<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Dear All,</div><div>I have the pleasure to announce the Fourth Balto Slavic Natural Language Processing Workshop (in conjunction with ACL 2013)<br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;"><br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">Hristo Tanev</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">Joint Research Centre, European Commission</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;">Ispra, Italy<br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">--------------------<br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">Call for papers:</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;"><br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">BSNLP 2013<br>Fourth Biennial International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing<br>Sofia, Bulgaria<br>8-9 August 2013<br>http://puls.cs.helsinki.fi/bsnlp-2013/<br><br>This year BSNLP will be held in conjunction with ACL 2013 (the 51st Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics), 5-9 August, 2013.<br>THEME and MOTIVATION<br><br>The languages from the Balto-Slavic group play an important role due to their diverse cultural heritage and widespread use — with over 400 million speakers. The recent political and economic developments in Central and Eastern Europe have brought Balto-Slavic societies and their languages into focus in terms of rapid technological advancement and rapidly expanding consumer markets.<br><br>This Workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Balto-Slavic languages. The NLP tasks in urgent need of attention include, but are not limited to:<br><br> morphological analysis and generation,<br> syntactic and semantic tagging,<br> named-entity recognition,<br> information extraction,<br> co-reference resolution,<br>
question-answering,<br> information retrieval,<br> text summarization,<br> machine translation. <br><br>Research on theoretical and applied topics in the context of many Balto-Slavic languages is still in its early stages. The linguistic phenomena specific to Balto-Slavic languages — such as rich morphological inflection and free word order — make the construction of NLP tools for these languages a challenging and intriguing task.<br><br>The goal of this Workshop is to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on NLP for Balto-Slavic languages. In particular, the Workshop will serve as an instrument to further stimulate the research on NLP techniques for Balto-Slavic languages, and to foster the creation of tools for these languages. The Workshop will provide a forum for exchanging ideas and experience, discussing difficult-to-tackle problems in this field of
research, and making the available resources more widely-known. One fascinating aspect of this sub-family of languages is the striking structural similarity, as well as an easily recognizable core vocabulary and inflectional inventory spanning the entire group of languages — despite a lack of mutual intelligibility — which creates a special environment in which researchers can fully appreciate the shared problems and solutions and communicate naturally.<br><br>This Workshop continues the proud tradition established by the previous BSNLP Workshops:<br><br> the First BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with ACL 2007 Conference in Prague;<br> the Second BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with IIS 2009: Intelligent Information Systems, in Cracow, Poland; and<br> the Third BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with TSD 2011, 14th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue in Plzen, Czech
Republic. <br><br>SUBMISSION<br><br>BSNLP 2013 welcomes two types of submissions: (a) full papers, and (b) short papers.<br><br>Long papers should describe original unpublished work and should indicate the state of completion of the reported results. In particular, overlap with previously published work should be clearly mentioned. The authors should indicate along with their submission if the paper has been submitted elsewhere.<br><br>Short papers should describe work in progress and/or interactive software demos.<br><br>All submissions, both long and short papers, will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, usability, and significance/relevance to the Workshop. Submissions will be reviewed by at least 3 members of the Program Committee.<br><br>The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Self-citations and other references that reveal the authors'
identity should be avoided.<br><br>In particular, submissions describing systems, resources or solutions that are made available to the wider public would be strongly encouraged, as this would help to promote computational linguistics applications for these languages.<br><br>Further details related to the submission format and electronic submission system will be announced in January 2013.<br><br>OFFICIAL LANGUAGE<br>The official language of the workshop is English.<br><br>PUBLICATION<br>The papers accepted for BSNLP 2013 will be published in ACL Workshop Proceedings.<br><br>After the Workshop, we intend to make a selection of the best papers based on this year's and previous years' Workshops, and to publish expanded versions of these papers in a volume on Balto-Slavic NLP as a book with a reputable publisher or in a special journal issue. No such unified reference work for Balto-Slavic NLP exists to date.<br><br>IMPORTANT
DATES<br><br> Paper submissions due: 26 April 2013<br> Notification of acceptance: 24 May 2013<br> Camera-ready versions due: 7 June 2014<br> Workshop: 8 or 9 August 2013<br><br>PROGRAM COMMITTEE<br> Tania Avgustinova (University of Saarland, Germany)<br> Damir Cavar (University of Zadar, Croatia)<br> Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield, UK)<br> Pavel Braslavski (Kontur labs / Ural Federal University, Russia)<br> Boris Dobrov (Moscow State University, Russia)<br> Tomaž Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)<br> Katja Filippova (Google, Zurich, Switzerland)<br> Radovan Garabik (Comenius University in Bratislava)<br> Tatiana Gornostay (Tilde, Riga, Latvia)<br> Maxim Gubin (Facebook
Inc., Menlo Park CA)<br> Mikhail Kopotev (University of Helsinki, Finalnd)<br> Vladislav Kubon (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic)<br> Olga Mitrofanova (St.Petersburg State University, Russia)<br> Karel Pala (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)<br> Gerald Penn (University of Toronto, Canada)<br> Maciej Piasecki (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)<br> Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)<br> Lidia Pivovarova (Univeristy of Helsinki/St.Petersburg State University, Russia)<br> Adam Przepiórkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)<br> Agata Savary (Université François Rabelais, Tours, France)<br> Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)<br> Vladimir Shirokov (The National
Academy of Sciences of Ukraine)<br> Joseph Steinberger (Pilzen University, Plsen, Czech Republic)<br> Pavel Stranák (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)<br> Stan Szpakowicz (University of Ottawa, Canada)<br> Marko Tadic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)<br> Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy)<br> Duško Vitas (University of Belgrade, Serbia)<br> Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finalnd)<br><br><br>ORGANIZING COMMITTEE<br><br> Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences)<br> Lidia Pivovarova (University of Helsinki, and St.Petersburg State University, Russia)<br> Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Ispra, Italy)<br> Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finland)<br><br></div></div></body></html>