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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">CALL FOR
PARTICIPATION</p><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">ACL Special Interest
Group on Annotation (SIGANN)</p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">Sharable Corpus and
Best Practice Guidelines Working Group Sessions</p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">1-6PM, May 27, 2008 </p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">The Second Linguistic
Annotation Workshop</p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">Held in conjunction
with LREC 2008</p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center">Marrakech, Morocco </p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><a href="http://verbs.colorado.edu/LAW2008/">http://verbs.colorado.edu/LAW2008/</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">The SIGANN Sharable Corpus and
Best Practice Guidelines Working Groups will hold a joint session at the Second
Linguistic Annotation Workshop on the afternoon of May 27, 2008, in Marrakech,
Morocco. The session will be devoted to issues surrounding the merging and
harmonization of linguistic annotations representing various phenomena that may
have been produced by different groups using different formats, and may be
based on different theoretical approaches. The discussions will use as a point
of departure linguistic annotations of a portion of the SIGANN Sharable Corpus
contributed by members of the computational linguistics community.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">We solicit contributions of
manually or automatically produced annotations of the SIGANN Sharable Corpus
for any linguistic phenomenon, including but not limited to morpho-syntax,
syntax, semantic roles, word senses, named entities, temporal elements, events,
co-reference and other discourse-level phenomena. The annotations will be
collected in early April, after which the session organizers will coordinate an
effort to merge and compare the contributed annotations. Based on the
experience of this exercise, discussion points including examples will be drawn
up for consideration in the joint session. Issues to be considered will
include:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:38.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
-20.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list 38.0pt">(1)<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span>What are the
issues/problems of merging diverse annotations of different phenomena into a
single multi-layer annotation, in terms of harmonizing different physical
formats? </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:38.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
-20.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list 38.0pt">(2)<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span>What are the
issues/problems of merging diverse annotations of different phenomena into a
single multi-layer annotation, in terms of enabling a coherent and
comprehensive linguistic description? </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:38.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
-20.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list 38.0pt">(3)<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span>Are there
phenomena for which an attempt at compatibility/harmonization is not desirable?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:38.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
-20.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list 38.0pt">(4)<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span>What are the
implications and/or suggestions of this exercise for the development of best
practice guidelines for linguistic annotation? </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:38.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
-20.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list 38.0pt">(5)<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span>Are there certain
phenomena (e.g. segmentation into tokens, phrases, etc.) that lend themselves
more readily to the specification of standard practices, and for which the
existence of a common method would enhance annotation interoperability?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:38.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
-20.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list 38.0pt">(6)<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span>What are the good
and bad consequences of introducing a theoretical bias into the merging
process? A theoretically biased merging procedure creates essentially a new
annotation that uses previously created annotation as input in a destructive
manner so that the input annotation can not be read directly from the merged
output. Can the creation of a merged annotation that is consistent with a theory
justify making these changes?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Can
“errors” in input annotation be detected in this way</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:38.0pt;text-align:justify"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Those who wish to contribute
annotations and/or be involved in discussions at the session should consult the
LAW II website for details: <a href="http://verbs.colorado.edu/LAW2008/">http://verbs.colorado.edu/LAW2008/</a>, or contact the
session organizers.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Session organizers:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;text-indent:36.0pt">Best Practices
Working Group</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
36.0pt">Nancy Ide, Vassar College (ide [at] cs.vassar.edu)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;text-indent:36.0pt">Sharable
Corpus Working Group</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
36.0pt">Adam Meyers, New York University (meyers [at] cs.nyu.edu)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"> <o:p></o:p></p>
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