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<b>***** PLEASE NOTE DEADLINE EXTENSION FOR <br>
WORKSHOP AND PANEL PROPOSALS TO OCTOBER, 27TH *****<br>
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<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>LREC
2004<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>24-30
May 2004, Lisbon,
Portugal<font size=4><x-tab> </x-tab><br>
<br>
</font><x-tab> </x-tab>Abstracts
submission forms now available on-line:<br>
<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/" eudora="autourl"><font color="#0000FF"><u>http://www.lrec-conf.org</a><br>
</u></font>****************************************************************************<br>
<br>
The fourth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation,
<br>
LREC 2004, is organised by ELRA in cooperation with other
Associations<br>
and Consortia, including ACL, AFNLP, ALLC, ALTA, COCOSDA and
Oriental<br>
COCOSDA, EAFT, EAMT, ELSNET, ENABLER, EURALEX, GKS, GWA,
IAMT,<font color="#FF0000"> <br>
</font>ICWLR, ISCA, LDC, ONTOWEB, TEI, and with major national and
international<br>
organisations, including the Commission of the EU - Information Society
DG, <br>
Unit E1 "Interfaces and Cognition”. Co-operation with other
organisations is<br>
currently being sought.<br>
<br>
*** Location ***<br>
<br>
Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal<br>
<br>
*** Dates ***<br>
<br>
- Pre-conference workshops: 24-25 May 2004<br>
- Main conference: 26-27-28 May 2004<br>
- Post-conference workshops: 29-30 May 2004<br>
<br>
*** Conference aims ***<br>
<br>
In the Information Society, the pervasive character of Human Language
Technologies<br>
(HLT) and their relevance to practically all fields of Information
Society Technologies<br>
(IST) has been widely recognised.<br>
<br>
Two issues are particularly relevant: the availability of Language
Resources (LRs) and<br>
the methods for the evaluation of resources, technologies, products and
applications.<br>
Substantial mutual benefits are achieved by addressing these issues
through international<br>
collaboration.<br>
<br>
The term “language resources” (LRs) refers to sets of language data and
descriptions<br>
in machine readable form, used in many types of
areas/components/systems/applications: <br>
- Creation and evaluation of natural language, speech and multimodal
algorithms and systems;<br>
- Software localisation and language services;<br>
- Language enabled information and communication services;<br>
- Knowledge management;<br>
- E-commerce, e-publishing, e-learning, e-government;<br>
- Cultural heritage;<br>
- Linguistic studies;<br>
- Etc.<br>
<br>
This large range of uses makes the LRs infrastructure a strategic part of
the e-society,<br>
where the creation of a basic set of LRs for all languages must be
ensured in order to<br>
bring all languages to the same level of usability and
availability.<br>
<br>
Examples of LRs are written or spoken corpora and lexica, which may be
annotated<br>
or not, multimodal resources, grammars, terminology or domain specific
databases and<br>
dictionaries, ontologies, multimedia databases, etc. LRs also cover basic
software tools<br>
for the acquisition, preparation, collection, management, customisation
and use of the<br>
above mentioned examples.<br>
<br>
The relevance of evaluation for language technologies development is
increasingly recognised. <br>
This involves assessing the state-of-the-art for a given technology,
measuring the progress<br>
achieved within a programme, comparing different approaches to a given
problem, assessing<br>
the availability of technologies for a given application, benchmarking,
and assessing system<br>
usability and user satisfaction.<br>
<br>
The aim of this conference is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art, discuss problems<br>
and opportunities, exchange information regarding LRs, their
applications, ongoing and planned<br>
activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the new
e-society, both with<br>
respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones.
LREC will also elaborate<br>
on evaluation methodologies and tools, explore the different trends and
promote initiatives for<br>
international collaboration in the areas mentioned above. <br>
<br>
*** Conference topics ***<br>
<br>
Examples of the topics which may be addressed by papers submitted to the
conference are given below.<br>
<br>
Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources
(LRs):<br>
- Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for
LRs;<br>
- Methods, tools and procedures for the acquisition, creation,
management, access, distribution and use of LRs;<br>
- Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g. terms,
lexical information, language modelling) from LRs;<br>
- Organisational and legal issues in the construction, distribution,
access and use of LRs;<br>
- Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LRs; <br>
- Definition and requirements for a Basic and Extended LAnguage Resource
Kit (BLARK, ELARK) for all languages;<br>
- Monolingual and multilingual LRs;<br>
- Multimedia and multimodal LRs. - Integration of various media and
modalities in LRs (speech, vision, language);<br>
- Documentation and archiving of languages, including minority and
endangered languages;<br>
- Ontologies and knowledge representation;<br>
- Terminology and NLP, tools and methodologies for terminology and
ontology building, term extraction, specialised dictionaries,<br>
- LRs for linguistic research in human-machine communication;<br>
- Exploitation of LRs in different types of applications (information
extraction, information retrieval, speech<br>
dictation, translation, summarisation, web services, semantic web,
etc.);<br>
- Exploitation of LRs in different types of interfaces (dialogue systems,
natural language and multimodal/multisensorial<br>
interactions, etc.);<br>
- Industrial LRs requirements, user needs and community's response;<br>
- Industrial production of LRs;<br>
- Industrial use of LRs;<br>
- Metadata descriptions of LRs.<br>
<br>
Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT) evaluation:<br>
- Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LRs,<br>
- Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures,<br>
- Benchmarking of systems and products, resources for benchmarking and
evaluation, blackbox, glassbox and<br>
diagnostic evaluation of systems, - Usability and user experience
evaluation, qualitative and perceptive evaluation,<br>
- Evaluation in written language processing (document production and
management, text retrieval, terminology<br>
extraction, message understanding, text alignment, machine translation,
morphosyntactic tagging, parsing,<br>
semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation, text understanding,
summarisation, question answering, localisation, etc.);<br>
- Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech recognition and
understanding, voice dictation, oral dialogue,<br>
speech synthesis, speech coding, speaker and language recognition, spoken
translation, etc.);<br>
- Evaluation of multimedia document retrieval and search systems
(including detection, indexing, filtering, alert,<br>
question answering, etc);<br>
- Evaluation of multimodal systems;<br>
- From evaluation to standardisation.<br>
<br>
General issues:<br>
- National and international activities and projects;<br>
- LRs and the needs/opportunities of the emerging industries;<br>
- LRs and contributions to societal needs (e.g. e-society);<br>
- Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international
policies for LRs;<br>
- Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international
cooperation, and their organisational and technological<br>
implications;<br>
- Open architectures for LRs.<br>
<br>
The Conference targets the integration of different types of LRs (spoken,
written and other modalities) and of the respective<br>
communities. To this end, LREC encourages submissions covering issues
which are common to different types of Language<br>
Technologies, such as dialogue strategy, written and spoken translation,
domain-specific data, multimodal communication<br>
or multimedia document processing, and will organise, in addition to the
usual tracks, common<br>
sessions encompassing the different areas of LRs.<br>
<br>
*** Programme ***<br>
<br>
The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations,
poster presentations, referenced demonstrations<br>
and panels. There is no difference in quality between oral presentations
and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness<br>
of the type of communication to the content of the paper will be
considered.<br>
<br>
*** Abstract submission ***<br>
<br>
On-line submission forms are now available.<br>
<br>
On the LREC 2004 web pages,
<a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php" eudora="autourl"><font color="#0000FF"><u>http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php</a></u></font>,
from the “Abstract submission” section, you can<br>
choose the appropriate submission form and submit paper, demonstration or
poster abstracts. <br>
A submission form is also available on the LREC 2004 web site if you
would like to propose a panel.<br>
<br>
*** Workshops ***<br>
<br>
Submission forms for workshops’ proposals are also available
on-line.<br>
<br>
Pre-conference workshops will be organised on 24th and 25th May 2004, and
post-conference workshops on 29th and 30th May 2004. <br>
A workshop is normally either half day or full day.<br>
<br>
The workshop proposers will be responsible for the organisational aspects
(e.g. workshop call preparation and distribution, review<br>
of papers, notification of acceptance, assembling of the workshop
proceedings, etc.). <br>
<br>
Proceedings will be printed for each workshop.<br>
<br>
*** Important dates ***<br>
<br>
<b>- Submission of proposals for panels and workshops: 27th October
2003<br>
</b>- Submission of proposals for oral and poster papers, referenced
demos: 31st October 2003<br>
- Notification of acceptance of workshop and panel proposals: 14th
November 2003<br>
- Notification of acceptance of oral papers, posters, referenced demos:
23rd January 2004<br>
- Final versions for the proceedings: 1st March 2004<br>
<br>
- Conference: 26th, 27th and 28th May 2004<br>
- Pre-conference workshops: 24th and 25th May 2004<br>
- Post-conference workshops: 29th and 30th May 2004<br>
<br>
The proceedings of the conference will include both oral and poster
papers.<br>
<br>
Internet connections and various computer platforms and facilities will
be available at the conference site. In addition to referenced<br>
demos concerning LRs and related tools, it will be possible to run
unreferenced demos of language processing products, systems and
tools.<br>
Contact details are posted on
<a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/" eudora="autourl"><font color="#0000FF"><u>www.lrec-conf.org</a></u></font>
if this opportunity interests you.<br>
<br>
*** Consortia and project meetings ***<br>
<br>
Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising meetings should contact the ELDA office, lrec@elda.fr<br>
(further details are given at the end of the document).<br>
<br>
*** Conference registration fees ***<br>
<br>
1/ Early-bird registration fees, available until 20th February 2004:<br>
<br>
- Standard participant: 260 Euro<br>
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 210 Euro<br>
- Student: 110 Euro<br>
<br>
2/ Registration fees after 20th February 2004:<br>
<br>
- Standard participant: 320 Euro<br>
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 250 Euro<br>
- Student: 130 Euro<br>
<br>
3/ On-site registration fees after 20th February 2004:<br>
<br>
- Standard participant: 380 Euro<br>
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 290 Euro<br>
- Student: 150 Euro<br>
<br>
The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings, welcome reception, conference dinner, coffee-breaks and refreshments. <br>
<br>
*** Workshop registration fees ***<br>
<br>
1/ Workshop only participant: <br>
- 1/2 day: 85 Euro<br>
- Full day: 170 Euro<br>
<br>
2/ Workshop and Conference participant:<br>
- 1/2 day: 50 Euro<br>
- Full day: 100 Euro<br>
<br>
The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings of the attended workshop, coffee-breaks and refreshments.<br>
<br>
*** Conference programme committee ***<br>
<br>
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa, Italy<br>
- Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France<br>
- Teresa Lino, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal<br>
- Bente Maegaard, CST, Copenhagen, Denmark<br>
- Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France<br>
- Jan Odijk, UIL-OTS, Utrecht, the Netherlands, and ScanSoft, Merelbeke, Belgium<br>
- Daniel Tapias, Telefonica Moviles, Madrid, Spain<br>
<br>
The composition of the committees as well as instructions and addresses for registration and accommodation will be detailed<br>
on the LREC web site at <a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/" eudora="autourl">www.lrec-conf.org</a>.<br>
<br>
*** ELRA ***<br>
<br>
For more information about ELRA (European Language Resources Association), please contact:<br>
<br>
Khalid Choukri, ELRA CEO<br>
55-57 Rue Brillat-Savarin,<br>
75013 Paris - France<br>
Tel: + 33 1 43 13 33 33<br>
Fax: + 33 1 43 13 33 30<br>
Email: choukri@elda.fr<br>
Web: <a href="http://www.elra.info/" eudora="autourl">www.elra.info</a> or <a href="http://www.elda.fr/" eudora="autourl">www.elda.fr</a><br>
<br>
****************************************************************************<br>
The first LREC was organised in Granada (Spain) in 1998: 197 papers and posters were presented, with about 510 registered<br>
participants from 38 different countries from all continents. Among these, the largest group came from Spain (81 participants), <br>
followed by France (75), USA (73), Germany (47), UK (43) and Italy (41). Registered participants belonged to over 325 different<br>
organisations.<br>
<br>
LREC 2000, in Athens, had 129 oral papers and 152 posters presented, with around 600 participants from 51 different countries<br>
from all continents. Among these, the largest group came from Greece (117), followed by USA (70), France (59), Germany (45), <br>
UK (43), Japan (35) and Italy (29). <br>
Registered participants belonged to 319 different organisations.<br>
<br>
LREC 2002, which took place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), attracted over 700 representatives, coming from 38 countries<br>
around the world, who could take advantage of the numerous oral and poster presentations (around 365, covering every area in HLT).<br>
<br>
A similar number of participants is expected at LREC 2004.<br>
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Marketing & Communication <br>
<br>
55-57, rue Brillat-Savarin <br>
75013 Paris FRANCE <br>
Tel: (+33) 1 43 13 33 33 / Fax: (+33) 1 43 13 33 30 <br>
Web sites: <a href="http://www.elra.info/" eudora="autourl"><font color="#0000FF"><u>http://www.elra.info</a></u></font> or <a href="http://www.elda.fr/" eudora="autourl"><u>http://www.elda.fr</a></u> <br>
<br>
LREC conference: <a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/" eudora="autourl">http://www.lrec-conf.org</a> <br>
<br>
LangTech forum: <a href="http://www.lang-tech.org/" eudora="autourl">http://www.lang-tech.org</a><br>
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