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<TITLE>1st CFP: LREC 2012 Workshop on Merging Language Resources </TITLE>
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<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">**Apologise for multiple posting**</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">1st Call for Papers</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">LREC 2012 Workshop on: Language Resource Merging</FONT></B></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><A HREF="http://panacea-lr.eu/en/news/project/2011/12/19/lrec-2012-merging-lr-workshop/"><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">http://panacea-lr.eu/en/news/project/2011/12/19/lrec-2012-merging-lr-workshop/</FONT></U></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN></A><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN></P>
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<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><U><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Location</FONT></U></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">: Istanbul, Turkey </FONT></SPAN></P>
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<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">IMPORTANT DATES</FONT></B></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">• Deadline for paper submission: 15 February 2012</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">• Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2012</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">• Submission of camera-ready version of papers: 31 March 2012</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">• Workshop date: 22 May 2012 – Afternoon Session</FONT></SPAN></P>
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<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">CONTEXT</FONT></B></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">The availability of adequate language resources has been a well-known bottleneck for most high-level language technology applications, e.g. Machine Translation, parsing, and Information Extraction, for at least 15 years , and the impact of the bottleneck is becoming all the more apparent with the availability of higher computational power and massive storage, since modern language technologies are capable of using far more resources than the community produces. The present landscape is characterized by the existence of numerous scattered resources, many of which have differing levels of coverage, types of information and granularity. Taken singularly, existing resources do not have sufficient coverage, quality or richness for robust large-scale applications, and yet they contain valuable information (Monachini et al. 2004 and 2006; Soria et al. 2006; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu et al. 2011). Differing technology or application requirements, ignorance of the existence of certain resources, and difficulties in accessing and using them, has led to the proliferation of multiple, unconnected resources that, if merged, could constitute a much richer repository of information augmenting either coverage or granularity, or both, and consequently multiplying the number of potential language technology applications. Merging, combining and/or compiling larger resources from existing ones thus appears to be a promising direction to take. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">The re-use and merging of existing resources is not altogether unknown. For example, WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) has been successfully reused in a variety of applications. But this is the exception rather than the rule; in fact, merging, and enhancing existing resources is uncommon, probably because it is by no means a trivial task given the profound differences in formats, formalisms, metadata, and linguistic assumptions.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">The language resource landscape is on the brink of a large change, however. With the proliferation of accessible metadata catalogues, and resource repositories (such as the new META-SHARE (<A HREF="http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share">http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share</A>) infrastructure), a potentially large number of existing resources will be more easily located, accessed and downloaded. Also, with the advent of distributed platforms for the automatic production of language resources, such as PANACEA (<A HREF="http://www.panacea-lr.eu/">http://www.panacea-lr.eu/</A>), new language resources and linguistic information capable of being integrated into those resources will be produced more easily and at a lower cost. Thus, it is likely that researchers and application developers will seek out resources already available before developing new, costly ones, and will require methods for merging/combining various resources and adapting them to their specific needs. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Up to the present day, most resource merging has been done manually, with only a small number of attempts reported in the literature towards (semi-)automatic merging of resources (Crouch & King 2005; Pustejovsky et al. 2005; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu et al. 2011). In order to take a further step towards the scenario depicted above, in which resource merging and enhancing is a reliable and accessible first step for researchers and application developers, experience and best practices must be shared and discussed, as this will help the whole community avoid any waste of time and resources. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">AIMS OF THE WORKSHOP</FONT></B></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">This half-day workshop is meant to be part of a series of meetings constituting an ongoing forum for sharing and evaluating the results of different methods and systems for the automatic production of language resources (the first one was the LREC 2010 Workshop on Methods for the Automatic Production of Language Resources and their Evaluation Methods). The main focus of this workshop is on (semi-)automatic means of merging language resources, such as lexicons, corpora and grammars. Merging makes it possible to re-use, adapt, and enhance existing resources, alongside new, automatically created ones, with the goal of reducing the manual intervention required in language resource production, and thus ultimately production costs. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">WORKSHOP TOPICS</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">The topics of the workshop are related to best practices, methods, techniques and experimental results regarding the merging of various types of language resources, such as lexicons and corpora, especially in support of language technology applications. In particular, new methods for automatic merging with a view towards reducing human intervention will be most welcome.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Topics for submission include, but are not limited to:</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">- Experiments on (semi-)automatic merging of automatically produced resources</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">- Experiments on the merging of two or more existing resources containing the same or different levels of linguistic information </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">- Studies or experiments on merging resources at different levels of granularity (corpora, lexicons, grammars)</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">- Studies or experiments on unifying, mapping or converting encoding formats </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">- Comparison between different resources and mapping algorithms to provide desired merging </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">- Use of linguistic information from different sources in high-level language applications</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">- Use of new, merged language resources in language technology applications</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">SUBMISSIONS</FONT></B></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Interested participants must submit a preliminary paper of about 4-6 pages including references (between 2000-2500 words). For the submission please use the online form on START LREC Conference Manager at: <A HREF="https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/MergingLR2012/">https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/MergingLR2012/</A></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">For further information on this new initiative, please refer to <A HREF="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012">http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012</A></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Papers will be peer-reviewed by the workshop Program Committee.</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"> </SPAN></P>
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<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">CONTACT</FONT></B></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><A HREF="mailto:lrec12_workshop_merging@ilc.cnr.it"><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">lrec12_workshop_merging@ilc.cnr.it</FONT></U></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN></A><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman"></FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"> </SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">ORGANIZING COMMITTEE</FONT></B></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Núria Bel, UPF, Barcelona, Spain</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Maria Gavrilidou, ILSP-“Athena”, Athens, Greece,</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="it"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Monica Monachini, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="it"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Valeria Quochi, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Laura Rimell, University of Cambridge, UK</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><B><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:</FONT></B></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Victoria Arranz, ELDA, Paris, France</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Paul Buitelaaar, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="it"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Nicoletta Calzolari, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Olivier Hamon, ELDA, Paris, France</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Aleš Horák, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Nancy Ide, Vassar College, Mass.</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="it"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">USA </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="it"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Bernardo Magnini, FBK, Trento, Italy </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="de"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Paola Monachesi, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="de"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Jan Odijk, , Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="de"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Muntsa Padró, IULA, Barcellona, Spain </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Karel Pala, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Thierry Poibeau University of Cambridge, UK and CNRS, Paris, France</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Benoît Sagot, INRIA, Paris, France </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-gb"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Times New Roman">Maurizio Tesconi, CNR-IIT, Pisa</FONT></SPAN></P>
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