LREC 2004 - COCOSDA-ICCWLRE meeting: Call for Particpation

[Magali Jeanmaire]

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                         CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

         Building the Language Resources and Evaluation Roadmap

   Joint COCOSDA and ICCWLRE Meeting in conjunction with LREC 2004 in
                                 Lisbon

                              30th May 2004
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The  first  joint  meeting  of  COCOSDA  and  of the new International
Committee for Written Language Resources and Evaluation (ICCWLRE) aims
at  bringing  together  the  communities  of Spoken and Written LRs to
foster  integration  between  them and to build a common vision of the
future of HLT.

We  think  that  working  together  on the preparation of a Technology
Roadmap  for  Language and Speech Technology offers a good opportunity
to  discuss  in  rather concrete terms issues related to the future of
LRs and Evaluation. In our view such a technology roadmap is a broadly
shared  vision  of our future, which identifies the main technological
challenges  ahead  of  us,  the  prerequisites for addressing them and
their potential impact in terms of applications or services they would
enable.

We  will  start from the approach to roadmapping adopted in ELSNET. It
involves defining independent milestones (these could be a resource, a
technology  or  an  application)  to  be available in a specific year.
Milestones  are  interlinked  in  various ways, as they may require or
enable   other   milestones.   The   ELSNET   Roadmaps  are  available
electronically  and  can  thus  be  easily  maintained. On the website
http://www.elsnet.org/roadmap.html  you  can  find  an  account of our
approach,  and  an  overview of the activities we have undertaken thus
far. For an initial overview of what we have, presented in a graphical
format,  see  http://elsnet.dfki.de,  and  select "LREC 2004 Resources
Roadmap",  where you will find a very preliminary example of a roadmap
showing some advanced applications and the basic technologies required
for them.

The results we have collected during the various roadmap workshops and
sessions  we  have  organized  over the last few years are still being
integrated, but in parallel we would like to start our process towards
consensus  building,  as  it  is  clear  that  a  roadmap based on the
opinions  of  a  small  group  of  people can not be seen as a broadly
shared  view  of  a whole community. It is essential that we consult a
larger  cross-section  of  our community to an agreement on milestones
and their expected year of completion.

As  part  of  the  consensus  building process we will be consulting a
number  of   experts  on  each  of  the  topics of language and speech
technology  covered by the roadmap in its present form. A Roadmap Task
Force will collect the results, integrate them in the roadmap if there
is  a  consensus,  and  put them on the agenda of the meeting at LREC:
some  of  the  milestones  will be clustered to be presented together,
while  cases  where  there is divergence between the experts' opinions
will  require  individual presentations and discussion at the meeting,
hopefully resulting in a consensus view.

We envisage that the co-ordination of the continued maintenance of the
language  resources  roadmap  will  become the joint responsibility of
COCOSDA  and  ICCWLRE.  The organization of similar meetings at future
events will be one of their instruments to implement this.

Participation  in  the meeting is open to everybody and free (there is
no  registration  fee), but registration is mandatory because of space
limitations.

Meeting URL:   http://www.elsnet.org/roadmap-lrec2004.html
LREC 2004 URL: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004

The meeting is organized by the joint ELSNET/ENABLER/ELRA Roadmap Task
Force:

- Stephan Busemann (stephan.busemann at dfki.de, DFKI)
- Nicoletta Calzolari (glottolo at ilc.cnr.it, ILC-CNR)
- Khalid Choukri (choukri at elda.fr, ELDA)
- Steven Krauwer (steven.krauwer at elsnet.org, ELSNET)

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