata catalogues, and resource repositories (such as the new META-SHARE (http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share) infrastructure), a potentially large number of existing resources will be more easily located, accessed and downloaded. Also, with the advent of distributed platforms for the automatic production of language resources, such as PANACEA (http://www.panacea-lr.eu/), new language resources and linguistic information capable of being integrated into those resources will be produced more easily and at a lower cost. Thus, it is likely that researchers and application developers will seek out resources already available before developing new, costly ones, and will require methods for merging/combining various resources and adapting them to their specific needs. Up to the present day, most resource merging has been done manually, with only a small number of attempts reported in the literature towards (semi-)automatic merging of resources (Crouch & King 2005; Pustejovsky et al. 2005; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu et al. 2011). In order to take a further step towards the scenario depicted above, in which resource merging and enhancing is a reliable and accessible first step for researchers and application developers, experience and best practices must be shared and discussed, as this will help the whole community avoid any waste of time and resources. Part of a series of meetings constituting an ongoing forum for sharing and evaluating the results of different methods and systems for the automatic production of language resources, this half-day workshop focuses on (semi-)automatic methods for merging language resources, such as lexicons, corpora and grammars. This workshop is co-located with the LREC 2012 Conference (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/).
Linguistic Subfield:	Computational Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics
LL Issue:	23.9


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