CFP: "NEW TEXT - Wikis and blogs and other dynamic text sources"

[Lauren Squires]

NEW TEXT - Wikis and blogs and other dynamic text sources

Trento, Italy April 3, 2006
newtext at sics.se
http://www.sics.se/jussi/newtext

Call for participation

The EACL 2006 Workshop on New Text will be hosted in conjunction with the 
11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational 
Linguistics ( EACL ) that will take place April 3-7, 2006, in Trento, Italy.

New types of text sources, multi-lingual, with numerous cooperating or even 
adversarial authors and little or no editorial control are one effect of the 
recently dramatically lowered publication threshold. Many contain linguistic 
items or features classically associated with spoken language - combining 
the high interactivity of dialogue with the low bandwidth of written text 
and with the multicasting capabilities of digital communication.

New material published today most noticeably includes *blogs* - a genre that 
has evolved from diaries, logbooks, commentaries, columns, and editorials 
into a multi-faceted and networked churn of text with widely ranging 
viewpoints and perspectives and varying application and ambition on the part 
of the creator. One of the most noticeable charateristics of the blog genre 
is its opinionated nature and its timeliness. Blog texts are often 
ill-edited and hastily cobbled together in a language reminiscent of brief 
notes, spoken asides, or short letters, rather than of essays or newsprint. 
This, at any rate, is the public perception.

Another emergent genre is that of the *wiki*. More closely patterned on a 
classic text genre, that of the encyclopedia, wiki texts are written and 
edited by open teams of authors. In contrast to blogs, wikis have high 
ambitions as regards factual correctness, persistence, editorial quality, 
and trustworthiness.

Bridging the two are genres such as discussion boards, web fora, and mailing 
lists.

Let us call these various new types of text (or indeed other modes of 
linguistic communication) collectively NEW TEXT.

THIS WORKSHOP is intended to discuss the analysis and application of new 
text, formulate research measures that are crying out to be taken, discuss 
which methodological steps are obsoleted, and which babies can be saved from 
the bath water.

NEW TEXT - Challenge questions

NEW TEXT provides a number of research issues, immediately obvious 
questions, and tentative applications for our research fields:
New possibilities for the philologically inclined: How does new text cast 
new light on human communicative behaviour? This includes question on style 
and genre: the characteristics of new text and relations to traditional 
media. Do blogs in fact resemble spoken language in any important way? Do 
wikis hold up their promise of qualitative information dissemination?
New challenges for building text analysis tools -- how are the today's 
algorithms portable to new text? This includes questions on multilinguality, 
code-switching, register variation, and formality melange apparent in new 
text.
New challenges for evaluation methodologies for information access systems:
Can new text, with dynamic information sources and streams of variable 
quality and impact be plugged into relevance-oriented evaluation frameworks 
without revising the target notion of text relevance?
Some new texts have high social impact; some sink without a trace; some have 
high import in tightly knit circles and communities. Traditional media have 
sales figures, citation indices, and distribution analyses. How can the 
impact of new texts be analyzed?
New texts have variable perceived intellectual status and quality -- how can 
it be measured and predicted?
New opportunities for new services -- e.g. linking different types of text 
in dynamic and interactive sessions of information refinement and 
elaboration.

Signing up for the workshop

To participate in the workshop: begin by announcing your interest to us 
(newtext at sics.se) as soon as possible! We may be sending out a data set and 
a common task for everyone to play with before the workshop.

If you wish to present your work or your ideas at the workshop you are 
invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the topic 
area. A presentation should address some of the challenge questions stated 
above. We are also thinking of making a sample text set available for 
experimentation for all participants before the workshop.

Submissions should be formatted using the EACL 2006 stylefiles with overt 
author and affiliation information and not exceeding 8 pages. The EACL 2006 
stylefiles are available at

http://eacl06.itc.it/submission/submission.htm .

LaTeX submissions are much preferred.

Please send your PDF file no later than January 6, 2006, to newtext at sics.se

Each submission will be reviewed at least by two members of the programme 
committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Dual submissions to the main EACL 2006 conference and this workshop are 
allowed; if you submit to the main session, do indicate this when you submit 
to the workshop. If your paper is accepted for the main session, you should 
withdraw your paper from the workshop upon notification by the main session.

Important dates

Deadline for workshop paper submissions: Jan. 6, 2006
Notification of workshop paper acceptance: Jan. 27, 2006
Deadline for camera-ready workshop papers: Feb. 10, 2006
Workshop program committee

Jussi Karlgren, SICS (chair)
Shlomo Argamon, IIT
Paul Clough, University of Sheffield
Björn Gambäck, SICS
Michael Gamon, Microsoft
Gilad Mishne, University of Amsterdam
Fredrik Olsson, SICS
Martin Svensson, SICS
Özlem Uzuner, MIT