Corpora: LREC 2002 - Workshop on "Customizing Knowledge in NLP Applications: Strategies, Issues and Evaluation"

[Evelyne Viegas]

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

     Customizing Knowledge in NLP Applications: Strategies, Issues and
Evaluation

              

                   A workshop at the Third International Conference

                         on Language Resources and Evaluation

                          http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2002/

 

 

The workshop addresses one of the key challenges in the development of
NLP 

applications: bridging a generic framework with domain/task specific
requirements. The 

issue reduces to the problem of customization of linguistic software and
the degree to 

which this effort can be limited once a given component (i.e., grammar,
lexicon, 

thesaurus, interpreter, tagger, etc.) is used across applications and
across domains.

 

As natural language products play an increasingly more prominent role in
the market for  

knowledge management, information extraction, search and navigation, the
suppliers of 

technologies still struggle with the ability to produce high-quality
software which can be 

deployed to new domains and relatively similar tasks in a short time
within budget. 

 

The issue of genericity versus specificity plays out in a number of
areas; the key to 

solving the problem is that of identifying whether there is a particular
locus to the 

dilemma: the architecture of the system, the language resources, the
application 

components. 

 

The problem of customization directly affects the architecture, the
development process 

as well as the evaluation benchmarks for NLP systems. Although the
notion of 

"knowledge bottleneck" has been essentially attached to NLP systems
relying on 

knowledge representation strategies, even statistical NLP systems suffer
from a 

customization problem.

 

The goal of the workshop is to emphasize the tension as well as the
potential for 

crossfertilization between knowledge-based and corpus-based approaches
to 

customization. While both approaches are needed, the key issue is how to
reconcile 

potential contrasts and define the optimal balance between the two in
order to maximise 

benefits for the content creation/management/delivery applications of
focus, e.g. 

categorization, search, navigation, retrieval, extraction,
personalization, generation 

etc.

 

SUBMISSIONS

 

The workshop aims at bringing together people from both academia and
industry to 

address the variety of topics in the areas of customization, knowledge
representation and 

acquisition, and metrics for measuring complexity. We invite submissions
of papers in all 

areas of customization of NLP components, including, but not limited to,
the following 

topics:

 

* The locus of generic and specific information in NLP systems;

* Generic and domain specific language resources;

* Knowledge acquisition and knowledge development strategies;

* Customization strategies in statistical NLP;

* Customization strategies in knowledge-based NLP systems;

* Modularization of applications for purposes of reducing customization
efforts;

* Criteria, strategies and metrics for assessing "degree of
customization."

 

Papers should be submitted electronically to r-knippen at attglobal.net and
should be 

in Word or postscript format. 

 

Papers should be no longer than 3,000 words, including the abstract. 

 

Contributors should also provide their affiliation and email contact.

 

Presentations will be allotted 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute
discussion. 

 

Upon notification of acceptance, authors will be provided with the LREC
stylesheet and 

make any necessary reformatting for the camera-ready version to be
published in the 

proceedings. 

 

IMPORTANT DATES

 

Deadline for workshop submission                       25th February
2002 

Notification of Acceptance                                  15th March
2002  

Final version of paper for workshop proceedings    8th April 2002


Workshop                                                         27th
May 2002 (14:30 to 20:00)

 

WORKSHOP REGISTRATION

 

The registration fees for the workshop are: 

* If you are not attending LREC: 70 EURO 

* If you are attending LREC: 45 Euro 

 

These fees cover the following: a copy of the proceedings of the
attended workshop, 

coffee-breaks and refreshments.  

 

Participation in the workshop is limited by the venue. 

 

Requests for participation will be processed on first come first served
basis.  

 

Registration will be handled by the LREC Secretariat. 

 

FURTHER DETAILS

 

For any further questions relating the workship itself, visit the
conference website 

at http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2002/ or e-mail federica_busa at yahoo.com.

 

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

 

Federica Busa               Webegg
federica_busa at yahoo.com

Evelyne Viegas              Microsoft Corporation
evelynev at microsoft.com

Antonio Sanfilippo          SRA International
antonio_sanfilippo at sra.com

Robert Knippen              LingoMotors Inc.
r-knippen at attglobal.net

Connie Parkes               Dictaphone
Cornelia.Parkes at dictaphone.com 

Saliha Azzam                Microsoft Corporation
salihaa at microsoft.com

Piek Vossen                  Irion Technologies
piek.vossen at irion.nl

Remi Zajac                    Systran Corporation
zajac at systransoft.com