LREC 2008 - FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

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LREC 2008 - 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

Palais des Congrès Mansour Eddahbi, MARRAKECH - MOROCCO

MAIN CONFERENCE: 28-29-30 MAY 2008

WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 26-27 MAY and 31 MAY- 1 JUNE 2008

Conference web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/


The sixth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation 
(LREC) will be organised in 2008 by ELRA in cooperation with a wide 
range of international associations and organisations.

CONFERENCE AIMS

In 10 years – the first LREC was held in Granada in 1998 – LREC has 
become the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for 
Human Language Technologies (HLT). The aim of LREC is to provide an 
overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and 
emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their 
applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, ongoing and planned 
activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the 
e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and 
organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding 
agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and 
opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for 
international cooperation, in support to investigations in language 
sciences, progress in language technologies and development of 
corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs): 
text, speech, multimodality
• Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs
• Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
• Methodologies and tools for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge
• Ontologies and knowledge representation
• Terminology
• Integration between (multilingual) LRs, ontologies and Semantic Web 
technologies
• Metadata descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup
Exploitation of LRs in different types of systems and applications
• For: information extraction, information retrieval, speech dictation, 
mobile communication, machine translation, summarisation, web services, 
semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, etc.
• In different types of interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, 
natural language and multimodal/multisensorial interactions, voice 
activated services, etc.
• Communication with neighbouring fields of applications, e.g. 
e-government, e-culture, e-health, e-participation, mobile applications, 
etc.
• Industrial LRs requirements, user needs
Issues in Human Language Technologies evaluation
• HLT Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
• Validation, quality assurance, evaluation of LRs
• Benchmarking of systems and products
• Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces, interactions and 
dialog systems
• Usability and user satisfaction evaluation
General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation
• National and international activities and projects
• Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international 
policies for LRs
• Open architectures
• Organisational, economical and legal issues

Special Highlights

LREC targets the integration of different types of LRs – spoken, 
written, and other modalities – and of the respective communities. To 
this end, LREC encourages submissions covering issues which are common 
to different types of LRs and language technologies.

LRs are currently developed and deployed in a much wider range of 
applications and domains. LREC 2008 recognises the need to encompass all 
those data that interact with language resources in an attempt to model 
more complex human processes and develop more complex systems, and 
encourages submissions on topics such as:
• Multimodal and multimedia systems, for Human-Machine interfaces, 
Human-Human interactions, and content processing
• Resources for modelling language-related cognitive processes, 
including emotions
• Interaction/Association of language and perception data, also for 
robotic systems

PROGRAMME

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, 
poster and demo presentations, and panels.
There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. 
Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less 
interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES

Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster or demo presentations 
should consist of about 1500-2000 words.
• Submission of proposals for oral and poster/demo papers: 31 October 2007

Proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials will be reviewed by the 
Programme Committee.
• Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 31 
October 2007

PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings on CD will include both oral and poster papers, in the 
same format.
In addition a Book of Abstracts will be printed.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, 
Pisa, Italy (Conference chair)
Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
Bente Maegaard, CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Jan Odijk, Nuance Communications International, Belgium and UIL-OTS, 
Utrecht, The Netherlands
Stelios Piperidis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), 
Athens, Greece
Daniel Tapias, Telefónica Móviles España, Madrid, Spain