linguistlist.org>
Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>
elda.fr>Please note that the submission deadline is soon approaching. ***** REMINDER: CALL FOR PAPERS ******* The European Language Resources Association (ELRA), the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP, Athens, Greece), and the National Technical University of Athens, Greece are pleased to announce: The 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2000) (The detailed announcement is available on the web at: http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html) Location: Athens, Greece Dates: 31 May - 2 June 2000 The Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation has been initiated by ELRA and is organised in cooperation with other Associations and Consortia, including ACL, ALLC, COCOSDA, ORIENTAL COCOSDA, EAFT, EAGLES, EDR, ELSNET, ESCA, EURALEX, FRANCIL, LDC, PAROLE, TELRI, etc., and with major national and international organisations, including the European Commission - DG XIII, ARPA, NSF, the IC/863 HTRDP Project (China), the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the ICSP Permanent Committee (Korea), The Natural Language Technical committee of JEIDA (Japan), and the Japanese Project for International Coordination in Corpora, Assessment and Labelling. Cooperation and support from other institutions is currently being sought. CONFERENCE AIMS In the framework of the Information Society, the pervasive character of human language technologies (HLT) and their relevance to all the fields of Information Society Technologies (IST) has been widely recognised. Two issues are currently considered to be particularly relevant: 1) the availability of language resources and 2) the methods for the evaluation of resources, technologies and products. Substantial mutual benefits can be expected from addressing these issues through international cooperation. The term language resources (LR) refers to sets of language data and descriptions in machine readable form, used specifically for building and evaluating natural language and speech algorithms or systems, for software localisation industries and language services, for language enabled information and communication services, for electronic commerce, electronic publishing, language studies, subject-area specialists and end users. Examples of language resources are written and spoken corpora, computational lexica, grammars, terminology databases, and basic software tools for the acquisition, preparation, collection, management, customisation and use of these and other resources. The relevance of evaluation for Language Engineering is increasingly recognised. This involves assessment of the state of the art for a given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a programme, comparing different approaches to a given problem and choosing the best solution, knowing its advantages and drawbacks, assessment of the availability of technologies for a given application, product benchmarking, and assessment of user satisfaction. Language engineering and R&D in language technologies have made important advances in the recent past in various aspects of both written and spoken language processing. Although the evaluation paradigm has been studied and used in large national and international programmes, including the US ARPA HLT programme, the EU LE programme Francophone Aupelf-Uref programme and others, and in the localisation industry (LISA and LRC), it is still subject to substantial unresolved basic research problems. The aim of this conference is to provide an overview of the state of the art, to discuss problems and opportunities, and to exchange information regarding ongoing and planned activities, language resources and their applications. We also intend to discuss evaluation methodologies and demonstrate evaluation tools, and explore possibilities and promote initiatives for international cooperation in the areas mentioned above. CONFERENCE TOPICS The following non-exhaustive list gives some examples of topics which could be addressed by papers submitted to LREC2000: I. Issues in the design, construction and use of Languages Resources (LR) (theoretical & best practice): * Guidelines, standards, specifications, and models for LR * Organisational issues in the construction, distribution, and use of LR * Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, creation, annotation, management, access, distribution, and use of LR * Legal aspects and problems in the construction, access, and use of LR * Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LR * Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g. terms, lexical information, language modelling) from LR * Monolingual and multilingual LR * Multimodal and multimedia LR * LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia cultural industry * Industrial production and use of LR * Integration of various modalities in LR (spoken, visual, gestual, textual) * Exploitation of LR in different types of applications (language technology, information retrieval, vocal interfaces, electronic commerce, etc.) * Industrial LR requirements and the community's response * Analysis of user needs for LR * Mechanisms of LR distribution and marketing * Economics of LR * Customisation and use of LR * Research issues relevant for LR II. Issues in Human Language Technologies evaluation: * Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LR * Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for benchmarking and evaluation * Evaluation in written language processing (text retrieval, terminology extraction, message understanding, text alignment, machine translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation, text understanding, summarisation, localisation, etc.) * Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech recognition and understanding, voice dictation, oral dialog, speech synthesis, speech coding, speaker and language recognition, etc.) * Evaluation of document processing (document recognition, on-line and off-line machine and hand-written character recognition, etc.) * Evaluation of (multimedia) document retrieval and search systems * Evaluation of multimodal systems * Qualitative and perceptive evaluation * Evaluation of products and applications * Blackbox, glassbox and diagnostic evaluation of systems * Situated evaluation of applications * Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures * From evaluation to standardisation of LR * Research issues relevant to evaluation III. General issues: * National and international activities and projects * LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia cultural industry * Priorities, perspectives, strategies in the field of LR national and international policies * Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international cooperation The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, presentations of accepted papers, poster sessions, referenced demonstrations and panels. Pre-Conference Workshops will be organized on the 29th and 30th of May and post-Conference Workshops on the 3rd and 4th of June 2000. Please consult the conference Web site (http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html) for complete information about submission guidelines, contact people, submission dates, various conference committees and members, and other general information. IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER * 20 NOVEMBER 1999: Submission of proposals for papers, posters, referenced demos, panels and workshops * 10 DECEMBER 1999: Notification of acceptance of workshop and panel proposals * 2 FEBRUARY 2000: Notification of acceptance of papers, posters, referenced demos * 2 APRIL 2000: Final version of the articles for the proceedings * 31 MAY - 2 JUNE 2000: Conference CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, Italy George Carayannis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athens, Greece Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France Harald H�ge, Siemens, Munich, Germany Bente Maegaard, CST, Copenhagen, Denmark Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy (Conference chair) For general information about the conference, please contact: LREC Secretariat: Ms. Despina Scutari Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) 6, Artemidos & Epidavrou Str. 15125 Marousi, Athens, GREECE Tel: +301 6800959 ; Fax: +301 6854270 e-mail: LREC2000Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
pscw.uva.nl>APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTINGS!! (this message was sent to several lists and more than 250 Africanists worldwide) CALL FOR PAPERS The Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa is a new, free, on-line journal published at the LPCA (Language and Popular Culture in Africa) web site. The Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa will publish data-centered studies on all aspects of African popular culture mediated by language. The Journal welcomes contributions from all relevant disciplines (anthropology, (socio-)linguistics, folklore, sociology, history, literature, etc.). Publication of the first issue of the Journal is scheduled for late Spring 2000. Please send your manuscripts to: Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa Vincent A. de Rooij, Editor in Charge Dept of Sociology and Anthropology University of Amsterdam O.Z. Achterburgwal 185 1012 DK Amsterdam The Netherlands All submissions will be reviewed by members of the LPCA Advisory Board or by other experts. For more information on the Journal's Editorial Policy and details on how to submit, consult the JLPCA home page: http://www.pscw.uva.nl/lpca/jlpca/info.html THE LPCA WEB SITE Language and Popular Culture in Africa (LPCA) is a web site that aims to document and further the study of expressions of popular language and culture in Africa. LPCA makes available texts that serve as the medium of African popular culture and are at the same time part of this culture. If you want to make relevant materials available through the LPCA web site, please contact us by e-mail or regular mail at the addresses below. For more information on the LPCA site and how to contribute, see our home page: http://www.pscw.uva.nl/lpca/index.html LPCA-L DISCUSSION LIST If you want to stay informed of new additions to the LPCA web site or if you want to discuss issues related to the web site's mission, you may want to subscribe to the LPCA-L discussion list (created on 8 October 1999). To subscribe, send the following command in the body of your e-mail message to <LISTSERVMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue