[Corpora-List] Call for Participation: Corpus Profiling Workshop at IIiX 2008

[Kruschwitz U]

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
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Corpus Profiling for Information Retrieval and Natural Language 
Processing Workshop 2008
18 October 2008
London
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/events/corpus-profiling/index.php

***Please note that there is no on-site registration***


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PURPOSE
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We aim to bring together people from different research communities 
interested in exploring how corpus characteristics affect the behaviour 
of techniques in information retrieval and natural language processing, 
and to set out a roadmap for a shared research agenda.

It is well known in NLP and IR that the effectiveness of a technique 
depends on both the data on which it is deployed and its match with the 
task at hand. In 1973, Spärck-Jones attributed differing degrees of 
success at automatic classification to differences in dataset 
characteristics. Since Croft and Harper (1979), IR performance has 
repeatedly been related to collection size and other features, though no 
upper bound has been found.

The importance of data and task dependencies has been highlighted in IR, 
anaphora resolution, automatic summarization and recently, in word sense 
disambiguation. Many web/enterprise web retrieval systems rely on URL 
properties, link graph properties, click streams, and so on, with 
performance dependent on the degree to which this evidence is present 
and meaningful in a particular corpus.

Systematically exploring features that can be used effectively to 
characterise corpora, has been missing from IR/NLP research. This 
creates problems with replicability of experimental results and the 
development of applications.

The time is right to pursue this dependence systematically to address 
topics in tracking the effect of dataset profile on technique 
performance. Over the past 15 years, the approaches of several subject 
areas have converged with IR, as large corpora and test collections 
assume central importance in research methodologies. These areas have 
highlighted issues surrounding the role of data.


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INVITED SPEAKERS
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Anne De Roeck (The Open University)
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton)
Michael Oakes (University of Sunderland)
Leif Azzopardi, (University of Glasgow)
Nikolaos Nanas (TBC), Centre for Research and Technology - Thessaly 
(CERETETH)


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ACCEPTED PAPERS
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Automatic Natural Language Style Classification and Transformation
Foaad Khosmood and Robert A. Levinson (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Genre Analysis of Structured E-mails for Corpus Profiling
Malcolm Clark (The Robert Gordon University), Ian Ruthven (University 
Strathclyde), Patrik O'Brian Holt (The Robert Gordon University)

Lexical Profiling of Existing Web Directories to Support Fine-grained 
Topic-Focused Web Crawling
Mark Greenwood, Goran Nenadic (University of Manchester)

Building a document genre corpus: a profile of the KRYS I corpus
Vera F. Berninger, Yunhyong Kim and Seamus Ross (University of Glasgow)

Distributional Lexical Semantics for Stop Lists
Neil Cooke, Lee Gillam (University of Surrey)


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YOUR CONTRIBUTION
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We are looking forward to a very productive workshop with as much 
interaction as possible. As stated in the workshop aims we are  to set 
out a roadmap for a shared research agenda. To do this most effectively 
we are asking participants to provide some input stating their views on 
corpus profiling for NLP and IR. Ideally this would be a short 
paragraph, suggestions for discussion or even a simple statement that 
should be submitted to the workshop organizers before the workshop. Any 
input is most welcome!

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REGISTRATION
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The registration fee will be £80. Registration is through the IIiX 
registration site: http://irsg.bcs.org/iiix2008/registration.php






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