[Corpora-List] Call for Participation: Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC 2009) Workshop at ACL-IJCNLP

Pierre Zweigenbaum pz at limsi.fr
Mon Jun 29 00:01:32 UTC 2009


=======================================================================
			CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
			======================

	2nd Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora:
		from parallel to non-parallel corpora

			   ACL-IJCNLP 2009
		     Singapore, August 6th, 2009
		    http://comparable2009.ust.hk/

	   *** Early registration through June 30, 2009 ***
	       *** Workshop program included below ***

=======================================================================

INVITED SPEAKER

 Kenneth Ward Church (Chief Scientist, Human Language Technology
   Center of Excellence, Johns Hopkins University, US)


MOTIVATION

 Research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons
 in the language engineering and the linguistics communities.  In
 language engineering, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use
 comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications
 such as statistical machine translation or cross-language information
 retrieval.  In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are
 of interest themselves in providing intra-linguistic discoveries and
 comparisons.  It is generally accepted in both communities that
 comparable corpora are documents in one to many languages, that are
 comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions.  It
 was pointed out that parallel corpora are at one end of the spectrum
 of comparability whereas quasi-comparable corpora are at the other
 end.  We believe that the linguistic definitions and observations in
 comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for
 applications to statistical NLP.  As such, it is of great interest to
 bring together builders and users of such corpora.

 Parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical
 machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons
 and terminologies.  However, beyond a few language pairs such as
 English-French or English-Chinese and a few contexts such as
 parliamentary debates or legal texts, they remain a scarce resource,
 despite the creation of automated methods to collect parallel corpora
 from the Web.  Interest in non-parallel forms of comparable corpora
 in language engineering primarily ensued from the scarcity of
 parallel corpora.  This has motivated research into the use of
 comparable corpora: pairs of monolingual corpora selected according
 to the same set of criteria, but in different languages or language
 varieties.  Non-parallel yet comparable corpora overcome the two
 limitations of parallel corpora, since sources for original,
 monolingual texts are much more abundant than translated texts.
 However, because of their nature, mining translations in comparable
 corpora is much more challenging than in parallel corpora.  What
 constitutes a good comparable corpus, for a given task or per se,
 also requires specific attention: while the definition of a parallel
 corpus is fairly straightforward, building a non-parallel corpus
 requires control over the selection of source texts in both
 languages.

 With the advent of online data, the potential for building and
 exploring comparable corpora is growing exponentially.  Comparable
 documents in languages that are very different from each other pose
 special challenges as very often, the non-parallel-ness in sentences
 can result from cultural and political differences.


THE WORKSHOP

 Following the success of the first workshop on Building and Using
 Comparable Corpora at LREC 2008 in Marrakech, this second workshop
 again brings together language engineers as well as linguists
 interested in the constitution and use of comparable corpora, ranging
 from parallel to non-parallel corpora.  In the larger context of the
 joint ACL-IJCNLP conference, this time the workshop specifically
 aimed to solicit contributions from researchers in different
 geographical regions, in order to highlight in particular the issues
 with comparable corpora across languages that are very different from
 each other, such as across Asian and European languages.  Research in
 minority languages is also of particular interest.  We are very glad
 to include papers on languages as varied as Arabic, Chinese, English,
 French, Japanese, Uyghur and even sign language.


=======================================================================
WORKSHOP PROGRAM
Thursday, August 6, 2009
http://comparable2009.ust.hk/program.html

8:45	Welcome and Introduction
--------------------------------

9:00-10:00 Session 1: Invited Presentation
----------------------------
9:00	Repetition and Language Models and Comparable Corpora
	Ken Church

10:00-10:30	Coffee break

10:30-12:10 Session 2: Information Extraction and Summarization
---------------------------------------------------------------
10:30	Extracting Lay Paraphrases of Specialized Expressions from
	Monolingual Comparable Medical Corpora
	Louise Deléger and Pierre Zweigenbaum
10:55	An Extensible Crosslinguistic Readability Framework
	Jesse Kirchner, Justin Nuger and Yi Zhang
11:20	An Analysis of the Calque Phenomena Based on Comparable
	Corpora
	Marie Garnier and Patrick Saint-Dizier
11:45	Active Learning of Extractive Reference Summaries for Lecture
	Speech Summarization
	Jian Zhang and Pascale Fung

12:10-13:50	Lunch break

13:50-15:30 Session 3: Statistical Machine Translation
------------------------------------------------------
13:50	Train the Machine with What It Can Learn---Corpus Selection
	for SMT
	Xiwu Han, Hanzhang Li and Tiejun Zhao
14:15	Mining Name Translations from Comparable Corpora by Creating
	Bilingual Information Networks
	Heng Ji
14:40	Chinese-Uyghur Sentence Alignment: An Approach Based on Anchor
	Sentences
	Samat Mamitimin and Min Hou
15:05	Exploiting Comparable Corpora with TER and TERp
	Sadaf Abdul Rauf and Holger Schwenk

15:30-16:00	Coffee break

16:00-16:50 Session 4: Building Comparable Corpora / Discussion
---------------------------------------------------------------
16:00	Compilation of Specialized Comparable Corpora in French and
	Japanese
	Lorraine Goeuriot, Emmanuel Morin and Béatrice Daille
16:25	Toward Categorization of Sign Language Corpora
	Jérémie Segouat and Annelies Braffort
16:50   Panel Session
        Multilingual Information Processing:
	from Parallel to Comparable Corpora

17:50	End of Workshop
=======================================================================


WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS

 Pascale Fung, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)
 Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI-CNRS (France)
 Reinhard Rapp, University of Mainz (Germany)
   and University of Tarragona (Spain)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

 Askar Hamdulla (Xinjiang University, China)
 Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Labs, USA)
 Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
 Éric Gaussier (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France)
 Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France)
 Satoshi Isahara (National Institute of Information and Communications
   Technology, Japan)
 Min-Yen Kan (National University of Singapore)
 Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd, UK)
 Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
 Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas, USA)
 Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver, Inc., USA)
 Grace Ngai (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong)
 Carol Peters (ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy)
 Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
 Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, USA)
 Mandel Shi (Xiamen University, China)
 Yujie Zhang (National Institute of Information and Communications
   Technology, Japan)


WORKSHOP TECHNICAL SUPPORT

 Ricky Chan Ho Yin (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)



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