19.180, Calls: Computational Ling,Lang Documentation/Morocco

Tue Jan 15 22:03:55 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-180. Tue Jan 15 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.180, Calls: Computational Ling,Lang Documentation/Morocco

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1)
Date: 14-Jan-2008
From: Briony Williams < b.williams at bangor.ac.uk >
Subject: Collaboration: SALTMIL Workshop

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:01:38
From: Briony Williams [b.williams at bangor.ac.uk]
Subject: Collaboration: SALTMIL Workshop
E-mail this message to a friend:
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Full Title: Collaboration: SALTMIL Workshop 
Short Title: COLLAB 

Date: 27-May-2008 - 27-May-2008
Location: Marrakech, Morocco 
Contact Person: Briony Williams
Meeting Email: b.williams at bangor.ac.uk
Web Site:
http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/en/activities/lrec2008/lrec-2008-workshop-cfp.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Computational Linguistics;
General Linguistics; Language Documentation 

Call Deadline: 29-Feb-2008 

Meeting Description

'Collaboration: Interoperability Between People in the Creation of Language
Resources for Less-Resourced Languages'

LREC 2008 Pre-conference Workshop
Marrakech, Morocco: afternoon of Tuesday 27th May 2008
Organised by the SALTMIL Special Interest Group of ISCA

SALTMIL: http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
LREC 2008: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/ 

Call for Papers

''Collaboration: Interoperability Between People in the Creation of Language
Resources for Less-Resourced Languages''
		http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/en/activities/lrec2008/lrec-2008-workshop-cfp.html

Paper Submission	

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=saltmil2008

Papers are invited for the above half-day workshop, in the format outlined
below. Most submitted papers will be presented in poster form, though some
authors may be invited to present in lecture format.

Context and Focus

The minority or ''less resourced'' languages of the world are under increasing
pressure from the major languages (especially English), and many of them lack
full political recognition. Some minority languages have been well researched
linguistically, but most have not, and the majority do not yet possess basic
speech and language resources which would enable the commercial development of
products. This lack of language products may accelerate the decline of those
languages that are already struggling to survive. To break this vicious circle,
it is important to encourage the development of basic language resources as a
first step.

In recent years, linguists across the world have realised the need to document
endangered languages immediately, and to publish the raw data. This raw data can
be transformed automatically (or with the help of volunteers) into resources for
basic speech and language technology. It thus seems necessary to extend the
scope of recent workshops on speech and language technology beyond technological
questions of interoperability between digital resources: the focus will be on
the human aspect of creating and disseminating language resources for the
benefit of endangered and non-endangered less-resourced languages.

Topics

The theme of ''collaboration'' centres on issues involved in collaborating with:

- Trained researchers.
- Non-specialist workers (paid or volunteers) from the speaker community.
- The wider speaker community.
- Officials, funding bodies, and others.

Hence there will be a corresponding need for the following:

- With trained researchers: Methods and tools for facilitating collaborative
working at a distance.
- With non-specialist workers: Methods and tools for training new workers for
specific tasks, and laying the foundations for continuation of these skills
among native speakers.
- With the wider speaker community: Methods of gaining acceptance and wider
publicity for the work, and of increasing the take-up rates after completion of
the work.
- With others: Methods of presenting the work in non-specialist terms, and of
facilitating its progress.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

- Bringing together people with very different backgrounds.
- How to organize volunteer work (some endangered languages have active volunteers).
- How to train non-specialist volunteers in elicitation methods.
- Working with the speaker community: strengthening acceptance of ICT and
language resources among the speaker community.
- Working collaboratively to build speech and text corpora with few existing
language resources and no specialist expertise.
- Web-based creation of linguistic resources, including web 2.0.
- The development of digital tools to facilitate collaboration between people.
- Licensing issues; open source, proprietary software.
- Re-use of existing data; interoperability between tools and data.
- Language resources compatible with limited computing power environments (old
machines, the $100 handheld device, etc.)
- General speech and language resources for minority languages, with particular
emphasis on software tools that have been found useful.

Important Dates

29 February 2008 - Deadline for submission
17 March 2008 - Notification
31 March 2008 -	Final version
27 May 2008 - Workshop

Organisers

- Briony Williams: Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University, Wales, UK
- Mikel Forcada: Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, Universitat
d'Alacant, Spain
- Kepa Sarasola: Dept. of Computer Languages, University of the Basque Country

Programme Committee

- Briony Williams: Bangor University, Wales, UK
- Mikel Forcada: Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
- Kepa Sarasola: University of the Basque Country
- Atelach Alemu Argaw: Stockholm University, Sweden
- Julie Berndsen, University College Dublin, Ireland
- Shannon Bischoff, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico
- Lori Levin, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
- Climent Nadeu, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
- Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
- Bojan Petek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
- Oliver Streiter, National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Submission Information

We expect short papers of max 3500 words (about 4-6 pages) describing research
addressing one of the above topics, to be submitted as PDF documents by
uploading to the following URL:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=saltmil2008

The final papers should not have more than 6 pages, adhering to the stylesheet
that will be adopted for the LREC Proceedings (to be announced later on the
Conference web site).

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