LREC 2012 Workshop: 1st CfP Workshop on Language Resources and Technologies for Turkic Languages

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First Workshop on Language Resources and Technologies for Turkic Languages

May 21, 2012 (afternoon session)
First Call for Papers

Turkic languages (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazakh, Tatar, Uzbek 
and many others) are spoken as native languages by more than 150 million 
people all around the world. Turkic languages have complex agglutinative 
morphology with very productive inflectional and derivational processes 
leading to a very large vocabulary size. They also have a very free 
constituent order with almost no formal constraints. Furthermore, due to 
various historical and social reasons these languages have employed a 
wide-variety of writing systems and still do so. These aspects bring 
numerous challenges to computational processing of these languages in 
tasks such as language modeling, parsing, statistical machine 
translation, speech-to-speech translation, etc. Time is now ripe to 
focus on the development of language resources and computational 
processing techniques for these languages to bring their status up to 
par with more studied languages in the context of speech and language 
processing.
We are pleased to invite you to the "First Workshop on Language 
Resources and Technologies for Turkic Languages" to be held during LREC 
2012 in Istanbul. This half-day workshop will be the first attempt to 
bring together the researchers, commercial interests and other 
stakeholders actively involved in developing and using speech and 
language technologies for Turkic languages. The workshop invites 
submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects 
of speech and language technologies for Turkic languages. Selected 
contributions will be presented as short-oral presentations or posters. 
Topics include but are not limited to:
• Morphological and Syntactic Analysis for Turkic languages
• Novel language modeling techniques for Turkic languages
• Development and adaptation of language and speech resources for Turkic 
languages
• Machine translation into/from/between Turkic languages
• Challenges for speech recognition and generation for Turkic languages


Submission Information

Submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Each submission 
will be judged on its originality, technical content, and relevance to 
the workshop. Contributions accompanied by language resources and 
datasets that are described in the paper are particularly encouraged. 
Paper submissions up to 4 pages (excluding references) must conform to 
the official LREC 2012 style guidelines (will be distributed soon on the 
LREC website). Submissions should be in PDF format and submitted through 
the START online submission system 
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/TurkicLanguage2012/. Since the 
reviewing will not be blind, submissions must include the authors' names 
and affiliations. Double submissions to other conferences are not 
allowed. More information on the submission procedure will be available 
in the next call of the papers.

When submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be kindly 
asked to provide relevant information about the resources that have been 
used for the work described in their paper or that are the outcome of 
their research. For further information on this initiative, please refer 
to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012. Authors will also be 
asked to contribute to the Language Library, the new initiative of LREC2012.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: February 27, 2012
Notification of acceptance: March 19, 2012
Camera-ready submission deadline: March 30, 2012
Workshop: May 21, 2012 (afternoon session)


Organizing Committee

Kemal Oflazer, Carnegie Mellon University - Qatar
Mehmed Özkan, Boğaziçi University
Mehmet Uğur Doğan, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Microsoft
Alper Kanak, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
İlknur Durgar El-Kahlout, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Şeniz Demir, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Yücel Bicil, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM

Program Committee

Adil Alpkoçak, Dokuz Eylül University
Ahmet Cüneyd Tantuğ, İstanbul Technical University
Arzucan Özgür, Boğaziçi University
Atakan Kurt, Fatih University
Banu Diri, Yıldız Technical University
Barış Bozkurt, Bahçeşehir University
Bilge Say, Middle East Technical University
Cem Bozşahin, Middle East Technical University
Cemil Demir, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Cenk Demiroğlu, Özyeğin University
Coşkun Mermer, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Deniz Yüret, Koç University
Deniz Zeyrek, Middle East Technical University
Ebru Arısoy, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Engin Erzin, Koç University
Erdem Ünal, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Fatma Canan Pembe, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Gülşen Cebiroğlu Eryiğit, İstanbul Technical University
Levent Arslan, Boğaziçi University
Mehmet Fatih Amasyalı, Yıldız Technical University
Murat Can Ganiz, Doğuş University
Murat Saraçlar, Google - Boğaziçi University
Oğuzhan Külekçi, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Özlem Çetinoğlu, University of Stuttgart
Ruken Cakici, Middle East Technical University
Selçuk Köprü, Teknoloji Yazılımevi
Şükriye Ruhi, Middle East Technical University
Tunga Güngör, Boğaziçi University
Ümit Güz, Işık University
Yeşim Aksan, Mersin University
Yusuf Ziya Işık, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM


Sponsor

The workshop is being supported by the European Commission 
FP7-REGPOT-2008-1 project (#229861) MULTISAUND (MULTilingualism 
Integrated to Speech and Audio UNDerstanding) - "Improvement of 
interactive and secure language and speech processing potential of 
TUBITAK-UEKAE for an increased multilingual capability in ERA".

Contact Information
Please contact Mehmet Uğur Doğan (mugur at uekae.tubitak.gov.tr) or İlknur 
Durgar El-Kahlout (idurgar at uekae.tubitak.gov.tr) for any further inquiries.