Corpora: 2nd International Workshop on Spanish Language Processing & Language Technologies

[Priscilla Rasmussen]

The Second International Workshop on
Spanish Language Processing and Language Technologies

The Computing Research Laboratory and the Spanish Society for Natural
Language Processing (SEPLN) are pleased to announce plans for the Second
International Workshop on Spanish Language Processing and Language
Technologies (SLPLT-2). The workshop is scheduled to take place Friday,
September 14, and Saturday, September 15, 2001, in Jaén, Spain,
immediately following and as part of the 17th Conference of the Spanish
Society for Natural Language Processing (September 12-14, 2001). It will
precedes the Machine Translation Summit VIII which will be held in
Santiago de Compostella, Spain, September 18-21, 2001.

The goal of the International Workshops on Spanish Language Processing
and Language Technologies is to promote the creation of an
infrastructure for carrying out research and development in the
computational processing of spoken and written Spanish. They do this by
bringing together researchers and developers from Europe and the
Americas to present the most recent advances in the field and to catalog
available resources for research and development as well as by promoting
cooperative efforts among participants from the different geographical
regions. The size of the workshop is limited to approximately 80
participants (at least 20 from each region) and the structure of
activities emphasizes broad descriptions of research and development
activities and infrastructure accompanied by ample discussions.  Also
integral to their success are a number of social events, which will
provide a more informal context for establishing networks of contacts.

Program

The program consists of morning and afternoon panel sessions each day.
In addition, there will be a reception after the first day's activities
and a banquet after the second.

Friday, September 14

9:30-1:30: Research Activities and Interests

Summary reports of the research activities and interests from a number
of R&D centers from each of the three regions (including text and dialog
analysis, text generation and speech recognition and synthesis). There
will be a 30-minute break at 11:30.

1:30-3:30:  LUNCH

3:30-7:00: Technologies and Applications

Summary reports on current or planned R&D efforts related to the
development of specific applications (including Information Retrieval,
Information Extraction, Machine Translation, Query and Dialog Systems,
Expert and Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Speech Recognition and
Synthesis, Text Summarization, Text Processing, Document Handling,
etc.). There will be a 30-minute break at 5:00.

8:00-9:30:  RECEPTION

Saturday, September 15

9:30-1:30: Research and Development Infrastructure

Summary reports on existing and planned infrastructure resources for
supporting Spanish language processing R&D (including corpora;
databases--geographical place names, company names, person names;
knowledge bases--ontologies, thesauri, dictionaries; processing
tools--tokenizers, POS-taggers, syntactic analyzers, lexica, text
generators, corpus analysis tools, speech processing tools, etc.). There
will be a 30-minute break at 11:15.

1:30-3:30:  LUNCH

3:30-7:00:  Funding Opportunities and Future Directions

Reports from funding agencies on pending initiatives and position papers
on future needs for Spanish language processing technologies and the
kinds of research needed to meet those needs. There will be a 30-minute
break at 5:00.

10:00:  BANQUET


Submissions

We are requesting that those interested in participating submit a five
page (2000-2500 words) paper addressing one of the above panel topics
and a brief two page (800-1000 words) biographical sketch. Each
submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program
committee each representing one of the regions. Submissions will be
accepted in Spanish or in English and the presentations are expected to
be in whichever language is used for the written submission. Both
Spanish and English are official languages for the workshop.

Submissions will be accepted in either electronic form or hard copy
although the former is preferred. Format instructions will follow those
for submissions to SEPLN-2001 (refer to: http://sepln2001.ujaen.es).
Please send submissions to:

David Farwell
Computing Research Laboratory
Box 30001/3CRL
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM 88003
USA

E-mail: david at crl.nmsu.edu

Important Dates

15 May:		Submission deadline
15 June:	Notification of acceptance
15 July:	Submission of final drafts


Organizing Committee

The organizing committee includes:

General Chair and North American Coordinator:
David Farwell			New Mexico State University
European Coordinator:
Antonio Ferrández Rodríguez	Universidad de Alicante
Latin American Coordinator:
Dina Wonsever			Universidad de la República, Montevideo
Local Organizing Chair
Patricio Martínez Barco		Universidad de Alicante


Program Committee

The program committee includes:

J. Gabriel Amores	Universidad de Sevilla
Alejandro Bassi		Universidad de Chile
Veronica Dahl		Simon Fraser University
Lori Levin		Center for Language Technology, CMU
Antonia Martí		Universidad de Barcelona
Lídia Moreno		Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Plutarco Naranjo	SIGNUM, S.A., Ecuador
Manuel Palomar		Universidad de Alicante
Horacio Rodríguez	Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña
Horacio Saggion		University of Sheffield
Ana García Serrano	Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Randall Sharp		University of British Columbia
Davide Turcato		Gavagai Inc., Vancouver, Canada
Alfonso Ureña López	Universidad de Jaén
Evelyne Viegas		Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA
Felisa Verdejo		Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia