18.3865, Calls: Computational Ling/Morocco; Text/Corpus Ling/Morocco

Fri Dec 21 21:49:56 UTC 2007

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-3865. Fri Dec 21 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.3865, Calls: Computational Ling/Morocco; Text/Corpus Ling/Morocco

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1)
Date: 21-Dec-2007
From: Thora Tenbrink < tenbrink at uni-bremen.de >
Subject: Methodologies for Processing Spatial Language 

2)
Date: 21-Dec-2007
From: Serge Sharoff < s.sharoff at leeds.ac.uk >
Subject: 4th Web as Corpus workshop: Can we beat Google?

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:47:54
From: Thora Tenbrink [tenbrink at uni-bremen.de]
Subject: Methodologies for Processing Spatial Language
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=18-3865.html&submissionid=164599&topicid=3&msgnumber=1  

Full Title: Methodologies for Processing Spatial Language 

Date: 31-May-2008 - 31-May-2008
Location: Marrakech, Morocco 
Contact Person: Thora Tenbrink
Meeting Email: tenbrink at uni-bremen.de
Web Site: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/IMG/ws/Spatial.pdf 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Feb-2008 

Meeting Description

The goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for researchers to share ongoing
research on spatial language processing, with the aim of moving towards a set of
community standards.
We invite submissions of papers and demonstrations related to the development of
or evaluation of resources, tools, and frameworks for understanding and
generating spatial expressions in natural language. 

Call for Papers

Methodologies and Resources for Processing Spatial Language
(Workshop at LREC 2008)

This workshop will be held at the sixth international conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008 (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/), in
Marrakech, Morocco on 31 May, 2008. 
(The main conference will be held 28-30 May 2008).

Rationale
The time is ripe for the development and standardization of computational
resources for processing spatial language: the ubiquitous use of digital
geographic resources (e.g., Mapquest and Google Earth) has resulted in a surge
of practical interest in location-based services; spoken-language interfaces for
navigation systems are becoming widespread; the publishing of
geographically-relevant information in Google Earth's Keyhole Markup Language
(KML) and other formats is now common; several commercial products for
geo-coding text in different languages are now available and have a growing user
base. Many of the technologies and resources used are, however, proprietary and
task-specific.

There is a need for versatile and comprehensive methodologies for mapping
natural language expressions that describe locations, orientations and paths to
the geospatial entities they refer to and for encoding the spatial relationships
among the entities described. This workshop aims to address this need and to
focus research on the development of standardized resources to support the
understanding and generation of spatial language on a large scale. These
resources include spatial annotation schemes and systems for spatial reasoning
as well as spatial ontologies, and might be applied to applications in
information retrieval, visualization, data mining, etc. In addition, research
into spatial processing may be informed by results from psycholinguistics,
particularly the acquisition and processing of spatial language, as well as
theoretical perspectives such as those offered by cognitive linguistics,
artificial intelligence, and usage-based approaches. The goal of the workshop is
to provide a forum for researchers to share ongoing research on spatial language
processing, with the aim of moving towards a set of community standards.

Topics
We invite submissions of papers and demonstrations related to the development of
or evaluation of resources, tools, and frameworks for understanding and
generating spatial expressions in natural language. Topics of interest include:
- resources for linguistic analysis of spatial descriptions
- gazetteers and databases for geospatial annotation and natural language
interpretation
- mining of resources like wikipedia to build resources for processing spatial
expressions
- spatial ontologies for natural language
- annotating topological, distance, and orientation relations
- tools to support spatial annotation
- tools for interpreting and generating spatial descriptions
- disambiguation of spatial descriptions
- generating textual descriptions of spatial locations, entities, and paths from
geospatial data
- cognitive and artificial intelligence perspectives on spatial language
- linking natural language with other areas of spatial reasoning.

Assuming there are sufficient high quality papers, the prospect of an edited
volume or journal special issue will be discussed at the workshop.

Related Links
SpatialML http://sourceforge.net/projects/spatialml
CIKM workshop series http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~rsp/gir07/
GeoCLEF evaluation http://ir.shef.ac.uk/geoclef/

Timeline
Submissions deadline: 15 February 2008
Notification to authors: 15 March 2008
Final copies due: 2 April 2008
Workshop: 31 May 2008

Submission Format
Technical papers should be no more than 8 pages in length and should follow the
style for submissions to the main LREC conference.

We also invite submissions of short papers (3 pages in length) describing
demonstrations (in the same LREC style). Demo papers must include a concise
abstract that describes what the demo is intended to convey, and should also
include screen shots. As the computing facilities in the workshop room are
limited, demonstrations are possible only if no additional facilities are
needed. Please contact tenbrink at uni-bremen.de for details.

All submissions, in pdf format only, should be sent to tenbrink at uni-bremen.de .
Organizers
Graham Katz (Georgetown)
Inderjeet Mani (MITRE)
Thora Tenbrink (Bremen)

Prpgram Committee
Nicholas Asher (IRIT/CNRS)
Janet Hitzeman (MITRE)
Alexander Klippel (Penn State)
Andras Kornai (MetaCarta)
Jochen Leidner (Edinburgh)
Amit Mukerjee (IIT Kanpur)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis)
Ehud Reiter (Aberdeen)
Frank Schilder (Thomson)
Nicola Stokes (Melbourne)
Andrea Tyler (Georgetown)
Peter Viechnicki (Board on Geographic Names)
Laure Vieu (IRIT/CNRS)
Stephan Winter (Melbourne)

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:47:59
From: Serge Sharoff [s.sharoff at leeds.ac.uk]
Subject: 4th Web as Corpus workshop: Can we beat Google?
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=18-3865.html&submissionid=164594&topicid=3&msgnumber=2 

Full Title: 4th Web as Corpus workshop: Can we beat Google? 
Short Title: WaC 

Date: 01-Jun-2008 - 01-Jun-2008
Location: Marrakech, Morocco 
Contact Person: Stefan Evert
Meeting Email: stefan.evert at uos.de
Web Site: http://webascorpus.sf.net/WAC4/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 29-Feb-2008 

Meeting Description

The fourth workshop on collecting and processing linguistic data from the Web 

Submission deadline: 29 February 2008

Description

Commercial Web search engines offer fast search on huge amounts of text,
combined with increasingly clever ranking and data analysis algorithms, but
their content-centric services do not cater to the needs of the computational
linguistics and NLP communities. The leading theme of this workshop, the fourth
in a row of highly successful Web as Corpus meetings, is to find out how to
combine the power and scalability of modern search engine technology with
sophisticated linguistic annotation and query processing.

We invite papers on various topics concerning the use of Web resources for
corpus research and NLP applications, including (but not limited to) the following:

- linguistic Web crawler technology and Web corpus collection projects
- applications of Web-derived corpora and other kinds of Web data
- how far does the ''easy way'' get you? (using search engines, or Google's
n-gram lists; we are particularly interested in a critical discussion of the
usefulness and limitations of such approaches)
- methods and tools for ''cleaning'' Web pages to turn them into a corpus
(contributors to this topic will be encouraged to participate in the second
CLEANEVAL competition to be held in 2009)
- automatic linguistic annotation of Web data: tokenisation, POS tagging,
lemmatisation, semantic tagging, etc. (established tools often perform very
poorly on Web data)
- search engine architectures for linguists: bringing linguistics to commercial
search engines, or high-performance search technology to linguistics?
- search engine-related topics such as result ranking (e.g. how to identify
typical'' uses rather than returning 50 very similar matches on the first page)
- duplicate detection, interactive query refinement, etc.
- reviews and clever uses of search engine APIs (Google, Yahoo, Altavista, and
in particular Microsoft's current generous LiveSearch API)

This workshop is endorsed by the Special Interest Group on the Web as Corpus
(SIGWAC) of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

Submission Information: Authors are invited to submit full papers on original,
unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Submissions should follow
the format of LREC proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including
references.  We strongly recommend the use of LREC LaTeX or Microsoft Word style
files tailored for this year's conference. Details on the submission procedure
will be posted on the conference website shortly.

Programme Committee

Silvia Bernardini, U of Bologna, Italy
Massimiliano Ciaramita, CNR Pisa, Italy
Jesse de Does, INL, Netherlands 
Katrien Depuydt, INL, Netherlands 
Stefan Evert, U of Osnabrück, Germany
Cédrick Fairon, UCLouvain, Belgium
William Fletcher, U.S. Naval Academy, USA
Gregory Grefenstette, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, France
Péter Halácsy, Budapest U of Technology and Economics, Hungary
Katja Hofmann, U of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Adam Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing Ltd, UK
Igor Leturia, U of the Basque Country, Spain
Phil Resnik, U of Maryland, College Park, USA
Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis U, USA
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, U Gent, Belgium
Klaus Schulz, LMU München, Germany
Serge Sharoff, U of Leeds, UK
Eros Zanchetta, U of Bologna, Italy

Organising Committee

Stefan Evert, University of Osnabrück
Adam Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds

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