[Corpora-List] LREC 2004 - Second Call for Papers

[LREC 2004]

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

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                         LREC 2004
                 24-30 May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal

         Abstracts submission forms now available on-line:

                 http://www.lrec-conf.org
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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, including ACL, AFNLP, ALLC, ALTA, COCOSDA and Oriental
COCOSDA, EAFT, EAMT, ELSNET, ENABLER, EURALEX, GKS, GWA,
IAMT, ICWLR, ISCA, LDC, ONTOWEB, TEI, and with major national and
international organisations, including the Commission of the EU - Information
Society DG, Unit E1 "Interfaces and Cognition".
Co-operation with other organisations is currently being sought.

*** 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

*** Conference aims ***

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.

*** 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 and NLP, tools and methodologies for terminology and ontology
building,
term extraction, specialised 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.

*** Programme ***

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.

*** Abstract submission ***

On-line submission forms are now available.

On the LREC 2004 web pages, http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/index.php,
from the
"Abstract submission" section, you can choose the appropriate submission
form and
submit paper, demonstration or poster abstracts.
A submission form is also available on the LREC 2004 web site if you would
like to
propose a panel.

*** Workshops ***

Submission forms for workshops' proposals are also available on-line.

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.

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.).

Proceedings will be printed for each workshop.

*** Important dates ***

- 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, 27th and 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.
Contact details are posted on www.lrec-conf.org if this opportunity
interests you.

*** Consortia and project meetings ***

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 registration fees ***

1/ Early-bird registration fees, available until 20th February 2004:

- Standard participant: 260 Euro
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 210 Euro
- Staudent: 110 Euro

2/ Registration fees after 20th February 2004:

- Standard participant: 320 Euro
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 250 Euro
- Staudent: 130 Euro

2/ On-site registration fees after 20th February 2004:

- Standard participant: 380 Euro
- Participant from ELRA member organisation: 290 Euro
- Staudent: 150 Euro

The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings, welcome
reception,
conference dinner, coffee-breaks and refreshments.

*** Workshop registration fees ***

1/ Workshop only participant:
- 1/2 day: 85 Euro
- Full day: 170 Euro

2/ Workshop and Conference participant:
- 1/2 day: 50 Euro
- Full day: 100 Euro

The fees cover the following services: a copy of the proceedings of the
attended workshop,
coffee-breaks and refreshments.

*** 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

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.

*** 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: www.elra.info or 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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