LREC 2012 Workshop on Language Resource Merging - Extended Deadline to Feb. 22, 2012

[ELRA ELDA Information]

Call for Papers
LREC 2012 Workshop on: Language Resource Merging
22 May 2012 – Afternoon Session

EXTENDED Submission deadline: 22 FEBRUARY

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

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

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: 22 February 2012 (23:59 CET +1) **EXTENDED**
Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2012
Submission of camera-ready version of papers: 31 March 2012
Workshop date: 22 May 2012 – Afternoon Session

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

Contacts
lrec12_workshop_merging at ilc.cnr.it

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