workshop Sign Language Processing

[Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa]

Valerie and all,

   Under the coordination of Oliver Streiter (EURAC), we succeded in
proposing an getting approved the realization of an academic workshop
on sign language processing and representation, to be held in the occasion
of LREC 2004, a major european conference on computational linguistics
and natural language processing.

  Below you can find the "call for papers" for the workshop.

  All the best,

  Ant ­? io Carlos

------------------------------------------------

                            CALL FOR PAPERS
                      ==============================

WORKSHOP ON THE REPRESENTATION AND PROCESSING OF SIGN LANGUAGES
>From SignWriting to Image Processing. Information techniques and their
implications for teaching, documentation and communication.

Workshop on the occasion of the 4th International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004)

Date: 30-May-2004 (at the closing of the main conference LREC 2004)
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Linguistic Sub-field: SignWriting, Computational Linguistics, Corpus
Linguistics, Image Processing, Lexicography

Meeting Background
==============================

Sign Languages are the languages used by deaf communities for non-written
communication. This kind of linguistic codes relies on the visual-gestural
modality of communication. Sign languages all share properties which
do not exist in spoken languages, especially through co-occurring
sign elements.  For storing and retrieving information,
sign languages may be encoded and processed electronically. Different
techniques are possible and have been proposed.

The workshop will focus on the problem of representing sign languages
electronically in order to facilitate communication among the deaf as
well as between deaf and hearing people. Moreover, it will promote the
documentation and teaching of sign languages to both communities and
stimulate linguistic research on sign languages.

The task of transcribing these languages onto electronic media as a main
technique for storing, retrieving or communicating (email, telephone,
snake mail, children's e-book) is technically and linguistically
challenging. Recent advances in the field of corpus linguistics, image
processing and the development of XML standards, promise to pave the way
for a broader application of these techniques. The workshop will set forth
to provide an introduction into the different approaches and techniques
currently employed, discuss their applications and respective advantages.

Preliminary Meeting program
==============================

30-May-2004

9:00-10:30: Presentations of invited talks
- Richard Gleaves (Deaf Action Committee For SignWriting)
- Thomas Hanke (Institute of German Sign language and Communication of
the Deaf University of Hamburg)
- Carol Neidle & Robert G. Lee (Department of Modern Foreign Languages and
Literatures, Boston University, Boston MA)

11:00-18:00:  Oral presentations, poster presentations and demos


Call for papers
==============================

Papers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research on
all aspects of sign language representation and processing, including,
but not limited to:

*sign writing
*corpus construction for sign languages
*sign language dictionaries
*sign language technologies
*e-learning of sign languages
*any topic related to sign language treatment and processing

Submissions of papers for oral and poster presentations should follow
the same style as the ones for regular LREC paper and not be longer than
6000 words. The final details will be published as soon as they become
available.

Demonstrations and related tools will be reviewed as well. You should
send an outline of about 400 words. If a demo is connected to a paper,
please attach the outline to the paper.

The papers and demonstration outlines, written in English, should be
attached to an email message sent to the following address (ostreiter
at eurac dot edu). Please include the name and the affiliation of the
author(s) in the body of the email message.  The deadline for paper
submission is February 11th, 2004. Notice of acceptance or rejection
will be sent on February 24, 2004.

We allow simultaneous paper submission to the workshop and the LREC
main conference. If a paper is accepted by both the conference and the
workshop, the paper will be presented at the conference, rather than at
the workshop. The author(s) should notify the workshop chair.

Papers will be published in the proceedings of this workshop (each workshop
and the main conference have separate proceedings) and may, depending on
the conference politics, be included into the the main conference CD-ROM.

Organizing Committee
==============================

- Ant ­? io Carlos da Rocha Costa (Escola de Inform H² ica, Universidade
Cat ¡_ ica de Pelotas, Brazil):  rocha at atlas.ucpel.tche.br
- Carol Neidle (Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures,
Boston University, Boston MA): carol at bu.edu
- Chiara Vettori (Language and Law, European Academy Bolzano, Italy):
cvettori at eurac.edu
- Christian Retor Z  (Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique,
France): retore at labri.fr
- Eva Safar (School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia,
Norwich, England): esafar at yahoo.com
- Ian Marshall (School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia,
Norwich, England): im at cmp.uea.ac.uk
- Marco Consolati (Cooperativa Alba , Torino, Italy): bigmark at mclink.it
- Oliver Streiter (Language and Law, European Academy Bolzano, Italy):
ostreiter at eurac.edu
- Patrice Dalle ( i” uipe "Traitement et Compr }¬ ension d'Images", IRIT -
Universit Z  Paul Sabatier France): dalle at irit.fr


Important Dates
==============================

11 February 2004 : Deadline for paper submissions
25 February 2004 : Notification of acceptance to authors
**               : Deadline for Camera-ready papers
30 May 2004      : Workshop


Contact
==============================

Contact person: Oliver Streiter
Contact Email: ostreiter at eurac.edu
Workshop URL: http://dev.eurac.edu:8080/sign/index.html