[Corpora-List] NEW TEXT - Wikis and blogs and other dynamic text sources: Call for papers and participation

[Fredrik Olsson]

         NEW TEXT - Wikis and blogs and other dynamic text sources

                        Trento, Italy April 3, 2006
                              newtext at sics.se
                      http://www.sics.se/jussi/newtext

Call for participation

   The EACL 2006 Workshop on New Text will be hosted in conjunction with
   the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for
   Computational Linguistics ( EACL, http://eacl06.itc.it/ ) 
   that will take place April 3-7, 2006, in Trento, Italy.

   New types of text sources, multi-lingual, with numerous cooperating or
   even adversarial authors and little or no editorial control are one
   effect of the recently dramatically lowered publication threshold.
   Many contain linguistic items or features classically associated with
   spoken language - combining the high interactivity of dialogue with
   the low bandwidth of written text and with the multicasting
   capabilities of digital communication.

   New material published today most noticeably includes *blogs* - a
   genre that has evolved from diaries, logbooks, commentaries, columns,
   and editorials into a multi-faceted and networked churn of text with
   widely ranging viewpoints and perspectives and varying application and
   ambition on the part of the creator. One of the most noticeable
   charateristics of the blog genre is its opinionated nature and its
   timeliness. Blog texts are often ill-edited and hastily cobbled
   together in a language reminiscent of brief notes, spoken asides, or
   short letters, rather than of essays or newsprint. This, at any rate,
   is the public perception.

   Another emergent genre is that of the *wiki*. More closely patterned
   on a classic text genre, that of the encyclopedia, wiki texts are
   written and edited by open teams of authors. In contrast to blogs,
   wikis have high ambitions as regards factual correctness, persistence,
   editorial quality, and trustworthiness.

   Bridging the two are genres such as discussion boards, web fora, and
   mailing lists.

   Let us call these various new types of text (or indeed other modes of
   linguistic communication) collectively NEW TEXT.
   THIS WORKSHOP is intended to discuss the analysis and application of
   new text, formulate research measures that are crying out to be taken,
   discuss which methodological steps are obsoleted, and which babies can
   be saved from the bath water.

                       NEW TEXT - Challenge questions

   NEW TEXT provides a number of research issues, immediately obvious
   questions, and tentative applications for our research fields:
    1. New possibilities for the philologically inclined: How does new
       text cast new light on human communicative behaviour? This
       includes question on style and genre: the characteristics of new
       text and relations to traditional media. Do blogs in fact resemble
       spoken language in any important way? Do wikis hold up their
       promise of qualitative information dissemination?
    2. New challenges for building text analysis tools -- how are the
       today's algorithms portable to new text? This includes questions
       on multilinguality, code-switching, register variation, and
       formality melange apparent in new text.
    3. New challenges for evaluation methodologies for information access
       systems:
          + Can new text, with dynamic information sources and streams of
            variable quality and impact be plugged into
            relevance-oriented evaluation frameworks without revising the
            target notion of text relevance?
          + Some new texts have high social impact; some sink without a
            trace; some have high import in tightly knit circles and
            communities. Traditional media have sales figures, citation
            indices, and distribution analyses. How can the impact of new
            texts be analyzed?
          + New texts have variable perceived intellectual status and
            quality -- how can it be measured and predicted?
    4. New opportunities for new services -- e.g. linking different types
       of text in dynamic and interactive sessions of information
       refinement and elaboration.

Signing up for the workshop

   To participate in the workshop: begin by announcing your interest to
   us (newtext at sics.se) as soon as possible! We may be sending out a data 
   set and a common task for everyone to play with before the workshop. 

   If you wish to present your work or your ideas at the workshop you are
   invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the
   topic area. A presentation should address some of the challenge
   questions stated above. We are also thinking of making a sample text
   set available for experimentation for all participants before the
   workshop.

   Submissions should be formatted using the EACL 2006 stylefiles with
   overt author and affiliation information and not exceeding 8 pages.
   The EACL 2006 stylefiles are available at

   http://eacl06.itc.it/submission/submission.htm .

   LaTeX submissions are much preferred.

   Please send your PDF file no later than January 6, 2006, to
   newtext at sics.se

   Each submission will be reviewed at least by two members of the
   programme committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop
   proceedings.

   Dual submissions to the main EACL 2006 conference and this workshop
   are allowed; if you submit to the main session, do indicate this when
   you submit to the workshop. If your paper is accepted for the main
   session, you should withdraw your paper from the workshop upon
   notification by the main session.

Important dates

     * Deadline for workshop paper submissions: Jan. 6, 2006
     * Notification of workshop paper acceptance: Jan. 27, 2006
     * Deadline for camera-ready workshop papers: Feb. 10, 2006

Workshop program committee

     * Jussi Karlgren, SICS (chair)
     * Shlomo Argamon, IIT
     * Björn Gambäck, SICS
     * Michael Gamon, Microsoft
     * Gilad Mishne, University of Amsterdam
     * Martin Svensson, SICS
     * Özlem Uzuner, MIT