[Corpora-List] CFP: Information Retrieval and Information Extraction for Less Resourced Languages (IE-IR-LRL)

[Mikel L. Forcada]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Information Retrieval and Information Extraction for Less Resourced Languages 
(IE-IR-LRL)

SEPLN 2009 pre-conference workshop
University of the Basque Country
Donostia-San Sebastián. Monday 7th September 2009
Organised by the SALTMIL Special Interest Group of ISCA

SALTMIL: 		http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
SEPLN 2009:		http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/sepln2009
Call For Papers:	
http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/en/activities/lrec2008/sepln-2009-workshop-
cfp.html
Paper submission:	http://sepln.org/myreview-saltmil2009
Deadline for submission: 8 June 2009

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 phenomenal growth of the Internet has led to a situation where, by some 
estimates, more than one billion words of text is currently available. This is 
far more text than any given person can possibly process. Hence there is a 
need for automatic tools to access and process his mass of textual 
information. Emerging techniques of this kind include Information Retrieval 
(IR), Information Extraction (IE), and Question Answering (QA)
 
However, there is a growing concern among researchers about the situation of 
languages other than English. Although not all Internet text is in English, it 
is clear that non-English languages do not have the same degree of 
representation on the Internet. Simply counting the number of articles in 
Wikipedia, English is the only language with more than 20 percent of the 
available articles. There then follows a group of 17 languages with between 
one and ten percent of the articles. The remaining 245 languages each have 
less than one percent of the articles. Even these low-profile languages are 
relatively privileged, as the total number of languages in the world is 
estimated to be 6800.

Clearly there is a danger that the gap between high-profile and low-profile 
languages on the Internet will continue to increase, unless tools are 
developed for the low-profile languages to access textual information. Hence 
there is a pressing need to develop basic language technology software for 
less-resourced languages as well. In particular, the priority is to adapt the 
scope of recently-developed IE, IR and QA systems so that they can be used 
also for these languages. In doing so, several questions will naturally arise, 
such as:

    *  What problems emerge when faced with languages having different 
linguistic features from the major languages?
    *  Which techniques should be promoted in order to get the maximum yield 
from sparse training data?
    *  What standards will enable researchers to share tools and techniques 
across several different languages?
    *  Which tools are easily re-useable across several unrelated languages?

It is hoped that presentations will focus on real-world examples, rather than 
purely theoretical discussions of the questions. Researchers are encouraged to 
share examples of best practice -- and also examples where tools have not 
worked as well as expected. Also of interest will be cases where the 
particular features of a less-resourced language raise a challenge to 
currently accepted linguistic models that were based on features of major 
languages.

TOPICS

Given the context of IR, IE and QA, topics for discussion may include, but are 
not limited to:

    *  Information retrieval;
    *  Text and web mining;
    *  Information extraction;
    *  Text summarization;
    *  Term recognition;
    *  Text categorization and clustering;
    *  Question answering;
    *  Re-use of existing IR, IE and QA data;
    *  Interoperability between tools and data.
    *  General speech and language resources for minority languages, with  
particular emphasis on resources for IR,IE and QA.

IMPORTANT DATES

    * 8 June 2009:  Deadline for submission
    * 1 July 2009:  Notification
    * 15 July  2009: Final version
    * 7 September 2009:  Workshop

ORGANISERS

    * Kepa Sarasola, University of the Basque Country
    * Mikel Forcada, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
    * Iñaki Alegria.  University of the Basque Country
    * Xabier Arregi,  University of the Basque Country
    * Arantza Casillas. University of the Basque Country
    * Briony Williams, Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University, Wales, 
UK

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE 

    * Iñaki Alegria. University of the Basque Country.
    * Atelach Alemu Argaw:  Stockholm University, Sweden
    * Xabier Arregi, University of the Basque Country.
    * Jordi Atserias, Barcelona Media (yahoo! research Barcelona)
    * Shannon Bischoff, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico
    * Arantza Casillas.  University of the Basque Country.
    * Mikel Forcada:  Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
    * Xavier Gomez Guinovart. University of Vigo.
    * Lori Levin, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
    * Climent Nadeu, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
    * Jon Patrick, University of Sydney, Australia
    * Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
    * Bojan Petek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
    * Kepa Sarasola,  University of the Basque Country
    * Oliver Streiter, National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan
    * Vasudeva Varma, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
    * Briony Williams:  Bangor University, Wales, UK

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://sepln.org/myreview-saltmil2009

The final papers should not have more than 6 pages, adhering to the stylesheet 
that will be adopted for the SEPLN Proceedings (to be announced later on the 
Conference web site).
-- 
Mikel L. Forcada <mlf at dlsi.ua.es>
http://www.dlsi.ua.es/~mlf/
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