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[Apologies for multiple postings]<br><br>
<div align="center">LREC 2006<br>
</div>
<b> <br>
</b><div align="center">5th Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation<br>
</div>
<br>
<div align="center"><font size=5><b>SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS<br>
</b></font></div>
<br>
<div align="center"><img src="cid:.0" width=173 height=202 alt="[]"><br>
</div>
<br>
<b> <br>
<div align="center">Magazzini del Cotone Conference Center, Genoa -
Italy<br>
<br>
MAIN CONFERENCE: 24-25-26 MAY 2006<br>
<br>
WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 22-23 and 27-28 MAY 2006<br>
<br>
Conference web site:
<a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006">
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006</a> <br>
</div>
<br>
</b> <br>
<b> <br>
</b>The fifth international conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation, LREC 2006, is organised by ELRA in cooperation with a wide
range of international associations and consortia, including AAMT, ACL,
AFNLP, ALLC, ALTA, COCOSDA and Oriental COCOSDA, EACL, EAMT, ELSNET,
ENABLER, EURALEX, Forum TAL, GWA, IAMT, ISCA, KnowledgeWeb, LDC, NEMLAR
Network, SENSEVAL, SIGLEX, TEI, Technolangue French Program, WRITE and
with major national and international organisations including the
European Commission – Information Society and Media Directorate General,
Unit “Interfaces”.<br>
<br>
<br>
<font size=2><b>CONFERENCE AIMS<br>
</b></font> <br>
In the Information Society, the pervasive character of Human Language
Technologies (HLT) and their relevance to practically all fields of
Information Society Technologies (IST) has been widely recognised. Two
issues are considered particularly relevant: the availability of Language
Resources (LRs) and the methods for the evaluation of resources,
technologies, products and applications. Substantial mutual benefits are
achieved by addressing these issues through international
cooperation.<br>
<br>
The term <i>language resources</i> refers to sets of language data and
descriptions in machine readable form, such as written or spoken corpora
and lexica, annotated or not, multimodal resources, grammars, terminology
or domain specific databases and dictionaries, ontologies, multimedia
databases, etc. LRs also cover basic software tools for their
acquisition, preparation, collection, management, customisation and use.
LRs are used in many types of components/systems/applications, such as
software localisation and language services, language enabled information
and communication services, knowledge management, e-commerce,
e-publishing, e-learning, e-government, cultural heritage, linguistic
studies, etc.. This large range of usages makes the LRs infrastructure a
strategic part of the e-society, where the creation of a basic set of LRs
for all languages must be ensured in order to bring all languages to the
same level of usability and availability.<br>
The relevance of the evaluation for language technologies development is
increasingly recognised. This involves assessing the state-of-the-art for
a given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a programme,
comparing different approaches to a given problem, assessing the
availability of technologies for a given application, product
benchmarking, and assessing system usability and user satisfaction.<br>
<br>
The aim of the LREC conference is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends,
exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation
methodologies and tools, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses
and needs, requirements coming from the new e-society, both with respect
to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones. LREC
provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies
from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and
opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for
international cooperation in the areas mentioned above, in support to
investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies
and development of corresponding products, services and
applications.<br><br>
<br><br>
<h3><font size=2><b>CONFERENCE TOPICS</b></font></h3> <br>
Examples of the topics which may be addressed by papers submitted to the
conference are given below. <br>
<br>
<b><u>Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources
(LRs) </u>
<ul>
<li>Methodologies and tools:</b>
</ul>· Guidelines,
standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs. <br>
· Methods, tools,
procedures for the acquisition, creation, annotation, management, access,
distribution, use of monolingual and multilingual LRs.<br>
· Methods for the
extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g. terms, ontologies, lexical
information, language modelling) from LRs, and knowledge transfer among
languages.<br>
· Definition and
requirements for a Basic and Extended LAnguage Resource Kit (BLARK,
ELARK) for all languages.<br>
· Documentation and
archiving of languages, including minority and endangered languages.<br>
· LRs for linguistic
research in human-machine communication.<br>
<br>
· <b>LRs construction
& annotation:<br>
</b>· Metadata
descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup.<br>
· Ontologies and
knowledge representation, especially with respect to HLT.<br>
· Terminology and NLP
tools and methodologies for terminology and ontology building or mapping,
term extraction, domain-specific dictionaries.<br>
· LRs for machine
translation.<br>
· LRs for ubiquitous
processing.<br>
· Availability and use of
generic vs. task/domain specific LRs.<br>
· Multimedia and
Multimodal LRs - Integration of various media and modalities in LRs
(speech, vision, language).<br>
<br>
· <b>LRs
exploitation:<br>
</b>· Industrial
production of LRs.<br>
· Industrial LRs
requirements, user needs and community's response.<br>
· Exploitation of LRs in
different types of applications (information extraction, information
retrieval, speech dictation, translation, summarisation, web services,
semantic web, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, etc.). <br>
· Exploitation of LRs in
different types of interfaces (dialogue systems, natural language and
multimodal/multisensorial interactions, etc.).<br>
<br>
<b><u>Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT) evaluation</u>
<ul>
<li>Methodologies, tools and standardisation:</b>
</ul>· 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 diagnostic evaluation of systems. <br>
· From evaluation to
standardisation.<br>
· User centred design
tools and methods.<br>
· Evaluation of
ontologies and knowledge bases by means of LR-related techniques.<br>
· Evaluation in written
language processing: (document production and management, text retrieval,
terminology extraction, message understanding, text alignment, machine
translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, semantic tagging, word
sense disambiguation, text understanding, summarization, question
answering, localization, etc.).<br>
· Evaluation in spoken
language processing: (speech recognition and understanding, voice
dictation, oral dialogue, 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, question answering, etc.). <br>
· Evaluation of
multimodal systems. <br>
<ul>
<li><b>Usability evaluation of HLT based user Interfaces:</b>
</ul>· Usability and user
satisfaction evaluation.<br>
· Psychophysical and
cognitive evaluation. <br>
· User experience
assessment.<br>
· Heuristic
evaluation.<br>
· Multimodal interaction
evaluation.<br>
· Evaluation of usability
in mobile services/applications, etc.<br>
<br>
<b><u>General issues<br><br>
</u></b>· National and
international activities and projects. <br>
· Open architectures for
LRs.<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 implications. <br>
· Organisational,
economical and legal issues in the construction, distribution, access and
use of LRs.<br>
<br><br>
<h3><font size=2><b>SPECIAL HIGHLIGHTS</font><font size=5>
</b></font></h3><b> </b>LREC targets the integration of different
types of LRs (spoken, written, and other modalities), and of the
respective communities. To this end, LREC encourages submissions covering
issues which are common to different types of LRs and language
technologies, such as dialogue strategy, written and spoken translation,
domain-specific data, multimodal communication or multimedia document
processing, and will organise, in addition to the usual tracks, common
sessions encompassing the different areas of LRs.<br>
<b> <br>
The 2006 Conference emphasises in particular the importance of
promoting:<br>
</b>-
<b>synergies and integration between (multilingual) LRs and Semantic Web
technologies, <br>
</b>- <b>new
paradigms for sharing and integrating LRs and LT coming from different
sources, <br>
</b>-
<b>communication with neighbouring fields for applications in
e-government and administration,<br>
</b>-
<b>common evaluation campaigns for the objective evaluation of the
performances of different systems,<br>
</b>-
<b>systems and products (also industrial ones) based on large-size and
high quality LRs.<br><br>
LREC therefore encourages submissions of papers, panels, workshops,
tutorials on the use of LRs in these areas.<br>
<br><br>
<font size=2>PROGRAMME<br>
</b></font> <br>
The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations,
poster presentations<s> </s>and panels. <br>
<b>There is no difference in quality between oral presentations and
poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of
communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will
be considered.<br>
</b> <br>
<b> <br>
<font size=2>ABSTRACT SUBMISSION<br>
</font> <br>
</b>On-line submission form for abstracts is now available. <br>
You should go to the “Abstract submission” section on the LREC2006 web
site
(<a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/">
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/</a>) and follow the procedure
instructions.<br>
<b> <br>
<br>
<font size=2>WORKSHOPS, TUTORIALS and PANELS<br>
</font> <br>
Submission of workshop, tutorial and panel proposals</b> should be made
by e-mail to both the following e-mail addresses:
<ul>
<li>
<a href="mailto:lrec@ilc.cnr.it">lrec@ilc.cnr.it</a>
<li>
<a href="mailto:lrec2006@elda.org">lrec@elda.org</a>
</ul><b> <br>
Proposals for workshops and tutorials</b> should be no longer than three
pages, and include:<br>
<ul>
<li><b>For workshops</b>:
<ul>
<li>The title
<li>A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that
the workshop will address
<li>The reasons why the workshop is of interest
<li>The names and affiliations, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers,
email and web site addresses of the organising committee, which should
consist of at least three people knowledgeable in the field, coming from
different institutions
<li>The name and the e-mail address of the member of the workshop
organising committee designated as the contact person
<li>The desirable duration of the workshop (half day or full day)
<li>A summary of the intended call for participation
<li>An estimate of the approximate audience size
<li>A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room
requirements
</ul>
</ul>The workshop proposers will be responsible for the organisational
aspects (e.g. workshop call preparation and distribution, review of
papers, notification of acceptance, assembling of the workshop
proceedings using the ELRA specifications, etc.).<br>
<ul>
<li><b>For tutorials</b>:
<ul>
<li>The title
<li>A brief technical description of the tutorial content
<li>The reasons why the tutorial is of interest
<li>The names and affiliations, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers,
email and web site addresses of the tutorial speakers, with brief
descriptions of their technical background
<li>The name and e-mail address of one tutorial speaker designated as the
contact person
<li>The duration of the tutorial (half day is the expected usual length)
<li>An estimate of the approximate audience size
<li>A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room
requirements
</ul>
</ul> <br>
The tutorial proposers will be responsible for the organisational aspects
(e.g. assembling of the tutorial material, etc.).<br>
<b> <br>
Proposals for panels</b> should contain the following information:
<ul>
<li>The title
<li>A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that
the panel will address
<li>The reasons why the panel is of interest
<li>Name of the panel organiser/s; affiliation and postal address; phone
and fax numbers; e-mail address; web site address
<li>The name and the e-mail address of the designated contact person
</ul><font size=5><b><br>
</font><font size=2>PROCEEDINGS<br>
</b></font> <br>
The Proceedings of the conference will cover both oral and poster
papers.<br><br>
<h3><b>The Conference package that will be provided to all will include
Proceedings on CD-ROM and a printed book of Abstracts and Conference
Programme. Hardcopy Proceedings will be printed on demand only.
</b></h3> <br>
<br>
<font size=2><b>IMPORTANT DATES</b></font>
<ul>
<li>Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials:
<b>14<sup> </sup>October 2005</b>
<li>Submission of proposals for oral and poster papers: <b>14 October
2005</b>
<li>Notification of acceptance of panels, workshops and tutorials
proposals:<b> 7 November 2005</b>
<li>Notification of acceptance of oral papers, posters: <b>16 January
2006</b>
<li>Final versions for the proceedings: <b>20 February 2006</b>
<li>Conference<b>: 24-26 May 2006</b>
<li>Pre-conference workshops and tutorials: <b>22 and 23 May 2006</b>
<li>Post-conference workshops and tutorials: <b>27 and 28 May 2006</b>
</ul>Internet connections and various computer platforms and facilities
will be available at the conference site. It will be possible to run
non-reviewed demos of language engineering products, systems and tools.
Those interested should contact the organiser of the demonstrations.
Ddetails will be posted on
<a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/">
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/</a>.<br>
<b> <br>
<br>
<font size=2>CONSORTIA AND PROJECT MEETINGS<br>
</b></font> <br>
Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising
meetings should contact the ELDA office at lrec@elda.org.<br>
<b> <br>
<br>
<font size=2>CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE <br>
</font> <br>
</b>Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR,
Pisa, Italy (Conference Chair)<br>
Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France<br>
Aldo Gangemi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione del CNR,
Roma, Italy<br>
Bente Maegaard, CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark<br>
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France<br>
Jan Odijk, ScanSoft, Merelbeke, Belgium and UIL-OTS, Utrecht, The
Netherlands <br>
Daniel Tapias, Telefonica Moviles, Madrid, Spain<br>
<br>
<br>
The composition of the committees as well as instructions and addresses
for registration and accommodation will be detailed on the LREC web site
at
<a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/">
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/</a>.<br>
<b> <br>
<br>
<font size=2>ELRA<br>
</font> <br>
</b>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.org<br>
Web: <a href="http://www.elra.info/">http://www.elra.info</a> or
<a href="http://www.elda.org/" eudora="autourl"><u>
http://www.elda.org/<br>
</a></u> <br>
<br>
<div align="center"><b>Some facts and figures about previous LRECs<br>
</b></div>
<br>
The first LREC was organised in Granada (Spain) in 1998: 197 papers and
posters were 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.<br>
<br>
LREC 2000, in Athens, had 129 oral papers and 152 posters presented, with
around 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.<br>
<br>
LREC 2002, which took place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain),
attracted over 700 representatives, coming from 38 countries around the
world. The following figures illustrate how successful it proved to be:
for the main conference, 460 papers had been submitted and reviewed, of
which 365 were presented at the conference. Most of the areas in HLT were
covered (about 280 papers dealt with written resources, about 100 with
spoken resources, 25 with multimodal and multimedia resources, around 50
dealt with evaluation of HLT, and 16 with terminology).<br>
<br>
The 4th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference was
held in memory of two dear friends and colleagues we lost in 2003, Angel
Martin Municio and Antonio Zampolli.<br>
LREC 2004, which took place in Lisbon (Portugal), attracted almost 1000
participants, coming from 50 countries from all the continents. Close to
800 submissions for poster and oral presentations were reviewed by the
Scientific Committee: 519 were actually presented, a majority dedicated
to written resources (260), 116 dealt with spoken resources, 40 with
terminological issues, 57 with evaluation, 17 were on general issues, and
29 on multimodal-multimedia ones. In addition, a total of 18 satellite
workshops covering various fields were organised before and after the
main conference. <br>
A new award in HLT was launched on that occasion: the ELRA Board created
a prize for “Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of Language
Resources and Language Technology Evaluation”, to honour the memory of
its co-founder and 1st president, Antonio Zampolli. The Antonio Zampolli
Prize was awarded for the first time at LREC 2004 to Fredrick Jelinek,
from John Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.<br>
<br>
A similar number of participants is expected at LREC 2006. <br><br>
<br>
<h3><b>If you want to know the state-of-the-art in LT and LRs and their
application in all aspects of e-society , this is the Conference to go
to!</b></h3> <br>
<br><br>
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