[Corpora-List] CALL FOR PAPERS - TAL Special Issue on Free Language Resources

[Núria Bel]

CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue of the TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues / Natural 
Language Processing) Journal on

FREE LANGUAGE RESOURCES

ATALA (French Association for Natural Language Processing) invites authors 
to submit papers for the Special Issue on "Free Language Resources".

Latest developments and applications in the field of Natural Language 
Processing have significantly changed the paradigms for the design, 
construction, operation and evaluation of, the so called, Language 
Resources. In particular, the growing importance of empirical approaches has 
raised the demand of corpora and lexica as major sources of data on 
languages. An increasingly important number of languages, including French 
and other Romance languages, are gradually becoming equipped with new and 
richer resources.

Language Resources can be textual, oral or multimodal. They include:
- written or oral corpora, raw or, more interestingly, enriched with 
annotations of several kinds, which can range from morphosyntactic labels to 
prosodic information, from dependence graphs to discourse structure markup.
- lexical resources with information about one or more levels of linguistic 
analysis, and also grammars or other forms of modeling different types of 
language structures - the boundary between lexicon and grammar depends often 
on the approach (cf. TAG, lexicon-grammar, etc.).
- complex resources, combining an annotated corpus and an associated lexical 
database or combining information from different levels of linguistic 
analysis.
A language resource may involve one or more variants of the language or 
languages covered: standard language, the language of journalism, 
specialized language (often with great importance given to issues of 
terminology), oral language (if transcribed), blogs and forums, SMS, etc..

However, the development of language resources is a long, expensive and 
highly error prone task regardless of the approaches used. This is one of 
the reasons for the increasing importance of resources which are freely 
available, so that authors and owners, while keeping the authorship, allow 
for their exploitation, transformation and redistribution.

The goal of this special issue is to focus on the full range of scientific 
issues related to language resources that go beyond the description of the 
resources by themselves. Thus, expected contributions can cover all topics 
related to language resources, including:

- Modeling of the language data that constitute the resource (both 
linguistically motivated formal frameworks, representation of linguistic 
information in the form of structured and/or quantitative data, standards 
for Language Resources ...)

- Methodologies for the development of Language Resources, either  by hand, 
completely automatic or hybrid (semi-supervised techniques, interlingual 
transfer methods, use of pre-annotation tools, validation / correction 
interfaces, etc.), approaches promoting linguistic relevance while 
minimizing the "human cost" are most welcome.

- Methods for validation and evaluation of language resources including 
extrinsic evaluation within NLP systems and for experimental linguistic 
purposes. Contributions must show how the use of language resources has 
caused system performance improvements, better understanding of phenomenon 
and/or  be a means to assess or improve these language resources.

Language Resources for French, or better multilingual resources or language 
independent methods where French is one of the addressed languages, are the 
main objective of this call. Works on resources for other Romance languages 
are also relevant. In addition, contributions related to free resources will 
be particularly appreciated.

Scientific Committee

Nicolas Asher
Delphine Bernhard
Paul Buitelaar
Maria Teresa Cabré
Emmanuel Cartier
Anne Condamines
Benoît Crabbé
Cecile Fabre
Mikel Forcada
Gregory Grefenstette
Eva Hajicová
Nancy Ide
Christine Jacquin
Anne Lacheret
Marie-Claude L'Homme
Joseph Mariani
Piet Mertens
Asunción Moreno
Sophie Rosset
Agata Savary
Jesse Tseng
Agnès Tutin
Gertjan van Noord
Piek Vossen
Geoffrey Williams


Important Dates

- Deadline for submission:  30 September 2011
- List of papers selected: 15 January 2011
- Deadline for camera ready papers: 3 March 2011
- Publication on line: mid 2012

THE JOURNAL

TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues / Natural Language Processing) is a 
forty year old international journal published by ATALA (French 
Associationfor Natural Language Processing) with the support of CNRS 
(National Centre for Scientific Research). It has moved to an electronic 
mode of publication, with printing on demand. This affects in no way its 
reviewing and selection process.


PRACTICAL ISSUES

Authors intending to submit a paper are encouraged to contact the guest
editors of the issue: Benoît Sagot (INRIA Paris Rocquencourt),
benoit.sagot at inria.fr et Núria Bel(IULA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 
Barcelona),
nuria.bel at upf.edu

Contributions (25 pages maximum, PDF format) must be sent by e-mail to the
addresses below : benoit.sagot at inria.fr and nuria.bel at upf.edu

Style sheets are available for download on the Web site of the journal
http://www.atala.org/English-style-files

The journal only publishes original contributions in French or in English.
Check the instructions to authors: http://www.atala.org/English-style-files 


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