[Corpora-List] CFP: Half-day workshop on "Collaboration: interoperability between people in the creation of language resources for less-resourced languages"

Mon Jan 14 17:21:23 UTC 2008

                 CALL FOR PAPERS

"Collaboration: interoperability between people in the creation of language 
resources for less-resourced languages"

LREC 2008 pre-conference workshop
Marrakech, Morocco:  afternoon of Tuesday 27th May 2008
Organised by the SALTMIL Special Interest Group of ISCA

SALTMIL:			http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
LREC 2008:			http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/
Call For Papers:	 
http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/en/activities/lrec2008/lrec-2008-workshop-cfp.html
Paper submission:		http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=saltmil2008

Papers are invited for the above half-day workshop, in the format outlined 
below.  Most submitted papers will be presented in poster form, though some 
authors may be invited to present in lecture format.

Context and Focus

The minority or "less resourced" languages of the world are under increasing 
pressure from the major languages (especially English), and many of them lack 
full political recognition.  Some minority languages have been well 
researched linguistically, but most have not, and the majority do not yet 
possess basic speech and language resources which would enable the commercial 
development of products.  This lack of language products may accelerate the 
decline of those languages that are already struggling to survive.  To break 
this vicious circle, it is important to encourage the development of basic 
language resources as a first step.

In recent years, linguists across the world have realised the need to 
document endangered languages immediately, and to publish the raw data. This 
raw data can be transformed automatically (or with the help of volunteers) 
into resources for basic speech and language technology. It thus seems 
necessary to extend the scope of recent workshops on speech and language 
technology beyond technological questions of interoperability between digital 
resources:  the focus will be on the human aspect of creating and 
disseminating language resources for the benefit of endangered and 
non-endangered less-resourced languages.

Topics

The theme of "collaboration" centres on issues involved in collaborating with:

* Trained researchers.
* Non-specialist workers (paid or volunteers) from the speaker community.
* The wider speaker community.
* Officials, funding bodies, and others.

Hence there will be a corresponding need for the following:

* With trained researchers: Methods and tools for facilitating collaborative 
working at a distance.
* With non-specialist workers: Methods and tools for training new workers for 
specific tasks, and laying the foundations for continuation of these skills 
among native speakers.
* With the wider speaker community: Methods of gaining acceptance and wider 
publicity for the work, and of increasing the take-up rates after completion 
of the work.
* With others: Methods of presenting the work in non-specialist terms, and of 
facilitating its progress.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

* Bringing together people with very different backgrounds.
* How to organize volunteer work (some endangered languages have active 
volunteers).
* How to train non-specialist volunteers in elicitation methods.
* Working with the speaker community: strengthening acceptance of ICT and 
language resources among the speaker community.
* Working collaboratively to build speech and text corpora with few existing 
language resources and no specialist expertise.
* Web-based creation of linguistic resources, including web 2.0.
* The development of digital tools to facilitate collaboration between people.
* Licensing issues; open source, proprietary software.
* Re-use of existing data; interoperability between tools and data.
* Language resources compatible with limited computing power environments 
(old machines, the $100 handheld device, etc.)
* General speech and language resources for minority languages, with 
particular emphasis on software tools that have been found useful.

Important dates

29 February 2008	Deadline for submission
17 March 2008		Notification
31 March 2008		Final version
27 May 2008		Workshop

Organisers

* Briony Williams:  Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University, Wales, UK
* Mikel Forcada:  Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, 
Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
* Kepa Sarasola:  Dept. of Computer Languages, University of the Basque Country

Programme Committee

* Briony Williams:  Bangor University, Wales, UK
* Mikel Forcada:  Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
* Kepa Sarasola:  University of the Basque Country
* Atelach Alemu Argaw:  Stockholm University, Sweden
* Julie Berndsen, University College Dublin, Ireland
* Shannon Bischoff, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico
* Lori Levin, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
* Climent Nadeu, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
* Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
* Bojan Petek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
* Oliver Streiter, National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Submission information

We expect short papers of max 3500 words (about 4-6 pages) describing 
research addressing one of the above topics, to be submitted as PDF documents 
by uploading to the following URL:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=saltmil2008

The final papers should not have more than 6 pages, adhering to the 
stylesheet that will be adopted for the LREC Proceedings (to be announced 
later on the Conference web site).

-- 
Briony Williams

Arweinydd Tîm Technoleg Lleferydd / Speech Technology Team Leader
Uned Technolegau Iaith            / Language Technologies Unit
Adeilad Rhos, Safle'r Normal      / Rhos Building, Normal Site
Prifysgol Bangor                  / Bangor University
Bangor                            / Bangor
Gwynedd LL57 2PX, UK              / Gwynedd LL57 2PX, UK

E-Bost / E-Mail : b.williams at bangor.ac.uk
Gwe (Cymraeg)   : http://www.bangor.ac.uk/ar/cb/technolegau_iaith.php.cy
Web (English)   : http://www.bangor.ac.uk/ar/cb/technolegau_iaith.php.en
Ffôn / Tel      : +44 (0) 1506 200862
Rhithfro / Blog : http://murmur.bangor.ac.uk
....................................................................

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