[Corpora-List] First CfP: Pre-Conference Workshop on Multilingual Corpora

[Silvia Hansen]

      Apologies to those of you who receive this more than once


                        ** CALL FOR PAPERS **


                        Multilingual Corpora:
          Linguistic Requirements and Technical Perspectives

   A pre-conference workshop to be held at
                      Corpus Linguistics 2003


       Lancaster, 27 March 2003

           http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/cl2003
    http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/mocu03



ORGANIZED BY:

Stella Neumann (Department of Applied Linguistics, Translation and
Interpreting)
Silvia Hansen (Department of Computational Linguistics)

Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany


TOPIC AND MOTIVATION:

How do researchers go about building multilingual corpora? For the
development of a linguistically interpreted corpus on the basis of more
than one language there seem to be two methods: First, the multilingual
corpus is split up into monolingual sub-corpora which are then annotated
independently. For the second method, one language serves as the basis
for building up and interpreting a multilingual corpus, whereas the
other has to be adapted. Both methods, however, are rather problematic.
They do not take sufficiently into account the differences and
commonalities between the languages in question at each stage of
corpus-based research, involving the comparability of the corpus design,
the different kinds of segmentation, the diverging annotation schemes,
the corpus representations and finally the again converging querying
across different languages. Mistakes or inconsistencies which happen at
one stage of the multilingual corpus development have negative
influences on the following steps and result in worse mistakes or
inconsistencies. Not only do these problems arise at each methodological
step. They also multiply with the growing complexity of the research
design. If the research aims at interpreting linguistic data on several
levels, cross-linguistic comparability has to be taken into account on
each level.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers who formulate
specific requirements of how to work with corpora under a linguistic
perspective and engineers who can offer technical solutions but need the
input of users to adapt their tools to the needs of the linguists.
Within this context, questions like the following are to be discussed:
- What happens, if the units under investigation diverge on the
different levels?
- At present, the preferred solution is to use XML at all stages and on
all layers. But is this really practicable?
- Do linguists get along with stand-off mark-up?
- Is this maybe a technical compromise?

The workshop should result in a requirement catalogue in combination
with technical solutions. It could thus serve as a starting point for
the development of an annotation typology which takes into account
different languages as well as different annotation layers. On the basis
of this typology, the comparability of a multilingual multi-layer
annotated corpus can be guaranteed. With this in mind, a multilingual
corpus builder should be able to cope with possible problems in each of
the above explained steps in corpus development.

Papers are expected on the following questions:
- linguistic requirements in the different methodological steps
- state-of-the-art technical solutions
- international standards which facilitate the development and exchange
of multilingual corpora


WORKSHOP PROFILE:
The workshop will take a full day comprising about 8-10 papers. Short
presentations are expected leaving enough time for discussion and
assessment of the used methodologies as well as the development of
possible solutions. This already points to the workshop agenda: The
first third will deal with linguistic fundamentals, the second part will
discuss the technical aspects and the last third will provide a platform
for integrating both perspectives. Workshop proceedings will be
produced.


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

to be announced!


SCHEDULE:

20 January 2003: Deadline for submitted papers
21 February 2003: Notification of acceptance
7  March 2003: Camera ready copy
27 March 2003: Workshop


REGISTRATION:

Please refer to the main conference web page
(http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/cl2003) for registration details.


SUBMISSIONS:

Please send submissions in English as RTF or plain text files
(preferably
by email) to the address below.  Paper length should be 8-10 pages,
formatted
in the same way as for the main conference
(see http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/cl2003/style.html
for paper format guidelines).

Stella Neumann (st.neumann at mx.uni-saarland.de)
Department of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting (FR 4.6)

Saarland University
Postfach 15 11 50
66041 Saarbrücken
Germany