LINGUIST List 14.2644

Wed Oct 1 2003

Calls: LREC 2004/Portugal; Computational Ling/UK

Editor for this issue: Steve Moran <stevelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. LREC 2004, LREC 2004 - Second Call for Papers
2. e.pastra, ILASH half-day workshop on Biomedical Text Processing

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 LREC 2004
 24-30 May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal

 Abstracts submission forms now available on-line:

 http://www.lrec-conf.org
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The fourth international conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation, LREC 2004, is organised by ELRA in cooperation with other
Associations and Consortia, including ACL, AFNLP, ALLC, ALTA, COCOSDA
and Oriental COCOSDA, EAFT, EAMT, ELSNET, ENABLER, EURALEX, GKS, GWA,
IAMT, ICWLR, ISCA, LDC, ONTOWEB, TEI, and with major national and
international organisations, including the Commission of the EU -
Information Society DG, Unit E1 "Interfaces and Cognition".
Co-operation with other organisations is currently being sought.

*** 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 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 and NLP, tools and methodologies for terminology and
ontology building, term extraction, specialised 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.

*** Abstract submission ***

On-line submission forms are now available.

On the LREC 2004 web pages,
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php, from the "Abstract
submission" section, you can choose the appropriate submission form
and submit paper, demonstration or poster abstracts. A submission
form is also available on the LREC 2004 web site if you would like to
propose a panel.

*** Workshops ***

Submission forms for workshops' proposals are also available on-line.

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.

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.).

Proceedings will be printed for each workshop.

*** 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, 27th and 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.
Contact details are posted on www.lrec-conf.org if this opportunity
interests you.

*** Consortia and project meetings ***

Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising
meetings should contact the ELDA office, lrecelda.fr (further details
are given at the end of the document).

*** Conference registration fees ***

1/ Early-bird registration fees, available until 20th February 2004:

- Standard participant: 260 Euro
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 210 Euro
- Staudent: 110 Euro

2/ Registration fees after 20th February 2004:

- Standard participant: 320 Euro
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 250 Euro
- Staudent: 130 Euro

2/ On-site registration fees after 20th February 2004:

- Standard participant: 380 Euro
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 290 Euro
- Staudent: 150 Euro

The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings,
welcome reception, conference dinner, coffee-breaks and refreshments.

*** Workshop registration fees ***

1/ Workshop only participant:
- 1/2 day: 85 Euro
- Full day: 170 Euro

2/ Workshop and Conference participant:
- 1/2 day: 50 Euro
- Full day: 100 Euro

The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings of
the attended workshop, coffee-breaks and refreshments.

*** Conference programme committee ***

- Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR,
Pisa, Italy
- Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
- Teresa Lino, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
- Bente Maegaard, CST, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
- Jan Odijk, UIL-OTS, Utrecht, the Netherlands, and ScanSoft, Merelbeke, 
Belgium
- Daniel Tapias, Telefonica Moviles, Madrid, Spain

The composition of the committees as well as instructions and
addresses for registration and accommodation will be detailed on the
LREC web site at www.lrec-conf.org.

*** ELRA ***

For more information about ELRA (European Language Resources
Association), please contact:

Khalid Choukri, ELRA CEO
55-57 Rue Brillat-Savarin,
75013 Paris - France
Tel: + 33 1 43 13 33 33
Fax: + 33 1 43 13 33 30
Email: choukrielda.fr
Web: www.elra.info or www.elda.fr

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The first LREC was organised in Granada (Spain) in 1998: 197 papers
and posters were presented, with about 510 registered participants
from 38 different countries from all continents. Among these, the
largest group came from Spain (81 participants), followed by France
(75), USA (73), Germany (47), UK (43) and Italy (41). Registered
participants belonged to over 325 different organisations.

LREC 2000, in Athens, had 129 oral papers and 152 posters presented,
with around 600 participants from 51 different countries from all
continents. Among these, the largest group came from Greece (117),
followed by USA (70), France (59), Germany (45), UK (43), Japan (35)
and Italy (29). Registered participants belonged to 319 different
organisations.

LREC 2002, which took place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain),
attracted over 700 representatives, coming from 38 countries around
the world, who could take advantage of the numerous oral and poster
presentations (around 365, covering every area in HLT).

A similar number of participants is expected at LREC 2004.
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ILASH half-day workshop on Biomedical Text Processing 
Date: 30-Oct-2003 - 30-Oct-2003
Location: Sheffield, United Kingdom
Contact: Katerina Pastra
Contact Email: e.pastradcs.shef.ac.uk 
Meeting URL: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Meetings/index.html

Linguistic Sub-field: Computational Linguistics 
Meeting Description:

Half-day workshop on Biomedical Text Processing, organised by the
Institute of Language, Speech and Hearing, University of Sheffield,
U.K. Dear all,

The Institute for Language, Speech and Hearing (ILASH), University of
Sheffield, would like to invite you to its half-day workshop on:
Biomedical Text Processing, that will take place on Thursday, 30
October 2003. Researchers/academic staff and students are all welcome
- no fees are required. However, we would appreciate it, if you sent
us an email notifying us of your intention to attend the workshop:

Here are more details on the event:

DATE: Thursday 30 October 2003
TIME: 10:00 a.m. - 13:35 p.m.
VENUE: Room G30, Regent Court, Department of Computer Science,
University of Sheffield, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield

Invited Speakers:
Rob Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield)
Claire Grover (University of Edinburgh)
Stephen Pulman (University of Oxford)
Donia Scott (University of Brighton)
Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh)

A poster and more detailed information on the event can be found in
the ILASH webpages (abstracts of the talks to appear shortly):
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Meetings/index.html

General Information on ILASH is available at:
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/

Maps of the University Precinct and the Sheffield City Centre can be
found at: http://www.shef.ac.uk/travel/

Please don't hesitate to contact me for any queries you might have,

Best,
Katerina Pastra

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Katerina Pastra
 Research Associate & ILASH Research Co-ordinator
 Natural Language Processing Group
 Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Regent Court - Room G35
 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield, U.K.
 Tel. +44 114 2221945 --- Fax +44 114 2221810
 http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~katerina
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~