[Corpora-List] LREC 2004 - First Announcement and Call for Papers

[LREC 2004]

[our apologies if you have received multiple copies of this announcement]

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                                 LREC 2004
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The fourth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation,
LREC 2004, is organised by ELRA in cooperation with other Associations and
consortia, national and international organisations.

Location:
Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal

Dates:
- Pre-conference workshops: 24-25 May 2004
- Main conference: 26-27-28 May 2004
- Post-conference workshops: 29-30 May 2004

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Conference web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org
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CONFERENCE AIMS
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In the Information Society, the pervasive character of Human Language
Technologies (HLT) and their relevance to practically all fields of Information
Society Technologies (IST) has been widely recognised.

Two issues are particularly relevant: the availability of Language
Resources (LRs)
and the methods for the evaluation of resources, technologies, products and
applications.
Substantial mutual benefits are achieved by addressing these issues through
international
collaboration.

The term "language resources" (LRs) refers to sets of language data and
descriptions
in machine readable form, used in many types of
areas/components/systems/applications:
- creation and evaluation of natural language, speech and multimodal
algorithms and systems,
- software localisation and language services,
- language enabled information and communication services,
- knowledge management,
- e-commerce, e-publishing, e-learning, e-government,
- cultural heritage,
- linguistic studies,
- etc.

This large range of uses makes the LRs infrastructure a strategic part of
the e-society,
where the creation of a basic set of LRs for all languages must be ensured
in order to bring
all languages to the same level of usability and availability.

Examples of LRs are written or spoken corpora and lexica, which may be
annotated or not,
multimodal resources, grammars, terminology or domain specific databases
and dictionaries,
ontologies, multimedia databases, etc. LRs also cover basic software tools
for the acquisition,
preparation, collection, management, customisation and use of the above
mentioned examples.

The relevance of evaluation for language technologies development is
increasingly recognised.
This involves assessing the state-of-the-art for a given technology,
measuring the progress
achieved within a programme, comparing different approaches to a given
problem, assessing
the availability of technologies for a given application, benchmarking, and
assessing system
usability and user satisfaction.

The aim of this conference is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art, discuss problems and
opportunities, exchange information regarding LRs, their applications,
ongoing and planned activities,
industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the new e-society, both
with respect to policy
issues and to technological and organisational ones. LREC will also
elaborate on evaluation methodologies
and tools, explore the different trends and promote initiatives for
international collaboration in the areas
mentioned above.
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CONFERENCE TOPICS
-----------------------------------
Examples of the topics which may be addressed by papers submitted to the
conference are given below.

*** Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs)***

- Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs,
- Methods, tools and procedures for the acquisition, creation, management,
access, distribution and use of LRs,
- Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g. terms,
lexical information, language modelling) from LRs,
- Organisational and legal issues in the construction, distribution, access
and use of LRs,
- Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LRs,
- Definition and requirements for a Basic and Extended LAnguage Resource
Kit (BLARK, ELARK) for all languages,
- Monolingual and multilingual LRs,
- Multimedia and multimodal LRs. - Integration of various media and
modalities in LRs (speech, vision, language),
- Documentation and archiving of languages, including minority and
endangered languages,
- Ontologies and knowledge representation,
- Terminology, term extraction, domain-specific dictionaries,
- LRs for linguistic research in human-machine communication,
- Exploitation of LRs in different types of applications (information
extraction, information retrieval, speech dictation,
translation, summarisation, web services, semantic web, etc.),
- Exploitation of LRs in different types of interfaces (dialog systems,
natural language and multimodal/multisensorial
interactions, etc.)
- Industrial LRs requirements, user needs and community's response,
- Industrial production of LRs,
- Industrial use of LRs,
- Metadata descriptions of LRs.

*** Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT) evaluation ***

- Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LRs,
- Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures,
- Benchmarking of systems and products, resources for benchmarking and
evaluation, blackbox, glassbox and
diagnostic evaluation of systems,
- Usability and user experience evaluation, qualitative and perceptive
evaluation,
- Evaluation in written language processing (document production and
management, text retrieval, terminology
extraction, message understanding, text alignment, machine translation,
morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, semantic
tagging, word sense disambiguation, text understanding, summarisation,
question answering, localisation, etc.),
- Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech recognition and
understanding, voice dictation, oral dialog, speech
synthesis, speech coding, speaker and language recognition, spoken
translation, etc.),
- Evaluation of multimedia document retrieval and search systems (including
detection, indexing, filtering, alert, question
answering, etc),
- Evaluation of multimodal systems,
- From evaluation to standardisation.

*** General issues ***

- National and international activities and projects,
- LRs and the needs/opportunities of the emerging industries,
- LRs and contributions to societal needs (e.g. e-society),
- Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international
policies for LRs,
- Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international
cooperation, and their organisational and
technological implications,
- Open architectures for LRs.

The Conference targets the integration of different types of LRs (spoken,
written and other modalities) and
of the respective communities. To this end, LREC encourages submissions
covering issues which are
common to different types of Language Technologies, such as dialog
strategy, written and spoken translation,
domain-specific data, multimodal communication or multimedia document
processing, and will organise, in addition
to the usual tracks, common sessions encompassing the different areas of LRs.
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PROGRAMME
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The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations,
poster presentations, referenced
demonstrations and panels. There is no difference in quality between oral
presentations and poster presentations.
Only the appropriateness of the type of communication to the content of the
paper will be considered.
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FORMAT FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
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Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster presentations should
consist of about 800 words.

Demonstrations of LRs and related tools will be reviewed as well. You
should send an outline of
about 400 words. If a demo is connected to a paper, please attach the
outline to the paper abstract.

A limited number of panels and workshops is foreseen, proposals will be
reviewed by the Programme
Committee.

For panels, please send a brief description, including an outline of the
intended structure (topic, organiser, panel
moderator, tentative list of panelists).

For workshops, see the dedicated section below.

Only electronic submissions will be considered. Further details about
submission will be circulated in the 2nd call
for papers and posted on the LREC web site (www.lrec-conf.org).

-------------------------------------------IMPORTANT DATES
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- Submission of proposals for panels and workshops: 20th October 2003

- Submission of proposals for oral and poster papers, referenced demos:
31st October 2003

- Notification of acceptance of workshop and panel proposals: 14th November
2003

- Notification of acceptance of oral papers, posters, referenced demos:
23rd January 2004

- Final versions for the proceedings: 1st March 2004

- Conference: 26th  28th  May 2004

- Pre-conference workshops: 24th and 25th May 2004

- Post-conference workshops: 29th and 30th May 2004

The proceedings of the conference will include both oral and poster papers.

Internet connections and various computer platforms and facilities will be
available at the conference
site. In addition to referenced demos concerning LRs and related tools, it
will be possible to run
unreferenced demos of language processing products, systems and tools.
Those interested should contact
the organiser of the demonstrations (details will be posted on
www.lrec-conf.org).
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WORKSHOPS
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Pre-conference workshops will be organised on 24th and 25th May 2004, and
post-conference
workshops on 29th and 30th May 2004. A workshop is normally either half day
or full day.
Proposals for workshops should be no longer than three pages, and include:

- A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that the
workshop will address.
- The reasons why the workshop is of interest this time.
- The names, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers and email addresses of
the workshop organising
committee, which should consist of at least three people knowledgeable in
the field, coming from different institutions.
- The name of the member of the workshop organising committee designated as
the contact person.
- A time schedule of the workshop and a preliminary agenda.
- A summary of the intended workshop call for participation.
- A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room
requirements.

The workshop proposers will be responsible for the organisational aspects
(e.g. workshop call preparation
and distribution, review of papers, notification of acceptance, assembling
of the workshop proceedings, etc.).
Further details about submission will be circulated in the 2nd call for
papers and posted on the LREC web site:
www.lrec-conf.org.

Proceedings will be printed for each workshop.
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CONSORTIA AND PROJECT MEETINGS
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Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising
meetings should contact the ELDA office,
lrec at elda.fr (further details are given at the end of the document).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------CONFERENCE
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR,
Pisa, Italy
- Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
- Teresa Lino, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
- Bente Maegaard, CST, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
- Jan Odijk, UIL-OTS, Utrecht, the Netherlands, and ScanSoft, Merelbeke,
Belgium
- Daniel Tapias, Telefonica Moviles, Madrid, Spain
- Antonio Zampolli, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa,
Italy (Conference chair)

The composition of the committees as well as instructions and addresses for
registration and accommodation
will be detailed on the LREC web site at www.lrec-conf.org and will be
announced in the 2nd call for papers to be
issued at the end of July.
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ELRA
---------

For more information about ELRA (European Language Resources Association),
please contact:

Khalid Choukri, ELRA CEO
55-57 Rue Brillat-Savarin,
75013 Paris - France
Tel: + 33 1 43 13 33 33
Fax: + 33 1 43 13 33 30
Email: choukri at elda.fr
Web: http://www.elra.info or http://www.elda.fr/

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The first LREC was organised in Granada (Spain) in 1998: 197 papers
and posters were presented, with about 510 registered participants
from 38 different countries from all continents. Among these, the largest
group came from Spain (81 participants), followed by France (75), USA (73),
Germany (47), UK (43) and Italy (41). Registered participants belonged to over
325 different organisations.

LREC 2000, in Athens, had 129 oral papers and 152 posters presented, with
around 600 participants from 51 different countries from all continents. Among
these, the largest group came from Greece (117), followed by USA (70),
France (59),
Germany (45), UK (43), Japan (35) and Italy (29). Registered participants
belonged to
319 different organisations.

LREC 2002, which took place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), attracted
over 700 representatives, coming from 38 countries around the world, who could
take advantage of the numerous oral and poster presentations (around 365,
covering
every area in HLT).

A similar number of participants is expected at LREC 2004.

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