ELL: LREC2002: First Announcement and Call for Papers

Magali Duclaux duclaux at ELDA.FR
Tue Jul 3 15:06:20 UTC 2001


[Our apologies if you receive multiple
copies of this announcement]

We are pleased to announce:

                 LREC2002
First Announcement and Call for Papers

*********************************************************
THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION
*********************************************************
Las Palmas, Canary Islands - Spain

Main conference: 29-30-31 MAY 2002
Workshops: 27-28 MAY and 1-2 JUNE 2002

With support of TELEFONICA Foundation (of Spain)
and support sought from the Commission of the EU
and other institutions.

The Third International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation is organised by ELRA
in cooperation with other Associations and Consortia,
including ACL, AFNLPA, ALLC, CLASS, COCOSDA,
ORIENTAL COCOSDA, EAFT, EAGLES/ISLE,
ELSNET, ENABLER, EURALEX, FRANCIL, ISCA,
LDC, ONTOWEB, PAROLE, etc., and with major
national and international organisations, including
the Commission of the EU  Information Society DG,
DARPA, NSF, and the Japanese Project for International
Co-ordination of East-Asian Spoken Language Resources
and Evaluation. Co-operation with other organisations is
currently being sought.

CONFERENCE AIMS

In the framework of the Information Society, the pervasive
character of Human Language Technologies (HLT) and
their relevance to practically all the fields of Information
Society Technologies (IST) has been widely recognised.

Two issues are considered particularly relevant: the
availability of language resources and the methods for
the evaluation of resources, technologies, products and
applications. Substantial mutual benefits can be expected
from addressing these issues through international cooperation.

The term language resources (LR) refers to sets of language
data and descriptions in machine readable form, used  e.g.
for: building and evaluating natural language, speech and
multimodal algorithms or systems, software localisation
industries and language services, language enabled
information and communication services, natural interactivity,
knowledge management, electronic commerce, electronic
publishing, language studies, subject-area specialists and end
users.

Examples of linguistic resources are written, spoken and
multimodal corpora and lexica, grammars, terminology databases,
multimedia databases, basic software tools for the acquisition,
preparation, collection, management, customisation and use of
these and other resources.

The relevance of evaluation for Language Technologies is increasingly
recognised. This involves assessment of the state-of-the-art for a
given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a pro-
gramme, comparing different approaches to a given problem
and choosing the best solution, knowing its advantages and dis-
advantages, assessment of the availability of technologies for a
given application, product benchmarking, and assessment of sys-
tem usability and user satisfaction.

In the recent past, language engineering and research and development
in language technologies have led to important advances in various
aspects of   written, spoken and multimodal language processing.
Although the evaluation paradigm has been studied and used in
large national and international programmes, including the US
DARPA HLT programme, the EU HLT programme under FP5-IST,
the Francophone AUF programme and others, particularly in the
localisation industry (LISA and LRC), it is still subject to
substantial unsolved basic research problems. The European 6th
Framework program (FP6), planned for a start in 2003, includes
multilingual and multisensorial communication as one of the
major R&D issue, and the evaluation of technologies appears as a
specific item in the Integrated Project instrument presentation.

The aim of this Conference is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art,
discuss problems and opportunities, exchange information regarding
language resources, their applications, ongoing and planned activities,
industrial use and requirements, discuss evaluation methodologies
and demonstrate evaluation tools, explore possibilities and promote
initiatives for international cooperation in the areas mentioned above.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

The following non-exhaustive list gives some examples of topics which
could be addressed by papers submitted to the Conference:

Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LR)
…       Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices
for LR
…       Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, creation, management,
         access, distribution, use of LR
…       Organisational issues in the construction, distribution and use of LR
…       Legal aspects and problems in the construction, access and use of LR
…       Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LR
…       Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g. terms,
         lexical information, language modelling) from LR
…       Monolingual and multilingual LR
…       Multimodal and multimedia LR
…       Integration of various modalities in LR (speech, vision, language)
…       Documentation and archiving of languages, including minority and
         endangered languages
…       Ontological aspects of creation and use of LR
…       LR for psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research in human-machine
         communication
…       Exploitation of LR in different types of applications (information
         extraction, information retrieval, vocal and multisensorial
interfaces,
         translation, summarisation, www services, etc.)
…       Industrial LR requirements and community's response
…       Industrial production of LR
…       Industrial use of LR
…       Analysis of user needs for LR
…       Internet-accessible metadata descriptions of LR
…       Mechanisms of LR distribution and marketing
…       Economics of LR

Issues in Human Language Technologies evaluation
…       Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LR
…       Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for
         benchmarking and evaluation
…       Evaluation in written language processing (text retrieval,
         terminology extraction, message understanding, text
         alignment, machine translation, morphosyntactic tagging,
         parsing, semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation,
         text understanding, summarization, localization, etc.)
…       Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech
         recognition and understanding, voice dictation, oral
         dialog, speech synthesis, speech coding, speaker and
         language recognition, spoken translation, etc.)
…       Evaluation of document processing (document recognition,
         on-line and off-line machine and hand-written character
recognition, etc.)
…       Evaluation of (multimedia) document retrieval and search
         systems (including detection, indexing, filtering, alert, question
         answering, etc)
…       Evaluation of multimodal systems
…       Qualitative and perceptive evaluation
…       Evaluation of products and applications, benchmarking
…       Blackbox, glassbox and diagnostic evaluation of systems
…       Situated evaluation of applications
…       Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
…       From evaluation to standardisation of LR

General issues
…       National and international activities and projects
…       LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia cultural
         industry
…       Priorities, perspectives, strategies in the field of LR national and
         international policies
…       Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international
cooperation
…       Open architectures for LR

PROGRAM

The Scientific Program will include invited talks, presentations of
oral papers, poster sessions, referenced demonstrations and panels.
A special workshop will be organised on National Projects in LR
and evaluation.

FORMAT FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and posters presentations
should consist of about 800 words.

Demonstrations of LR and related tools will be reviewed as well.
Please send an outline of about 400 words. If a demo is connected to
a paper, please attach the outline to the paper  abstract.

A limited number of panels and workshops is foreseen. Proposals
are welcome and will be reviewed. For panels please send a brief
description, including an outline of the intended structure (topic,
organiser, panel moderator , tentative list of panelists). For workshops,
see below.

All submissions should include a separate title page, providing
the following information: type of proposal (paper for oral presentation,
paper for poster presentation, demo, paper plus demo, panel); the title
to be printed in the programme of the Conference; names and
affiliations of the authors or proposers; the full address of the first author
(or a contact person), including phone, fax, email, URL; the required
facilities for presentation (overhead projector, data display; other hardware,
platforms, communications); and 5 keywords.

All submissions will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee that will be
announced within the second call.

Electronic submission Electronic submission of abstracts
should be in ASCII file format. This file should be sent to:
lrec at ilc.pi.cnr.it Attn: Antonio Zampolli - LREC chairman
Submission in hard copy You may also submit hard copies.
Please send five hard copies to:
Antonio Zampolli  LREC Chairman
Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR
Area della Ricerca di Pisa,
Via G. Moruzzi 1,
56124 Pisa - ITALY

Exhibits: An exhibit area will also be made available at
LREC2002.  This is open to companies and projects wishing
to promote, present and demonstrate their language resources
and evaluation products and prototypes to a wide range of experts
and representatives from all over the world who will be participating
at the conference. Please note that the exhibits of LR are different
from system demonstrations. The exhibits will run in parallel with
the Conference for 3 days and the exhibit hall will be located
near the general conference rooms.
For more information, please contact the ELDA office at:
choukri at elda.fr

LREC98, in Granada, had 197 papers and posters presented,
with about 510 registered participants from 38 different countries
from all  continents. Among these, the largest group came from
Spain (81 participants), followed by France (75), USA (73), Germany (47),
UK (43) and Italy (41). Registered participants belonged to over 325
different organisations.
LREC2000, in Athens, had 129 oral papers and 152 posters presented,
with more than 600 participants from 51 different countries from all
continents. Among these, the largest group came from Greece (117),
followed by USA (70), France (59), Germany (45), UK (43), Japan (35)
and Italy (29). Registered participants belonged to 319 different
organisations.
We anticipate a similar number of participants in LREC2002.
We therefore expect the exhibits at LREC2002 to have a large audience.

IMPORTANT DATES

…       Submission of proposals for oral and poster papers, referenced demos,
                 panels and workshops: 20 NOVEMBER 2001
…       Notification of acceptance of workshop and panel proposals: 10
DECEMBER 2001
…       Notification of acceptance of oral papers, posters, referenced
demos: 2 FEBRUARY 2002
…       Final versions for the Proceedings: 2 APRIL 2002
…       Conference: 29-30-31 MAY 2002
…       Pre Conference Workshops: 27-28 MAY 2002
…       Post Conference Workshops: 1-2 JUNE 2002

Conference Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers.

Internet connections and various computer platforms and facilities
will be available at the Conference site. In addition to referenced
demos concerning LR and related tools, it will be possible to run
unreferenced demos of language engineering products, systems
and tools. Those interested should contact the organiser of the
demonstrations (see details on www.lrec-conf.org).

WORKSHOPS
Pre-Conference Workshops will be organised on the 27 and
28 of May 2002,and post-Conference Workshops on the 1
and 2 of June 2002. Proposals for workshops should be sent to:
Antonio Zampolli  (see address above), be no longer than three pages
and contain:
…       A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that
         the workshop will address.
…       The reasons why the workshop is of interest this time.
…       The names, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers and email
         addresses of the Workshop Organising Committee, which should
         consist of at least three people knowledgeable in the field  coming
         from different institutions.
…       The name of  the member of the Workshop Organising Committee
         designated as the contact person.
…       A time schedule of the workshop and a preliminary agenda.
…       A summary of the intended workshop Call for Participation.
…       A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room
         requirements.

The workshop proposers will be responsible for the organisational aspects
(e.g. Workshop Call preparation and distribution, review of papers,
notification
of acceptance, etc.). Further details will be sent to the proposers.
Proceedings will be printed for each workshop.

CONSORTIA AND PROJECT MEETINGS

Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising
meetings, should contact the Conference Secretariat for assistance
in arranging meeting facilities.

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION FEES

Before 28 February 2002
Standard                        240EURO
Participant from member
organisations of ELRA           190
EURO
Student                 100 EURO

After 28 February 2002
Standard                        280 EURO
Participant from member
organisations of ELRA           230 EURO
Student                 120 EURO

On site
Standard                        300 EURO
Participant from member
organisations of ELRA           250 EURO
Student                 130 EURO

The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings,
welcome reception, conference dinner, coffee-breaks and refreshments.
WORKSHOPS REGISTRATION FEES

The duration of a workshop can range from a half day to two full days.
The participation fees for each half day will be:

45 EURO for Conference participants
70 EURO for the others

The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings of the
attended workshop, coffee-breaks and refreshments.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, Italy
Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
Bente Maegaard, CST, Copenhagen, Denmark
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Angel Martin Municio, President of the Real Academia de Ciencias, Madrid, Spain
Daniel Tapias, TELEFONICA I+D, Madrid, Spain
Antonio Zampolli, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, Italy
(Conference chair)

INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Sture Allen,  professor, former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy,
Sweden
Souguil Ann, Seoul National University, Korea
Georges Carayannis, Institute for Language and Speech processing, Athens,
Greece
Roberto Cencioni, Commission of the EU, Information Society DG, Luxembourg
Zhiwei Feng , The State Language Commission of China, Beijing, China
Hiroya Fujisaki, Science University of Tokyo, Japan
Mark Maybury, MITRE Corporation, Boston, USA
Bernard Quemada, Conseil SupÈrieur de la Langue FranÁaise, Paris, France
Gary Strong, NSF, Washington D.C., USA
Piet G.J. Van Sterkenburg, International Permanent Committee of Linguists,
Leiden, The Netherlands
Giovanni Battista Varile, Commission of the EU, Information Society DG,
Luxembourg
Charles Wayne, DARPA, Washington D.C., USA

The composition of the Local Committee as well as instructions
and addresses for registration and accommodation will be detailed
in the www.lrec-conf.org and will be announced in the Second Call for Papers
to be issued at the end of July.

ELRA

For more information about ELRA (the European Language Resources
Association), please contact:

Khalid Choukri, ELRA CEO
55-57 Rue Brillat-Savarin,
75013 PARIS, FRANCE
Tel: + 33 1 43 13 33 33  Fax: + 33 1 43 13 33 30
E-mail: choukri at elda.fr
Web: http://www.elda.fr/


----
Endangered-Languages-L Forum: endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
Web pages http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/
Subscribe/unsubscribe and other commands: majordomo at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
----



More information about the Endangered-languages-l mailing list