[Corpora-List] 2nd CfP: LREC workshop on Compiling and Processing Spoken Language Corpora

[Nelleke Oostdijk]

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2ND CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on


COMPILING AND PROCESSING SPOKEN LANGUAGE CORPORA

http://lands.let.kun.nl/CPSLC/

Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal
24th  May 2004


Workshop to be held in conjunction with
the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 
2004)
Main conference: 26-27-28 May 2004
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/





Aim

The aim of the workshop is to bring together people working on the 
development (compilation and processing) of spoken language corpora.* The 
workshop will provide participants with the opportunity to exchange views 
and share experiences. Moreover, the workshop is instrumental in taking 
stock of and evaluating the present state-of-the-art. The workshop thus 
aims to contribute to the development of a future roadmap that will guide 
the development of standards, tools, etc. for use with spoken language corpora.

*The term ‘spoken language corpora’ is used here to distinguish such 
corpora from speech corpora or speech databases: speech corpora are 
collections of spoken data that are typically recorded for specific 
purposes by specific users (speech corpora/databases such as SpeechDat Car 
that are used for developing consumer applications). Usually such databases 
lack the richness of linguistic annations that is pursued for spoken 
language corpora.




Background and motivation

Despite the wide experience gained in the compilation of written language 
corpora, working with spoken language data is not immediately 
straightforward as spoken language involves many novel aspects that need to 
be taken care of. The fact that spoken language is transient is sometimes 
offered as an explanation for why it is more difficult to collect spoken 
data than it is to compile a corpus of written data. However, it is not 
just the capturing of data that is anything but trivial. Once the (audio) 
data have been collected and stored, the next step is to produce some kind 
of transcript (whether orthographic or phonetic). Further annotations such 
as POS tagging, lemmatisation, syntactic annotation, and prosodic 
annotation may then build upon this transcription. Among the problems 
encountered in the processing of spoken language data are the following:

    *        There is as yet little experience with the large scale 
transcription of spoken language data. Procedures and guidelines must be 
developed, and tools implemented.
    *       Well-established practices that have originated from working on 
written language corpora do not hold up when trying to cope with the 
idiosyncracies of the spoken language. This is true for all levels of 
linguistic annotation. Annotation schemes need to be reconsidered and tools 
must be adapted.
    *        In so far as standards have emerged (eg CES), they need to be 
adapted in order to be able to cater for the needs of spoken language corpora.
    *          By their very nature, spoken language corpora bring together 
speech and language technologists and linguists from various backgrounds. 
Ideally, such corpora should address the needs of all these different user 
groups. Often, however, there is a conflict of interest. For example, the 
quality of recordings of spontaneous conversations in noisy environments 
although highly interesting and worthwhile from a linguistic perspective 
will prove too poor to be of any use to someone doing research into speech 
recognition.


Workshop topics

Topics of interest include orthographic transcription, phonetic 
transcription, prosodic annotation, segmentation, POS tagging and 
lemmatisation, parsing, and discourse analysis. Contributions on the 
development and implementation of standards or guidelines for spoken 
language corpora (annotation schemes, meta-data descriptions) are also 
invited, as are contributions describing software for the exploitation of 
spoken language corpora.



Format of the Workshop

The workshop will comprise of oral presentations of previously submitted 
papers that went through a double peer review process. The proceedings of 
the workshop will be published by the local organising committee.



Important dates

24th January 2004          Deadline for submission of (full) papers
1st  March 2004             Notification of acceptance and preliminary 
programme
21st March 2004             Deadline for submission of final versions of 
accepted papers for the proceedings
3rd April 2004                Definitive programme
24th May 2004                Workshop




Submissions

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for oral presentation. 
Only full papers in English will be accepted, and the length of the paper 
should not exceed 6000 words (or the equivalent in space for 
diagrams).  Submissions in MS Word, Postscript, PDF or RTF should be 
submitted through the workshop website: http://lands.let.kun.nl/CPSLC/


Registration

Workshop participants need to register through the LREC website: 
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/
The fee for this half-day workshop is 50 Euro for conference participants 
and 85 for others and includes a coffee break and the workshop proceedings.


Organising committee

Nelleke OOSTDIJK, University of Nijmegen
Gjert KRISTOFFERSEN, University of Bergen
Geoffrey SAMPSON, University of Sussex


Programme committee

Daan BROEDER                                Max Planck Institute
Emanuela CRESTI                             University of Florence
Gjert KRISTOFFERSEN                    University of Bergen
Tony MCENERY                               University of Lancaster
Nelleke OOSTDIJK                             University of Nijmegen
Pavel IRCING                                    University of Western Bohemia
Geoffrey SAMPSON                           University of Sussex
Antonio Moreno SANDOVAL               University of Madrid
Jean VERÓNIS                                 Université de Provence