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<div align="center"><b>Call for Papers</b><i><b><br>
<br>
Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the
Sharing Paradigm</b></i><br>
</div>
<div align="center"><b><br>
November 12, 2011</b></div>
<div align="center"><b>At IJCNLP2011 (<a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.ijcnlp2011.org/">http://www.ijcnlp2011.org/</a>)
</b><br>
<b><br>
*********************************************************************************************<br>
</b></div>
<br>
<u>The Context </u><br>
<br>
Some of the current major initiatives in the area of language
resources – FLaReNet (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.flarenet.eu/">http://www.flarenet.eu/</a>),
Language Grid (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://langrid.nict.go.jp/en/index.html">http://langrid.nict.go.jp/en/index.html</a>)
and META-SHARE (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="http://www.meta-share.org">www.meta-share.org</a>, <a
class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.meta-net.eu">www.meta-net.eu</a>)
– have agreed to organise a joint workshop on infrastructural issues
that are critical in the age of data sharing and open data, to
discuss state of the art, international cooperation, future
strategies and priorities, road-mapping.<br>
<br>
It is an achievement, and an opportunity for our field, that
recently a number of strategic-infrastructural initiatives have been
started all over the world. This is also a sign that funding
agencies recognise the strategic value of our field and the
importance of helping a coherent growth also through a number of
coordinated actions. Some of <br>
these initiatives, two European and an Asian, have agreed to join
forces to foster a debate that may lead to future coordinated
actions all over the world.<br>
<br>
FLaReNet aims at providing recommendations for future initiatives in
the field of Language Resources and Technologies: we are aware that
it is important to discuss future policy and priorities not only on
the European scene, but also in a worldwide context. This is true
both when we try to highlight future directions of research, and –
even more – when we analyse which infrastructural initiatives are
needed. The growth of the field should be complemented by common
efforts that try to look for synergies and to overcome
fragmentation. <br>
<br>
The Language Grid aims at constructing a multilingual service
infrastructure on the Internet that allows users to share language
services such as online dictionaries, bilingual corpora, and machine
translations, and create new language services by combining existing
services to support intercultural collaboration. The Language Grid
is <br>
operated by Kyoto and Bangkok operation centers in a federated
fashion. More than 110 language services are registered and shared
by 140 groups in 18 countries.<br>
<br>
META-SHARE aims to build an open, integrated, secure and
interoperable exchange facility for language resources (data and
tools) for the Human Language Technologies domain and other
applicative domains (e.g., digital libraries, cognitive systems,
robotics, etc) where language plays a critical role. It aims to act
as an infrastructure that will enable language resources
documentation, cataloguing, uploading and storage, downloading and
exchange, aiming to support a resources economy at large. <br>
<br>
Cooperation is an issue that needs to be prepared. This joint
strategic Workshop plans to continue a discussion, started on
several occasions in the last years, on the usefulness and the
interest of promoting international cooperation among various
initiatives and communities around the world, within and around the
field of Language <br>
Resources and Technologies. <br>
<br>
<u>Topic and Content</u><br>
<br>
The three organising projects will contribute with reports on their
activities aiming at boosting a constructive and fruitful debate. In
particular, <br>
<ul>
<li>FLaReNet will bring in its final recommendations and
priorities deriving from the various events it organised,
summarised in the FLaReNet Blueprint of actions and
infrastructures (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.flarenet.eu/sites/default/files/D8.2b.pdf">http://www.flarenet.eu/sites/default/files/D8.2b.pdf</a>).
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The Language Grid proposes a service-oriented language
infrastructure that shifts from language resources to language
services, and institutional design for operating the
infrastructure in a federated fashion (<a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://servicegrid.net/en/index.html">http://servicegrid.net/en/index.html</a>).
<br>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li> META-SHARE will present the principles underlying its design
and governance model, its proposed architecture for language
resources sharing and collaborative building as well as the
technical and legal instruments supporting its operation.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
The Workshop aims at addressing (some of the) technological, market
and policy challenges posed by the “sharing and openness paradigm”,
the major role that language resources can play and the consequences
of this paradigm on language resources themselves.<br>
Examples of topics and issues to be addressed are:<br>
<ul>
<li>Sharing Language Resources and Language Technologies</li>
<li>Need for global information on Language Resources and Language
Technologies: relevant initiatives in the various
regions/countries</li>
<li>Interoperability and Reusability</li>
<li>Linguistic web services and language applications development</li>
<li>Metadata and Cataloguing</li>
<li>Legal issues </li>
<li>Infrastructures, policies, gaps and critical areas</li>
<li>Common roadmap and strategies: local, regional, international
frameworks</li>
<li>International cooperation, models for collaboration and
agreements on joint initiatives </li>
</ul>
The proposed Workshop will be a place where colleagues interested on
infrastructural initiatives get together to discuss and promote
collaboration actions. <br>
This should also lead to discussing the modalities of how to
organise the cooperation among various initiatives. <br>
<br>
We think that organising this workshop in Thailand we can attract
participation of many Asian initiatives and can lead to fruitful
collaboration between Asian and other international initiatives. <br>
<br>
<u>Important dates</u><br>
Deadline for paper submissions: May 20,
2011 <br>
Notification of paper acceptance: July 1,
2011 <br>
Camera-ready copies due (firm): July 22,
2011 <br>
<br>
<u>Workshop Chairs</u><br>
Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy)<br>
Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan)<br>
Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, Athens, Greece)<br>
Virach Sornlertlamvanich (NECTEC, Thailand)<br>
<br>
<u>Scientific Committee </u><br>
Sophia Ananiadou <br>
Nuria Bel <br>
Emily Bender <br>
Steven Bird <br>
Nicoletta Calzolari <br>
Thatsanee Charoenporn<br>
Key-Sun Choi <br>
Khalid Choukri <br>
Chris Cieri <br>
Yoshihiko Hayashi <br>
Chu-Ren Huang <br>
Nancy Ide <br>
Hitoshi Isahara <br>
Toru Ishida <br>
Steven Krauwer <br>
Joseph Mariani<br>
Monica Monachini <br>
Yohei Murakami <br>
Jan Odijk <br>
Stelios Piperidis <br>
James Pustejovsky <br>
Claudia Soria <br>
Virach Sornlertlamvanich <br>
Thepchai Supnithi<br>
Take Tokunaga<br>
Dan Tufis <br>
Kiyotaka Uchimoto <br>
Hans Uszkoreit <br>
Peter Wittenburg <br>
<br>
<br>
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