Appel: Extended Deadline 22 February: LREC2012 Workshop on "@NLP can u tag #user_generated_content?! via lrec-conf.org"

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:42:30 +0100
From: Jordi Atserias <jordi at yahoo-inc.com>
Message-ID: <4F3A64C6.1040403 at yahoo-inc.com>
X-url: http://nlp4ugc.barcelonamedia.org


The Web 2.0 has transferred the authorship of contents from institutions
to the people; the web has become a channel where users exchange,
explain or write about their lives and interests, give opinions and rate
others' opinions. The so-called User Generated Content (UGC) in text
form is a valuable resource that can be exploited for many purposes,
such as cross-lingual information retrieval, opinion mining, enhanced
web search, social science analysis, intelligent advertising, and so on.
In order to mine the data from the Web 2.0 we first need to understand
its contents. Analysis of UG content is challenging because of its
casual language, with plenty of abbreviations, slang, domain specific
terms and, compared to published edited text, with a higher rate of
spelling and grammar errors. Standard NLP techniques, which are used to
analyze text and provide formal representations of surface data, have
been typically developed to deal with standard language and may not
yield the expected results on UGC. For example, shortened or misspelled
words, which are very frequent in the Web 2.0 informal style, increase
the variability in the forms for expressing a single concept.

This workshop aims at providing a meeting point for researchers working
in the processing of UGC in textual form in one way or another, as well
as developers of UGC-based applications and technologies, both from
industry and academia.

Topics of Interest

We are mainly interested in, but not restricted to, the following
research questions:

- What characterises UGC? Linguistic and textual phenomena that
  distinguish UGC from standard written text, and may pose a challenge
  for NLP.

- Definition of norm, concept of error, deviation and variation in UGC.

- Criteria and standards for the annotation of evaluation corpora in UGC
  at various levels of linguistic analysis (form, part of speech,
  constituents, dependencies, speech acts, deviation types, etc.).

- How quality of text affects processing tasks (tokenization, POS
  tagging, chunking, parsing, named-entity detection, etc.)

- Architecture and software design for flexible adaptation of NLP 
  processing pipelines to new domains (topic domains and text-genre
  domains)

- Text normalisation vs adaptation of processing tools:   - Pros and 
  cons   - Task dependent?   - Costs and benefits   - Hybrid solutions

- Approaches to normalisation (text checking, ASR, MT techniques, etc.)

- Evaluation issues related to processing and normalising UGC- ...

Intended Audience

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers and developers from
academia and industry. In particular, perspectives from the following
user groups are welcome:

- UGC-based application developers, from both research and industry

- Researchers from the NLP, IR and IE communities- Ph.D students
  interested or working in the processing of UGC

Submissions

Oral papers and posters should follow the main conference formatting
requirements (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/). To submit
contributions, please follow the instructions at
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/UGC2012/The contributions will undergo
a double review by members of the programme committee. When submitting a
paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential
information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies,
standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work
described in the paper or are a new result of your research. For further
information on this new initiative, please refer to:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012.

Important Dates

February 22: Paper submission EXTENDED DEADLINE
March 15: Acceptance notifications
March 30: Camera-ready papers
May 26: Afternoon workshop at LREC

Organising Committee

Laura Alonso i Alemany, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina)
Jordi Atserias, Yahoo! Research (Spain)
Toni Badia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
Maite Melero, Barcelona Media Innovation Center (Spain)
Martí Quixal, Barcelona Media Innovation Center (Spain)

Programme Committee

Rafael Banchs, Institute for Infocomm Research - A*Star (Singapore)
Steven Bedrick, Oregon Health & Science University
Richard Beaufort, Cental, Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium)
Joan Codina, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
Louise-Amélie Cougnon, Cental, Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium)
Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University (Ireland)
Michael Gamon, Microsoft Research (USA)
Dan Lopresti, CS&E, Lehigh University (USA)
Fei Liu, Bosch Research (USA)
Ulrike Pado, VICO Research&Consulting GmbH (Germany)
Lluís Padró, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain)
Alan Ritter, CSE, University of Washington (USA)
Roser Saurí, Barcelona Media Innovation Center (Spain)
Paul Schmidt, Institut für Angewandten Informationsforschung (Germany)
Venkata Subramaniam, IBM Research (India)

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