[Corpora-List] CFP: LREC 2012 Language Resource Merging Workshop

[Valeria Quochi]

2nd Call for Papers

LREC 2012 Workshop on: Language Resource Merging

http://panacea-lr.eu/en/news/project/2011/12/19/lrec-2012-merging-lr-workshop/

Date: 22 May 2012 – Afternoon Session

Location: Istanbul, Turkey

**** Deadline for paper submission: 15 February 2012 *****

CONTEXT

The availability of adequate language resources has been a well-known  
bottleneck for most high-level language technology applications, e.g.  
Machine Translation, parsing, and Information Extraction, for at least  
15 years , and the impact of the bottleneck is becoming all the more  
apparent with the availability of higher computational power and  
massive storage, since modern language technologies are capable of  
using far more resources than the community produces. The present  
landscape is characterized by the existence of numerous scattered  
resources, many of which have differing levels of coverage, types of  
information and granularity. Taken singularly, existing resources do  
not have sufficient coverage, quality or richness for robust  
large-scale applications, and yet they contain valuable information  
(Monachini et al. 2004 and 2006; Soria et al. 2006; Molinero, Sagot  
and Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu et al. 2011). Differing technology or  
application requirements, ignorance of the existence of certain  
resources, and difficulties in accessing and using them, has led to  
the proliferation of multiple, unconnected resources that, if merged,  
could constitute a much richer repository of information augmenting  
either coverage or granularity, or both, and consequently multiplying  
the number of potential language technology applications. Merging,  
combining and/or compiling larger resources from existing ones thus  
appears to be a promising direction to take.

The re-use and merging of existing resources is not altogether  
unknown. For example, WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) has been successfully  
reused in a variety of applications. But this is the exception rather  
than the rule; in fact, merging, and enhancing existing resources is  
uncommon, probably because it is by no means a trivial task given the  
profound differences in formats, formalisms, metadata, and linguistic  
assumptions.

The language resource landscape is on the brink of a large change,  
however. With the proliferation of accessible metadata catalogues, and  
resource repositories (such as the new META-SHARE  
(http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share) infrastructure), a potentially  
large number of existing resources will be more easily located,  
accessed and downloaded. Also, with the advent of distributed  
platforms for the automatic production of language resources, such as  
PANACEA (http://www.panacea-lr.eu/), new language resources and  
linguistic information capable of being integrated into those  
resources will be produced more easily and at a lower cost. Thus, it  
is likely that researchers and application developers will seek out  
resources already available before developing new, costly ones, and  
will require methods for merging/combining various resources and  
adapting them to their specific needs.

Up to the present day, most resource merging has been done manually,  
with only a small number of attempts reported in the literature  
towards (semi-)automatic merging of resources (Crouch & King 2005;  
Pustejovsky et al. 2005; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu  
et al. 2011). In order to take a further step  towards the scenario  
depicted above, in which resource merging and enhancing is a reliable  
and accessible first step for researchers and application developers,  
experience and best practices must be shared and discussed, as this  
will help the whole community avoid any waste of time and resources.

AIMS OF THE WORKSHOP

This half-day workshop is meant to be part of a series of meetings  
constituting an ongoing forum for sharing and evaluating the results  
of different methods and systems for the automatic production of  
language resources (the first one was the LREC 2010 Workshop on  
Methods for the Automatic Production of Language Resources and their  
Evaluation Methods). The main focus of this workshop is on  
(semi-)automatic means of merging language resources, such as  
lexicons, corpora and grammars. Merging makes it possible to re-use,  
adapt, and enhance existing resources, alongside new, automatically  
created ones, with the goal of reducing the manual intervention  
required in language resource production, and thus ultimately  
production costs.

WORKSHOP TOPICS

The topics of the workshop are related to best practices, methods,  
techniques and experimental results regarding the merging of various  
types of language resources, such as lexicons and corpora, especially  
in support of language technology applications. In particular, new  
methods for automatic merging with a view towards reducing human  
intervention will be most welcome.

Topics for submission include, but are not limited to:

-       Experiments on (semi-)automatic merging of automatically  
produced resources

-       Experiments on the merging of two or more existing resources  
containing the same or different levels of linguistic information

-       Studies or experiments on merging resources at different  
levels of granularity (corpora, lexicons, grammars)

-       Studies or experiments on unifying, mapping or converting  
encoding formats

-       Comparison between different resources and mapping algorithms  
to provide desired merging

-       Use of linguistic information from different sources in  
high-level language applications

-       Use of new, merged language resources in language technology  
applications

SUBMISSIONS

Interested participants must submit a preliminary paper of about 4-6  
pages including references (between 2000-2500 words). For the  
submission please use the online form on START LREC Conference Manager  
at: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/MergingLR2012/

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to  
provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e.  
also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been  
used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your  
research.

For further information on this new initiative, please refer to  
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012

Papers will be peer-reviewed by the workshop Program Committee.

IMPORTANT DATES

•       Deadline for paper submission: 15 February 2012

•       Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2012

•       Submission of camera-ready version of papers: 31 March 2012

•       Workshop date: 22 May 2012 – Afternoon Session

CONTACT

lrec12_workshop_merging at ilc.cnr.it

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Núria Bel, UPF, Barcelona, Spain

Maria Gavrilidou, ILSP-“Athena”, Athens, Greece,

Monica Monachini, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy

Valeria Quochi, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy

Laura Rimell, University of Cambridge, UK

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Victoria Arranz, ELDA, Paris, France

Paul Buitelaaar, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Nicoletta Calzolari, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy

Olivier Hamon, ELDA, Paris, France

Aleš Horák, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Nancy Ide, Vassar College, Mass. USA

Bernardo Magnini, FBK, Trento, Italy

Paola Monachesi, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Jan Odijk, , Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Muntsa Padró, IULA, Barcellona, Spain

Karel Pala, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Thierry Poibeau University of Cambridge, UK and CNRS, Paris, France

Benoît Sagot, INRIA, Paris, France

Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria

Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy

Maurizio Tesconi, CNR-IIT, Pisa





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