linguistlist.org>
Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>
soton.ac.uk>Language and the Future of Europe: Ideologies, Policies and Practices Date: 08-JUL-04 - 10-JUL-04 Location: Southampton, United Kingdom Contact: Patrick Stevenson Contact Email: lippMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
elda.fr>The fourth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2004, is organised by ELRA in cooperation with other Associations and consortia, national and international organisations. Location: Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal Dates: - Pre-conference workshops: 24-25 May 2004 - Main conference: 26-27-28 May 2004 - Post-conference workshops: 29-30 May 2004 Conference web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org - ----------------------------- CONFERENCE AIMS - ----------------------------- In the Information Society, the pervasive character of Human Language Technologies (HLT) and their relevance to practically all fields of Information Society Technologies (IST) has been widely recognised. Two issues are particularly relevant: the availability of Language Resources (LRs) and the methods for the evaluation of resources, technologies, products and applications. Substantial mutual benefits are achieved by addressing these issues through international collaboration. The term "language resources" (LRs) refers to sets of language data and descriptions in machine readable form, used in many types of areas/components/systems/applications: - creation and evaluation of natural language, speech and multimodal algorithms and systems, - software localisation and language services, - language enabled information and communication services, - knowledge management, - e-commerce, e-publishing, e-learning, e-government, - cultural heritage, - linguistic studies, - etc. This large range of uses makes the LRs infrastructure a strategic part of the e-society, where the creation of a basic set of LRs for all languages must be ensured in order to bring all languages to the same level of usability and availability. Examples of LRs are written or spoken corpora and lexica, which may be annotated or not, multimodal resources, grammars, terminology or domain specific databases and dictionaries, ontologies, multimedia databases, etc. LRs also cover basic software tools for the acquisition, preparation, collection, management, customisation and use of the above mentioned examples. The relevance of evaluation for language technologies development is increasingly recognised. This involves assessing the state-of-the-art for a given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a programme, comparing different approaches to a given problem, assessing the availability of technologies for a given application, benchmarking, and assessing system usability and user satisfaction. The aim of this conference is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, discuss problems and opportunities, exchange information regarding LRs, their applications, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the new e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones. LREC will also elaborate on evaluation methodologies and tools, explore the different trends and promote initiatives for international collaboration in the areas mentioned above. CONFERENCE TOPICS Examples of the topics which may be addressed by papers submitted to the conference are given below. *** Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs)*** - Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs, - Methods, tools and procedures for the acquisition, creation, management, access, distribution and use of LRs, - Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g. terms, lexical information, language modelling) from LRs, - Organisational and legal issues in the construction, distribution, access and use of LRs, - Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LRs, - Definition and requirements for a Basic and Extended LAnguage Resource Kit (BLARK, ELARK) for all languages, - Monolingual and multilingual LRs, - Multimedia and multimodal LRs. - Integration of various media and modalities in LRs (speech, vision, language), - Documentation and archiving of languages, including minority and endangered languages, - Ontologies and knowledge representation, - Terminology, term extraction, domain-specific dictionaries, - LRs for linguistic research in human-machine communication, - Exploitation of LRs in different types of applications (information extraction, information retrieval, speech dictation, translation, summarisation, web services, semantic web, etc.), - Exploitation of LRs in different types of interfaces (dialog systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensorial interactions, etc.) - Industrial LRs requirements, user needs and community's response, - Industrial production of LRs, - Industrial use of LRs, - Metadata descriptions of LRs. *** Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT) evaluation *** - Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LRs, - Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures, - Benchmarking of systems and products, resources for benchmarking and evaluation, blackbox, glassbox and diagnostic evaluation of systems, - Usability and user experience evaluation, qualitative and perceptive evaluation, - Evaluation in written language processing (document production and management, text retrieval, terminology extraction, message understanding, text alignment, machine translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation, text understanding, summarisation, question answering, localisation, etc.), - Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech recognition and understanding, voice dictation, oral dialog, speech synthesis, speech coding, speaker and language recognition, spoken translation, etc.), - Evaluation of multimedia document retrieval and search systems (including detection, indexing, filtering, alert, question answering, etc), - Evaluation of multimodal systems, - From evaluation to standardisation. *** General issues *** - National and international activities and projects, - LRs and the needs/opportunities of the emerging industries, - LRs and contributions to societal needs (e.g. e-society), - Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs, - Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international cooperation, and their organisational and technological implications, - Open architectures for LRs. The Conference targets the integration of different types of LRs (spoken, written and other modalities) and of the respective communities. To this end, LREC encourages submissions covering issues which are common to different types of Language Technologies, such as dialog strategy, written and spoken translation, domain-specific data, multimodal communication or multimedia document processing, and will organise, in addition to the usual tracks, common sessions encompassing the different areas of LRs. PROGRAMME The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster presentations, referenced demonstrations and panels. There is no difference in quality between oral presentations and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication to the content of the paper will be considered. FORMAT FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster presentations should consist of about 800 words. Demonstrations of LRs and related tools will be reviewed as well. You should send an outline of about 400 words. If a demo is connected to a paper, please attach the outline to the paper abstract. A limited number of panels and workshops is foreseen, proposals will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. For panels, please send a brief description, including an outline of the intended structure (topic, organiser, panel moderator, tentative list of panelists). For workshops, see the dedicated section below. Only electronic submissions will be considered. Further details about submission will be circulated in the 2nd call for papers and posted on the LREC web site (http://www.lrec-conf.org). IMPORTANT DATES - Submission of proposals for panels and workshops: 20th October 2003 - Submission of proposals for oral and poster papers, referenced demos: 31st October 2003 - Notification of acceptance of workshop and panel proposals: 14th November 2003 - Notification of acceptance of oral papers, posters, referenced demos: 23rd January 2004 - Final versions for the proceedings: 1st March 2004 - Conference: 26th 28th May 2004 - Pre-conference workshops: 24th and 25th May 2004 - Post-conference workshops: 29th and 30th May 2004 The proceedings of the conference will include both oral and poster papers. Internet connections and various computer platforms and facilities will be available at the conference site. In addition to referenced demos concerning LRs and related tools, it will be possible to run unreferenced demos of language processing products, systems and tools. Those interested should contact the organiser of the demonstrations (details will be posted on http://www.lrec-conf.org). WORKSHOPS Pre-conference workshops will be organised on 24th and 25th May 2004, and post-conference workshops on 29th and 30th May 2004. A workshop is normally either half day or full day. Proposals for workshops should be no longer than three pages, and include: - A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that the workshop will address. - The reasons why the workshop is of interest this time. - The names, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers and email addresses of the workshop organising committee, which should consist of at least three people knowledgeable in the field, coming from different institutions. - The name of the member of the workshop organising committee designated as the contact person. - A time schedule of the workshop and a preliminary agenda. - A summary of the intended workshop call for participation. - A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room requirements. The workshop proposers will be responsible for the organisational aspects (e.g. workshop call preparation and distribution, review of papers, notification of acceptance, assembling of the workshop proceedings, etc.). Further details about submission will be circulated in the 2nd call for papers and posted on the LREC web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org. Proceedings will be printed for each workshop. CONSORTIA AND PROJECT MEETINGS Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising meetings should contact the ELDA office, lrecMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue