[Corpora-List] LREC 2006 - FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

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[Apologies for multiple postings]

LREC 2006

5th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS




Magazzini del Cotone Conference Center,  GENOA - ITALY

MAIN CONFERENCE: 24-25-26 MAY 2006

WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 22-23 and 27-28 MAY 2006

Conference web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org



The fifth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 
LREC 2006, is organised by
ELRA in cooperation with a wide range of international associations and 
organisations.


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 considered 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 
cooperation.

The term language resources refers to sets of language data and 
descriptions in machine readable form,
such as written or spoken corpora and lexica, annotated or not, multimodal 
resources, grammars,
terminology or domain specific databases and dictionaries, ontologies, 
multimedia databases, etc. LRs
also cover basic software tools for their acquisition, preparation, 
collection, management, customisation
and use. LRs are used in many types of components/systems/applications, 
such as 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 usages 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.
The relevance of the 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, product benchmarking, and assessing system 
usability and user satisfaction.

The aim of the LREC conference is to provide an overview of the 
state-of-the-art, explore new R&D
directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and 
their applications, evaluation
methodologies and tools, 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 provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding 
agencies from across a wide
spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies 
and promote initiatives for
international cooperation in the areas mentioned above, in support to 
investigations in language sciences,
progress in language technologies and development of corresponding 
products, services and applications.


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)
*	Methodologies and tools:
*	Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs.
*	Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, creation, annotation, 
management, access,
	distribution, use of monolingual and multilingual LRs.
*	Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge (e.g. terms, 
ontologies, lexical
	information, language modelling) from LRs, and knowledge transfer among 
languages.
*	Definition and requirements for a Basic and Extended LAnguage Resource 
Kit (BLARK,
	ELARK) for all languages.
*	Documentation and archiving of languages, including minority and 
endangered languages.
*	LRs for linguistic research in human-machine communication.

*	LRs construction & annotation:
*	Metadata descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup.
*	Ontologies and knowledge representation, especially with respect to HLT.
*	Terminology and NLP tools and methodologies for terminology and ontology 
building or
	mapping, term extraction, domain-specific dictionaries.
*	LRs for machine translation.
*	LRs for ubiquitous processing.
*	Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LRs.
*	Multimedia and Multimodal LRs - Integration of various media and 
modalities in LRs
	(speech, vision, language).

*	LRs exploitation:
*	Industrial production of LRs.
*	Industrial LRs requirements, user needs and community's response.
*	Exploitation of LRs in different types of applications (information 
extraction, information
	retrieval, speech dictation, translation, summarisation, web services, 
semantic web, semantic
	search, text mining, inferencing, etc.).
*	Exploitation of LRs in different types of interfaces (dialogue systems, 
natural language and
	multimodal/multisensorial interactions, etc.).

Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT) evaluation
*	Methodologies, tools and standardisation:
*	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.
*	From evaluation to standardisation.
*	User centered design tools and methods.
*	Evaluation of ontologies and knowledge bases by means of LR-related 
techniques.
*	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, summarization, question answering, localization, etc.).
*	Evaluation in spoken language processing: (speech recognition and 
understanding, voice
	dictation, oral dialogue, 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.

*	Usability evaluation of HLT based user Interfaces:
*	Usability and user satisfaction evaluation.
*	Psychophysical and cognitive evaluation.
*	User experience assessment.
*	Heuristic evaluation.
*	Multimodal interaction evaluation.
*	Evaluation of usability in mobile services/applications, etc.

General issues
*	National and international activities and projects.
*	Open architectures for LRs.
*	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.
*	Organisational, economical and legal issues in the construction, 
distribution, access and use of
	LRs.

Special Highlights

LREC 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 LRs and language technologies, such as dialogue 
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.

The 2006 Conference emphasises in particular the importance of promoting:
-	synergies and integration between (multilingual) LRs and Semantic Web 
technologies,
-	new paradigms for sharing and integrating LRs and LT coming from 
different sources,
-	communication with neighbouring fields for applications in e-government 
and administration,
-	common evaluation campaigns for the objective evaluation of the 
performances of different
	systems,
-	systems and products (also industrial ones) based on large-size and high 
quality LRs.

LREC therefore encourages submissions of papers, panels, workshops, 
tutorials on the use of LRs
in these areas.

PROGRAMME

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, 
poster presentations, peer-
reviewed demonstrations and panels.
There is no difference in quality between oral presentations and poster 
presentations. Only the
appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to 
the content of the paper
will be considered.


ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster or demo presentations 
should consist of about 1000
words.

A limited number of panels, workshops and tutorials 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 and tutorials, see the dedicated section below.

Only electronic submissions will be considered. Further details about 
submission will be circulated in
the 2nd Call for Papers to be issued at the end of July and posted on the 
LREC web site (www.lrec-
conf.org).


PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings of the conference will include both oral and poster papers.
Printed Proceedings will be published only on demand. Proceedings on CD 
will be provided to all.
In addition a book of Abstracts will be printed.


IMPORTANT DATES

*	Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 14 October 2005
*	Submission of proposals for oral and poster papers, referenced demos: 14 
October 2005
*	Notification of acceptance of panels, workshops and tutorials proposals: 
7 November 2005
*	Notification of acceptance of oral papers, posters, referenced demos:  16 
January 2006
*	Final versions for the proceedings:  20 February 2006
*	Conference: 24-26 May 2006
*	Pre-conference workshops and tutorials: 22 and 23 May 2006
*	Post-conference workshops and tutorials: 27 and 28 May 2006

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 engineering products, systems and tools. Those interested 
should contact the organiser
of the demonstrations (details will be posted on www.lrec-conf.org).


WORKSHOPS AND TUTORIALS

Pre-conference workshops and tutorials will be organised on 22 and 23 May 
2006, and post-conference
workshops and tutorials on 27 and 28 May 2006. A workshop/tutorial can be 
either half day or full day.
Proposals for workshops and tutorials should be no longer than three pages, 
and include:
*	A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that the 
workshop/tutorial will
	address.
*	The reasons why the workshop/tutorial is of interest this time.
*	The names, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers and email addresses of 
the
	workshop/tutorial 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/tutorial organising committee 
designated as the
	contact person.
*	A time schedule of the workshop/tutorial and a preliminary programme.
*	A summary of the intended workshop/tutorial call for participation.
*	A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room 
requirements.

The workshop/tutorial proposers will be responsible for the organisational 
aspects (e.g. workshop/tutorial
call preparation and distribution, review of papers, notification of 
acceptance, assembling of the
workshop/tutorial 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 produced for each workshop/tutorial.


CONSORTIA AND PROJECT MEETINGS

Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising 
meetings should contact the ELDA
office, lrec at elda.org (further details are given at the end of the document).


CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa, 
Italy (Conference chair)
Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
Aldo Gangemi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione del CNR, 
Roma, Italy
Bente Maegaard, CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Jan Odijk, ScanSoft, Merelbeke, Belgium and UIL-OTS, Utrecht, The Netherlands
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 
and will be announced in the
2nd Call for Papers.


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.org
Web: http://www.elra.info or http://www.elda.org/

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. The following figures illustrate 
how successful it proved to
be: for the main conference, 460 papers had been submitted and reviewed, of 
which 365 were presented at
the conference. Most of the areas in HLT were covered (about 280 papers 
dealt with written resources,
about 100 with spoken resources, 25 with multimodal and multimedia 
resources, around 50 dealt with
evaluation of HLT, and 16 with terminology).

The 4th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference was 
held in memory of two dear
friends and colleagues we lost in 2003, Angel Martin Municio and Antonio 
Zampolli.
LREC 2004, which took place in Lisbon (Portugal), attracted almost 1000 
participants, coming from 50
countries from all the continents. Close to 800 submissions for poster and 
oral presentations were
reviewed by the Scientific Committee: 519 were actually presented, a 
majority dedicated to written
resources (260), 116 dealt with spoken resources, 40 with terminological 
issues, 57 with evaluation, 17
were on general issues, and 29 on multimodal-multimedia ones. In addition, 
a total of 18 satellite
workshops covering various fields were organised before and after the main 
conference.
A new award in HLT was launched on that occasion: the ELRA Board created a 
prize for "Outstanding
Contributions to the Advancement of Language Resources and Language 
Technology Evaluation", to
honour the memory of its co-founder and 1st president, Antonio Zampolli. 
The Antonio Zampolli Prize
was awarded for the first time at LREC 2004 to Fredrick Jelinek, from John 
Hopkins University,
Baltimore, USA.

A similar number of participants is expected at LREC 2006.

If you want to know the state-of-the-art in LT and LRs and their 
application in all aspects of
e-society , this is the Conference to go to!