[Corpora-List] 2nd CfP: EACL 2014 Workshop on Web as Corpus (WAC-9)

[Felix Bildhauer]

The 9th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-9)

http://www.sigwac.org.uk/wiki/WAC9

Endorsed by the Special Interest Group of the ACL on Web as Corpus


The World Wide Web has become increasingly popular as a source of
linguistic data, not only within the NLP communities, but also with
theoretical linguists facing problems of data sparseness or data
diversity. Accordingly, web corpora continue to gain importance, given
their size and diversity in terms of genres/text types. However, the
field is still new, and a number of issues in web corpus construction
still needs much research (fundamental and applied), ranging from
questions of corpus design (e.g., corpus composition assessment,
sampling strategies and their relation to crawling algorithms, handling
of duplicated material) to more technical aspects (e.g., efficient
implementation of individual post-processing steps in document cleansing
and linguistic annotation, or large-scale parallelization to achieve
web-scale corpus construction). Similarly, the systematic evaluation of
web corpora, for example in the form of task-based comparisons to
traditional corpora, has only lately shifted into focus.

For almost a decade, the ACL SIGWAC, and especially the highly
successful Web as Corpus (WaC) workshops have served as a platform for
researchers interested in building and working with web-derived corpora.
Past workshops have been co-located with major conferences on
computational linguistics and/ or corpus linguistics (such as EACL,
LREC, WWW, Corpus Linguistics). As part of the workshop, we will have a
panel discussion dedicated to the planning of a shared task for WaC10
(2015), including the nomination of organizers of the shared task. The
tracks of the shared task will focus on the quality of web corpus
creation tools, tools for linguistic annotation (at least lemmatization,
possibly also POS tagging, etc.), and the quality of web corpora themselves.


SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

As in previous years, the 9th Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-9) invites
original contributions pertaining to all aspects of web corpora,
including data collection, cleaning, duplicate removal, document
filtering, linguistic post-processing, and use of web corpora in
language technology and linguistics.

However, a major challenge in the construction of web corpora is the
question of the quality and the evaluation of both the software used in
the construction of web corpora as well as the corpora themselves.
Therefore, WaC9 seeks to put special emphasis on these topics, and it
particularly encourages submissions addressing the following points:

* noise in web corpora: normalization and implications for linguistic
annotation (lemmatization, POS tagging, parsing, etc.)
* task-based ("extrinsic") evaluation of web corpora, especially in
comparison to traditional corpus resources and n-gram databases (Web 1T
5-Grams, Google Books)
* missing meta data in web corpora: enriching web corpora with data by
automatic classification with high accuracy
* sampling strategies/ crawling algorithms and their effect on corpus
composition/ corpus quality
* non-destructive cleaning and normalization of web data (Currently
available web corpora have usually undergone radical cleaning procedures
in order to produce "high-quality" data. At least for some uses of the
data, aggressive and sometimes arbitrary removal of material in the form
of whole documents or parts thereof can be problematic. The same is true
for aggressive normalization of the data. To meet such problems, ways of
cleaning and normalizing the data transparently, i.e., preserving the
non-normalized forms, should be discussed.)


SUBMISSION DETAILS

Abstracts should be
* anonymous
* no longer than two pages (including figures and references)
* in PDF-format
* formatted according to the EACL stylesheet (templates for LaTeX and MS
Word are available ​from http://www.eacl2014.org/files/eacl-2014-styles.zip)
* submitted via the ​START online submission system at
https://www.softconf.com/eacl2014/WaC9/
* submitted no later than 23 January 2014


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

    Felix Bildhauer, Freie Universität Berlin
    Roland Schäfer, Freie Universität Berlin


PROGRAMM COMMITTEE

Organizing comittee, plus

    Adrien Barbaresi, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
    Silvia Bernardini, Università di Bologna
    Chris Biemann, Technische Universität Darmstadt
    Jesse Egbert, Northern Arizona University
    Stefan Evert, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
    Adriano Ferraresi, Università di Bologna
    William Fletcher, United States Naval Academy
    Dirk Goldhahn, Universität Leipzig
    Adam Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing Ltd.
    Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
    Alexander Mehler, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
    Uwe Quasthoff, Universität Leipzig
    Paul Rayson, Lancaster University
    Sabine Schulte, im Walde, Universität Stuttgart
    Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds
    Egon Stemle, European Academy of Bolzano
    Stephen Wattam, Lancaster University
    Yannick Versley, Universität Heidelberg
    Torsten Zesch, Universität Darmstadt


IMPORTANT DATES

    11 November 2013: First Call for Workshop Papers
    12 December 2013: Second Call for Workshop Papers
    4 January 2014: Final Call for Workshop Papers
    23 January 2014: Workshop Paper Due Date
    20 February 2014: Notification of Acceptance
    3 March 2014: Camera-ready papers due
    26 April 2014: Workshop Date



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