18.675, Calls: Comp Ling/Czech Republic; Gen Ling/Hong Kong

Sun Mar 4 02:33:59 UTC 2007

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-675. Sat Mar 03 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.675, Calls: Comp Ling/Czech Republic; Gen Ling/Hong Kong

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1)
Date: 02-Mar-2007
From: Jakub Piskorski < Jakub.Piskorski at jrc.it >
Subject: Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing 2007 

2)
Date: 02-Mar-2007
From: Catherine Law < egclaw at inet.polyu.edu.hk >
Subject: 3rd International Symposium on Teaching English at Tertiary Level 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:29:56
From: Jakub Piskorski < Jakub.Piskorski at jrc.it >
Subject: Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing 2007 

Full Title: Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing 2007 
Short Title: BSNLP 2007 

Date: 29-Jun-2007 - 29-Jun-2007
Location: Prague, Czech Republic 
Contact Person: Jakub Piskorski
Meeting Email: Jakub.Piskorski at jrc.it
Web Site: http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Language Family(ies): Baltic; Slavic Subgroup 

Call Deadline: 01-Apr-2007 

Meeting Description

ACL Workshop: Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing 2007 (BSNLP 2007)
with Special Theme: Information Extraction and Enabling Technologies

June 29, 2007 
Prague, Czech Republic
http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007 

Second Call for Papers

Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing 2007 (BSNLP 2007)
with Special Theme: Information Extraction and Enabling Technologies

BSNLP will be held in conjunction with the ACL 2007 conference
(http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/) and is co-organised by the
European Commission's Joint Research Centre

Topic and Motivation

The recent political and economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe and the
related on-going enlargement of the European Union brings into focus new
cultures and languages.  Among them, the languages from the Balto-Slavonic group
have an outstanding role because of their rich cultural heritage and the
widespread use - over 400 million speakers.

The topic of the workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the
Balto-Slavonic languages, with the focus on Information Extraction (IE) and
enabling technologies for this language family. The task of IE is to identify a 
predefined set of concepts from natural language text. The spectrum of IE tasks
ranges from named-entity recognition, through relation extraction and
co-reference resolution to the identification of complex events and
cross-document entity profile extraction. Although a considerable amount of 
IE-related work exists, most of the studies are concentrated on a few major
languages. Research on this topic, as well as on general-purpose NLP tools in
the context of Balto-Slavonic languages, is still in its early stage and is
progressing relatively slowly. Due to some specific phenomena like the highly
inflectional character and relatively free word order, a construction of IE
systems and other language processing tools (question-answering, text
summarization, machine translation) for these languages is an intriguing and
challenging task.

This workshop can be seen as the follow-up to the successful workshop on
Information Extraction for Slavonic and Other Central and Eastern European
Languages (http://lml.bas.bg/IESL2003) held in conjunction with the 
RANLP 2003 conference. It is also related to the EACL 2003 workshop on
Morphological Processing of Slavic Languages (http://nl.ijs.si/mpsl03). In
particular, we would strongly encourage submissions describing systems,
resources or solutions that are made available to the wider public, as 
these would help to promote computational linguistics applications for these
languages.

Areas of Interest include, but are not limited to

A. Specific challenges for Balto-Slavonic NLP, in particular in the context of
IE and enabling technologies

- text segmentation
- morphological analysis
- morphology models
- morpho-syntactic disambiguation
- named-entity recognition 
- named-entity disambiguation (e.g., geo-referencing)
- named-entity lemmatisation
- term and keyword extraction
- name variant recognition and merging
- syntactic parsing and chunking
- co-reference resolution
- word sense disambiguation
- corpus-based knowledge acquisition

B. Multilingual IE frameworks and techniques applied to these languages

- tools and resources (freely available for research purposes will be preferred)
- experience with, and evaluation of, linguistic data and processing resources
- comparative evaluation between languages

C. IE solutions for these languages

- scenario template filling / event extraction
- relation extraction
- automatic pattern learning
- corpus studies and statistical techniques for IE
- IE from Web sources
- IE-based ontology population
- IE evaluation
- IE techniques for Question/Answering and Answer Extraction
- Utilisation of IE-based techniques in other NLP applications

Intended Audience

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners
working on NLP for Balto-Slavonic languages, in particular on IE and core
technologies supporting IE for these languages. The workshop will give an
opportunity to exchange ideas and experience, to discuss hard-to-tackle problems
in this field of research, and to make available resources more widely known.

Submission

Papers should describe original work and should indicate the state of completion
of the reported results. In particular, an overlap with previously published
work should be clearly mentioned. Submissions will be judged on correctness,
novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, usability, and 
significance/relevance to the workshop. 

Submissions should follow the two-column format of the ACL 2007 main-conference
proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We
recommend using either the LaTeX style file or the Microsoft-Word style file,
which can be found at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles.

The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include the
authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-citations and other
references that could reveal the author's identity should be avoided. 

Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted papers is
Adobe PDF. Papers must be submitted no later than April 1, 2006 using the
submission webpage http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007/submission 
(or http://www.softconf.com/acl07/ACL07-WS12/submit.html). 

Submissions will be reviewed by 3 members of the Program Committee. Authors of
accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce camera-ready
versions of their papers for inclusion in the ACL workshop proceedings.

Important Dates

Workshop Paper Submission deadline: April 1
Notification of Acceptance: April 25
Camera-ready Version: May 9
Workshop: June 29, 2007.

Location

Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, is located in the centre of Europe.
It is one of the most valuable historical city reserves in Europe. The
historical core of the city is listed in the UNESCO World Cultural and Natural
Heritage Register. The workshop itself will take place in the TOP HOTEL Praha,
located in the quiet neighbourhood of the Prague 4 district, only 15-20 minutes
from the historic centre of Prague. 

Prague is easily reachable by car, bus or train from central Europe (only 3-hour
drive from Vienna or Budapest or 4 hours from Berlin or Munich), by cheap
flights from the rest of Europe, and by several direct flights from overseas. 

Further Information

For further information please write to bsnlp2007 at jrc.it or check the workshop
web page http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007.

Program Committee

Tania Avgustinova (University of Saarland / DFKI, Germany)
Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield, UK)
Tomaz Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Vaclav Kubon (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic)
Anna Kupsc (University Paris III, France)
Ruta Marcinkeviciene (Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania)
Agnieszka Mykowiecka (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Bruno Pouliquen (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Marko Tadic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Agata Savary (University of Tours, France)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Wojciech Skut (Google Inc., USA)
Ralf Steinberger (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Dusko Vitas (University of Beograd, Serbia)
Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finland) 

Program Committee Chair

Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)

Organizing Committee

Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Bruno Pouliquen (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Ralf Steinberger (Joint Research Centre, Italy)

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:30:00
From: Catherine Law < egclaw at inet.polyu.edu.hk >
Subject: 3rd International Symposium on Teaching English at Tertiary Level 

Full Title: 3rd International Symposium on Teaching English at Tertiary Level 

Date: 09-Jun-2007 - 10-Jun-2007
Location: Hong Kong, Hong Kong 
Contact Person: Catherine Law
Meeting Email: egclaw at inet.polyu.edu.hk
Web Site: http://www.engl.polyu.edu.hk/events/Callforpaper.html 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 15-Mar-2007 

Meeting Description:

The conference is jointly organised by Tsinghua University and the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University. It aims to provide a platform for academics to discuss
and review various issues related to teaching English at tertiary level. 

Issues and questions that the symposium will address:
- English for Academic/Specific Purposes
- Curriculum/syllabus/materials development & related research
- CALL/WELL/Distance learning
- Self-access language learning
- Teaching and learning styles
- Testing and assessment

The conference language will be English.

All presentations will be 30 minutes in length, including question time.

Your abstract should be a maximum of 250 words.  Please include with your
abstract: the title of your paper, your name, title, institution, e-mail address
and mailing address.

Send submissions to:

Dr Gillian Humphreys
Department of English
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hong Kong
Tel: +(852) 2766 7529
Fax: +(852) 2333 6569
Email: eghump at polyu.edu.hk

Deadline for Submission: 

15 March 2007 (Notices of acceptance will be sent by 15
April 2007.)

Publication: 

All presented papers will be considered for the Proceedings of the
3rd International Symposium on Teaching English at Tertiary Level.

Registration Fee: 

The registration fee will be HK$800 for regular participants
and HK$300 for students.

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