LINGUIST List 8.1157

Fri Aug 8 1997

Confs: Language Resources

Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Simone Saint Laurent, First International Conference on Language Resources

and Evaluation
	

	
*PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT*
	
FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION
	
GRANADA, SPAIN, 28-30 MAY 1998
	
	
The First International Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation has been initiated by ELRA and is organized in cooperation
with other associations and consortia, including EAFT, EAGLES, EDR,
ELSNET, ESCA, FRANCIL, LDC, PAROLE, TELRI, etc., and with the
sponsorship of major national and international organizations,
including ARPA, the European Commission - DG XIII and the NSF.
Cooperation and co-sponsorship with other institutions is currently
being sought.
	
	
CONFERENCE TOPIC
	
In the framework of the Information Society, the pervasive character
of language technologies and their relevance to practically all the
fields of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has been
widely recognized.
	
Two issues are currently considered particularly relevant for
promoting international cooperation: the availability of language
resources and the methods for the evaluation of resources,
technologies and products.
	
The term language resources (LR) refers to sets of language data and
descriptions in machine readable form, used specifically for building,
improving or evaluating natural language and speech algorithms or
systems, and in general, as core resources for the software
localization and language services industries, for language studies,
electronic publishing, international transactions, subject-area
specialists and end users. Examples of linguistic resources are
written and spoken corpora, computational lexicons, grammars,
terminology databases, basic software tools for the acquisition,
preparation, collection, management, customization and use of these
and other resources.

The relevance of evaluation in Language Engineering is increasingly
recognized. This involves assessment of the state-of-the-art for a
given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a program,
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, and finally
product benchmarking. It accompanies research and development in Human
Language Technologies, and has driven 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 programs, including the US
ARPA HLT program, EU Language Engineering projects, the Francophone
Aupelf-Uref program and others, particularly in the localization
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, discuss problems and opportunities, exchange
information on ongoing and planned activities, present language
resources and their applications, discuss evaluation methodologies and
demonstrate evaluation tools, 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 the Conference:
	
- Issues in the design, construction and use of LR (theoretical & best
practice)
- Guidelines, standards, specifications, models for LR.
- Organizational issues in the construction, distribution and use of
LR.
- Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, creation,
management, access, distribution, 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 modeling) from LR
- Monolingual vs. multilingual LR
- National and international activities and projects
- LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia cultural
industry.
- Industrial production of LR
- Integration of various modalities in LR (speech, vision, language)
- Exploitation of LRs 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
- Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LR
- Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for benchmarking and
evaluation
- Priorities, perspectives, strategies in the field of LR - national
and international policies
- Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international
cooperation
- Evaluation in written language processing (text retrieval,
terminology extraction, message understanding, text alignment, machine
translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, text understanding,
summarization, localization, 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 handwritten character recognition, etc)
- Evaluation of (multimedia) document retrieval and search 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
- Mechanisms of LR distribution and marketing
- Economics of LRs
	
	
IMPORTANT DATES
	
1. Submission of summaries for proposed papers: (approximately 800
words):
	1 December 1997
	
E-mail submission in ASCII form is encouraged. Otherwise, five hard
copies should be submitted.
	
- E-mail submissions should be sent to
 lrecilc.pi.cnr.it
	
- Postal submissions should be sent to
	
	Antonio Zampolli - LREC
	Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR
	via della Faggiola, 32
	56100, Pisa, ITALY
	
2. Notification of acceptance:		15 February 1998
	
3. Final version of the paper:		20 April 1998
	
The papers accepted will be included in the Conference Proceedings.
	
	
PROGRAM
	
The program will include both papers and poster sessions. In
addition, the Program will also include invited speakers, and a number
of panels on the major themes of the Conference.
	
In particular, it is planned to organize a panel on various aspects
and perspectives of international cooperation, with the participation
of representatives of the major European, North American and Asian
sponsoring agencies.
	
	
WORKSHOPS
	
Half-day pre- and post-conference Workshops can be organized, at the
request of a presenter, to permit the discussion and debate of topics
of current interest.
	
The format of each Workshop will be determined by the Workshop
organizer, who will set any necessary deadlines for the participants.
The next announcement, to be circulated in September, will provide
guidelines on how to submit a proposal for a Workshop to the Program
Committee.
	
	
SYSTEMS AND LR DEMONSTRATIONS
	
Various platforms will be available for language resources and tools
presentations and unreferenced systems demonstrations. Organizations
interested in presenting systems should contact the local
demonstration organizers, whose address will be provided in the next
announcement.
	
	
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
	
The full composition of the Scientific Committee will be listed in the
next announcement.
	
The Conference Chair is Antonio Zampolli (Istituto di Linguistica
Computazionale del CNR and President of ELRA, via della Faggiola, 32,
Pisa 56100, Italy).
	
The Secretariat of the Conference is provided by Khalid Choukri (ELRA,
87, Avenue d'Italie, F-75013, Paris, FRANCE).
	
The conference organizing committee consists of: Harald Hoege
(Siemens, Munich, Germany). Bente Maegaard (CST, Copenhagen, Denmark),
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France), Angel Martin-Municio
(President of the Real Academia de Ciencias, Madrid, Spain), Antonio
Zampolli (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, Italy).
	
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