LREC 2012 Workshop: 1st CfP Creating Cross-language Resources for Disconnected Languages and Styles (CREDISLAS)

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Workshop on

CREATING CROSS-LANGUAGE RESOURCES FOR DISCONNECTED LANGUAGES AND STYLES

Co-located with LREC 2012 (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/)
Istanbul, Turkey
May 27, 2012 (afternoon session)

Deadline for paper submissions: February 26, 2012

http://www-lium.univ-lemans.fr/credislas2012

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This half-day workshop aims at developing strategies and sharing 
experiences on creating resources for reducing the linguistic gap 
between those language pairs for which cross-language resources are 
scarce. Although this specific situation has been most commonly 
addressed for the case of minority languages that have scarce resources 
by themselves, it also happens to be an important issue in some other 
situations such as: majority languages that, because of their cultural, 
historical and/or geographical disconnection, do not count with a 
significant amount of cross-language resources between them (as Chinese 
and Spanish, just to mention an excellent example in this category); or, 
single languages for which new communication trends and styles do not 
have available cross-language resources between the main formal language 
and it (as chat speak style communications and formal languages).

Current computational and data storage capabilities have favoured the 
proliferation of data-driven and statistical approaches in natural 
language processing and computational linguistics. Empirical evidence 
has demonstrated in a large number of cases and applications how the 
availability of appropriate datasets can boost the performance of 
processing methods and analysis techniques. In this scenario, the 
availability of data has become to play a fundamental role. On the other 
hand, both the diversity of languages and the emergence of new 
communication media and stylistic trends are responsible for the 
scarcity of resources in the case of some specific tasks and 
applications. In this sense, this workshop attempts to focus its 
attention on those specific applications or cases for which data 
scarcity poses a restrictive problem for data-driven approaches. This 
includes the following three specific situations:

Minority Languages, for which scarcity of resources is a consequence of 
the minority nature of the language itself. In this case, attention is 
focused on the development of both monolingual and cross-lingual 
resources. Some examples in this category include: Basque, Pashto and 
Haitian Creole, just to mention a few.

Disconnected Languages, for which a large amount of monolingual 
resources are available, but due to cultural, historical and/or 
geographical reasons cross-language resources are actually scarce. Some 
examples in this category include language pairs such as Chinese and 
Spanish, Russian and Portuguese, and Arabic and Japanese, just to 
mention a few.

New Language Styles, which represent different communication forms or 
emerging stylistic trends in languages for which the available resources 
are practically useless. This case includes the typical examples of 
tweets and chat speak communications, as well as other informal form of 
communications, in many languages.

The main topics of interest for this workshop include, but are not 
limited to, the following ones:

  * Construction and collection of monolingual resources
  * Construction and collection of cross-language resources
  * Annotation guidelines and evaluation
  * Automatic extraction of linguistic resources
  * Automatic annotation of linguistic resources
  * Use of crowdsourcing for generating and annotating resources
  * Use of pivot languages for bridging unconnected languages
  * Methods  to adapt existing resources to new domains and styles
  * Generation of resources for informal communication styles
  * Evaluation of monolingual resources: tasks and protocols
  * Evaluation of cross-language resources: tasks and protocols

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit papers on original and previously 
unpublished work. Formatting should
be according to LREC 2012 specifications using LaTeX or MS-Word style 
files (available soon at the
conference website, see http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/).

Submission is electronic in PDF format using the START submission system at

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/CREDISLAS2012/

Double submission policy: Parallel submission to other meetings or 
publications are possible but
must be immediately notified to the workshop contact person (see below).

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their research at 
the workshop.
The workshop papers will be part of the LREC proceedings and published 
on the web site of LREC 2012 before the conference.

IMPORTANT DATES

February 26, 2012: Paper submissions due
March 16, 2012: Notification of acceptance
March 30, 2012: Camera ready papers due
May 27, 2012:  Workshop in Istanbul (afternoon session)

ORGANIZERS

Contact person: Patrik Lambert (e-mail: 
patrik.lambert at lium.univ-lemans.fr )

Patrik Lambert (University of Le Mans),
Marta R. Costa-jussà (Barcelona Media Innovation Center),
Rafael E. Banchs (Institute for Infocomm Research)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Marianna Apidianaki, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Jordi Atserias, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
Victoria Arranz, ELDA, Paris, France
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore
Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh, UK
Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex, UK
Yanjun Ma, Baidu Inc. Beijing, China
Sara Morrissey, Dublin City University, Ireland
Maja Popovic, DFKI, Berlin, Germany
Paolo Rosso, Universidad de Valencia, Spain
Marta Recasens, Stanford University, USA
Wade Shen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
Haifeng Wang, Baidu Inc. Beijing, China