Corpora: CfP: ACL2001 Workshop on Sharing Tools and Resources

[Steven Krauwer]

                          CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

                           ACL/EACL Workshop on
           Sharing Tools and Resources for Research and Education

                          Co-organised by ELSNET
                     Toulouse, Saturday 7th July 2001

BACKGROUND:

   At a workshop at ACL 2000 in Hong Kong dedicated to Infrastructures
   for Global Collaboration there was an agreement between the main
   professional organisations in NLP and Speech (ACL and ISCA), and
   ELSNET, and the other meeting participants, that it would be useful to
   aim at a broadly supported, joint repository or catalogue for tools
   and materials for the language and speech communities.

   An ELSNET-sponsored workshop on educational issues held at EACL99
   concluded that certain non-transient infrastructures needed to be
   instigated to raise the public perception of educational issues in
   NLP. It also concluded that a repository of shared materials,
   appropriately indexed for educational usage, would be a useful point
   of departure.

   This workshop will build on the consensus reached at these previous
   workshops. There will be two clear foci: one upon instruments for
   sharing tools and resources in general that addresses practical
   problems, and the other upon the technological and infrastructural
   issues surrounding the educational uses of repositories.

   Good examples of existing initiatives in this area are among others
   the ACL Natural Language Software Registry (hosted at DFKI,
   registry.dfki.de) which was set up as a repository for tools for the
   distinct fields of Human Language Techology (HLT), the ELRA/ELDA, LDC,
   TELRI and Elsnet resources catalogues and repositories
   (www.icp.inpg.fr/ELRA, www.ldc.upenn.edu, www.telri.de and
   www.elsnet.org/resources.html), OLAC (a worldwide network of language
   archives at www.language-archives.org), and JEWELS
   (www.elsnet.org/jewels), an as-yet incomplete EU funded website for
   educational materials in Language and Speech.

   A third theme concerns how to build upon existing initiatives as
   sources of data or inspiration.

AIM AND SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP:

   The main goal of the workshop is to discuss methods for the
   improvement and extension of existing repositories; the educational
   uses of repositories; the closer interlinking between different kinds
   of repositories (tools and resources); global infrastructures for the
   achievement of joint actions. However, we expect the scope of the
   workshop to be much wider than that, as the issues addressed are of
   general interest to everybody who believes that sharing tools and
   resources is essential for the progress of research and education in
   our field.

   Contributions of papers and demonstrations are solicited that address
   the above themes. The following list of topics is suggestive rather
   than exhaustive:
     * Repositories versus catalogues
     * Mechanisms and infrastructures for sharing and describing content
     * Repository management
     * Standards for exchange, description, and annotation
     * Metadata descriptions
     * Quality assessment
     * Structure and content of an NLP/CL repository
     * Tools and materials for NLP/CL education
     * Web-based teaching methods for NLP/CL

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS FOR PAPERS

     * Electronic submissions only (PostScript, Word, or PDF), following
       the appropriate ACL latex style or Microsoft Word style.
       Submissions should not exceed eight (8) pages, including
       references. You can download the appropriate style or template
       files using the following link: acl2001.dfki.de/style. In case of
       problems with the submission format, please contact one of the
       co-chairs.
     * Submissions to either co-chair (Mike Rosner and Thierry Declerck).
       All submissions will be acknowledged.
     * Please provide a list of keywords in the separate header page and
       indicate the best fitting subtopic(s) from the above list.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS FOR DEMONSTRATIONS

     * Demos may be submitted with or without an accompanying paper.
     * Please write a 2-page description of the demo and send to either
       co-chair. Please let us know about special hardware requirements
       over and above the standard PC + beamer without internet access
       provided by default

CONFIRMED COMMITTEE MEMBERS

   - Thierry Declerck (DFKI) Co-chair (Repository) declerck at dfki.de
   - Mike Rosner (Malta) Co-chair (Education) mros at cs.um.edu.mt
   - Steven Bird (U. Penn)
   - Bill Black (UMIST) (UMIST, Manchester, UK) wjb at co.umist.ac.uk
   - Gosse Bouma (University of Groningen) gosse at let.rug.nl
   - Koenraad de Smedt (University of Bergen) desmedt at uib.no
   - Claire Gardent (CNRS, Nancy) claire.gardent at loria.fr
   - Steven Krauwer (Utrecht University) steven.krauwer at elsnet.org
   - Donna Harman (NIST)
   - Julia Hirschberg (ATT, ISCA)
   - Jun'ichi Tsujii (Tokyo)
   - Andy Way (Dublin City University) away at compapp.dcu.ie
   - Antonio Zampolli (Univ. of Pisa) pisa at ilc.pi.cnr.it

DEADLINES

     * Submission Deadline:     6th April 2001
     * Notification Date:      27th April 2001
     * Camera ready copy due:  16th May 2001

WORKSHOP URL

    http://www.elsnet.org/acl2001-tools.html

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT

   Michael Rosner   mros at cs.um.edu.mt
   Thierry Declerck declerck at dfki.de