1st CfP: LLREC 2010 Workshop on Language Resources (LRs) and Human Language Technologies (HLT) for Semitic Languages - Status, Updates and Prospects

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CALL FOR PAPERS
*Workshop on Language Resources (LRs) and Human Language Technologies 
(HLT) for Semitic Languages - Status, Updates, and Prospects
*
To be held in conjunction with the 7th International Language Resources 
and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2010)

*17 May 2010, Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valetta, Malta*

*Deadline for submission: 26 February 2010
*

Description

The Semitic family includes languages and dialects spoken by a large 
number of native speakers (around 300 million). Prominent members of 
this family are Arabic (and its varieties), Hebrew, Amharic, Tigrinya, 
Aramaic, Maltese and Syriac. Their shared ancestry is apparent through 
pervasive cognate sharing, a rich and productive pattern-based 
morphology, and similar syntactic constructions.  In addition, there are 
several languages which are used in the same geographic area such as 
Amazigh or Coptic, which, while not Semitic, have common features with 
Semitic languages, such as borrowed vocabulary.

The recent surge in computational work for processing Semitic languages, 
particularly Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Modern Hebrew (MH), has 
brought modest improvements in terms of actual empirical results for 
various language processing components (e.g., morphological analyzers, 
parsers, named entity recognizers, audio transcriptions, etc.). 
Apparently, reusing existing approaches developed for English or French 
for processing Semitic language text/speech, e.g., Arabic parsing is not 
as straightforward as initially thought. Apart from the limited 
availability of suitable language resources, there is increasing 
evidence that Semitic languages demand modeling approaches and 
annotations that deviate from those found suitable for English/French. 
Issues such as the pattern-based morphology, the frequently head-initial 
syntactic structure, the importance of the interface between morphology 
and syntax, and the difference between spoken and written forms 
(especially in Colloquial Arabic(s)) exemplify the kind of challenges 
that may arise when processing Semitic languages. For language 
technologies, such as information retrieval and machine translation, 
these challenges are compounded by sparse data and often result in 
poorer performance than for other languages.

This Workshop intends to follow on topics of paramount importance for 
Semitic-language NLP that were discussed at previous events (LREC, 
MEDAR/NEMLAR Conferences, the workshops of the ACL Special Interest 
Group for Semitic languages, etc.) and which are worth revisiting.

The workshop will bring together people who are actively involved in 
Semitic language processing in a mono- or cross/multilingual context, 
and give them an opportunity to update the community through reports on 
completed or ongoing work as well as on the availability of LRs, 
evaluation protocols and campaigns, products and core technologies (in 
particular open source ones). We also invite authors to address other 
languages spoken in the Semitic language area (languages such as 
Amazigh, Coptic, etc.).  This should enable participants to develop a 
common view on where we stand and to foster the discussion of the future 
of this research area.  Particular attention will be paid to activities 
involving technologies such as Machine Translation and Cross-Lingual 
Information Retrieval/Extraction, Summarization, etc. Evaluation 
methodologies and resources for evaluation of HLT will be also a main 
focus. 
 
We expect to elaborate on the HLT state of the art, identify problems of 
common interest, and debate on a potential roadmap for the Semitic 
languages. Issues related to sharing of resources, tools, standards, 
sharing and dissemination of information and expertise, adoption of 
current best practices, setting up joint projects and technology 
transfer mechanisms will be an important part of the workshop.

Topics of Interest

This full-day workshop is not intended to be a mini-conference, but as a 
real workshop aiming at concrete results that should clarify the 
situation of Semitic languages with respect to Language Resources and 
Evaluation. We expect to launch at least two evaluation campaigns: 
Comparative evaluation of Morphology taggers and Named Entities 
Recognizers.

Among the many issues to be addressed, below follow a few suggestions:

?    Issues in the design, the acquisition, creation, management, 
access, distribution, use of Language Resources, in particular in a 
bilingual/multilingual setting (Standard Arabic, Hebrew, Colloquial 
Arabic, Amazigh, Coptic, Maltese, etc.)

?    Impact on LR collections/processing and NLP of the crucial issues 
related to "code switching" between different dialects and languages

?    Specific issues related to the above-mentioned languages such as 
the role of morphology, named entities, corpus alignment, etc.

?    Multilinguality issues including relationship between Colloquial 
and Standard Arabic

?    Exploitation of LR in different types of applications

?    Industrial LR requirements and community's response

?    Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for benchmarking 
and evaluation for written and spoken language processing;

?    Focus on some key technologies such as MT (all approaches e.g. 
Statistical, Example-Based, etc.), Information Retrieval, Speech 
Recognition, Spoken Documents Retrieval, CLIR, Question-Answering, 
Summarization, etc.

?    Local, regional, and international activities and projects and 
needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for regional and 
international cooperation.

We invite submissions on computational approaches to processing 
text/speech in all Semitic and Semitic-area languages. The call is open 
for all kinds of computational work, e.g., work on computational 
linguistic processing components (e.g., analyzers, taggers, parsers), on 
state-of-the-art NLP applications and systems, on leveraging resource 
and tool creation for the Semitic language family, and on using 
computational tools to gain new linguistic insight. We especially 
welcome submissions on work that crosses individual language boundaries, 
heightens awareness amongst Semitic-language researchers of shared 
challenges and breakthroughs, and highlights issues and solutions common 
to any subset of the Semitic languages family.


Workshop general chair:  
Khalid Choukri, Choukri at elda.org, ELRA/ELDA, Paris, France

Workshop co-chairs:  
Owen Rambow, Columbia University, New York, USA 
Bente Maegaard , University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Ibrahim A. Al-Kharashi, Computer and Electronics Research Institute, 
King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia


Organizing Committee information
The Organizing, Program, and the Scientific Committees will be listed on 
the web pages.

Important Dates

Deadline for abstract submissions:    26 February 2010
Notification of acceptance:        15 March 2010
Final version of accepted paper:    11 April 2010
Workshop full-day:            17 May 2010

Submission Details

Submissions should comply with LREC standards (including the LREC Map 
initiative) and must be in English. Abstracts for workshop contributions 
should not exceed Four A4 pages (excluding references). An additional 
title page should state: the title; author(s); affiliation(s); and 
contact author's e-mail address, as well as postal address, telephone 
and fax numbers.

Submission will use the LREC START facility: 
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/SemiticLanguages2010/
Expected deadline is 26 February 2010.

Submitted papers will be judged based on relevance to the workshop aims, 
as well as the novelty of the idea, technical quality, clarity of 
presentation, and expected impact on future research within the area of 
focus.

Registration to LREC'2010 will be required for participation, so 
potential participants are invited to refer to the main conference 
website for all details not covered in the present call 
(http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/)

Formatting instructions for the final full version of papers will be 
sent to authors after notification of acceptance and will be identical 
to LREC main conference instructions.

/When submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be kindly 
asked to provide relevant information about the resources that have been 
used for the work described in their paper or that are the outcome of 
their research. For further information on this new initiative, please 
refer to 
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources.
/
//

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