19.326, Calls: Computational Ling/Morocco; General Ling/United Kingdom

Tue Jan 29 17:46:50 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-326. Tue Jan 29 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.326, Calls: Computational Ling/Morocco; General Ling/United Kingdom

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1)
Date: 29-Jan-2008
From: Anton Batliner < batliner at informatik.uni-erlangen.de >
Subject: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 

2)
Date: 28-Jan-2008
From: Kakia Chatsiou < achats at essex.ac.uk >
Subject: 3rd Language at the University of Essex Postgraduate Conference

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:42:10
From: Anton Batliner [batliner at informatik.uni-erlangen.de]
Subject: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-326.html&submissionid=167721&topicid=3&msgnumber=1  

Full Title: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 
Short Title: LREC 

Date: 26-May-2008 - 01-Jun-2008
Location: Marrakech, Morocco 
Contact Person: Helene Mazo
Meeting Email: lrec at lrec-conf.org
Web Site: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 12-Feb-2008 

Meeting Description:

LREC 2008 - 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Main Conference: 28 - 30 May 2008
Workshops and Tutorials: 26 - 27 May and 31 May - 1 June 2008

The sixth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)
will be organised in 2008 by ELRA in cooperation with a wide range of
international associations and organisations.

Palais des Congrès Mansour Eddahbi, Marrakech - Morocco

Conference web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/ 

Second Call for Papers

Second International Workshop on Emotion (satellite of LREC):

Corpora for Research on Emotion and Affect

Monday, 26 May 2008
Palais des Congrès Mansour Eddahbi
in Marrakech (Morocco)

In Association with

6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

LREC2008 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/

This decade has seen an upsurge of interest in systems that register emotion (in
a broad sense) and react appropriately to it. Emotion corpora are fundamental
both to developing sound conceptual analyses and to training these
'emotion-oriented systems' at all levels - to recognise user emotion, to express
appropriate emotions, to anticipate how a user in one state might respond to a
possible kind of reaction from the machine, etc. Corpora have only begun to grow
with the area, and much work is needed before they provide a sound foundation.

This workshop follows a first successful workshop on Corpora for research
on Emotion and Affect at LREC 2006. The HUMAINE network of excellence
(http://emotion-research.net/) has brought together several groups working on
the development of emotional databases, the HUMAINE association will
continue this effort and the workshop aims to broaden the interaction that has
developed in that context. The HUMAINE Association portal will provide a range
of services for individuals, such as a web presence, access to data, and an
email news service; special interest groups will be provided with a working
folder, a mailing list, and a discussion forum or a blog. Conferences, workshops
and research projects in the area of emotion-oriented computing can be given a
web presence on the portal.

Papers are invited in the area of corpora for research on emotion and affect.
They may raise one or more of the following questions. What kind of theory of
emotion is needed to guide the area? What are appropriate sources? Which
modalities should be considered, in which combinations? What are the realistic
constraints on recording quality? How can the emotional content of episodes be
described within a corpus? Which emotion-related features should a corpus
describe, and how? How should access to corpora be provided? What level of
standardisation is appropriate? How can quality be assessed? Ethical issues in
database development and access.

Description of the Specific Technical Issues of the Workshop:
Many models of emotion are common enough to affect the way teams go about
collecting and describing emotion-related data. Some which are familiar
and intuitively appealing are known to be problematic, either because they
are theoretically dated or because they do not transfer to practical contexts.
To evaluate the resources that are already available, and to construct valid new
corpora, research teams need some sense of the models that are relevant to the area.

What are Appropriate Sources?
In the area of emotion, some of the hardest problems involve acquiring basic
data. Four main types of source are commonly used. Their potential contributions
and limitations need to be understood.

Acted:
Many widely used emotion databases consist of acted representations of
emotion (which may or may not be generated by actors). The method is
extremely convenient, but it is known that systems trained on acted material may
not transfer to natural emotion. It has to be established what kind of acted
material is useful for what purposes.

Application-driven:
A growing range of databases are derived from specific applications (eg
call centres). These are ideal for some purposes, but access is often restricted
for commercial reasons, and it is highly desirable to have more
generic material that could underpin work on a wide range of applications.

General Naturalistic:
Data that is representative of everyday life is an attractive ideal, but very
difficult to collect. Making special-purpose recordings of everyday life is a
massive task, with the risk that recording changes behavior. Several teams have
used material from broadcasts, radio & TV (talk shows, current affairs). That
raises issues of access, signal quality, and genuineness.

Induction:
A natural ideal is to induce emotion of appropriate kinds under appropriate
circumstances. Satisfying induction is an elusive ideal, but new techniques are
gradually emerging.

Which Modalities Should be Considered, In Which Combinations?
Emotion is reflected in multiple channels - linguistic content, paralinguistic
expression, facial expression, eye movement, gesture, gross body movement,
manner of action, visceral changes (heart rate, etc), brain states (eeg
activity, etc). The obvious ideal is to cover all simultaneously, but that is
impractical - and it is not clear how often all the channels are actually
active. The community needs to clarify the relative usefulness of the channels,
and of strategies for sampling combinations.

What are the Realistic Constraints on Recording Quality?
Naturalism tends to be at odds with ease of signal processing. Understanding of
the relevant tradeoffs needs to be reached. That includes awareness of different
applications (high quality may not be crucial for defining the expressive
behaviors a virtual agent should show) and of timescale for solving particular
signal processing issues (e.g recovering features from images of heads in
arbitrary poses).

How Can the Emotional Content of Episodes be Described within a Corpus?
Several broad approaches exist to transcribing the emotional content of an
excerpt - using everyday emotion words; using dimensional descriptions
rooted in psychological theory (intensity, evaluation, activation, power); using
concepts from appraisal theory (perceived goal-conduciveness of a development,
potential for coping, etc). These are being developed in specific ways driven by
goals such as elegance, inter-rater reliability, and faithfulness to the
subtlety of everyday emotion, relevance to agent decisions, etc.  There seems to
be a real prospect of achieving an agreed synthesis of the main schemes.

Which Emotion-related Features Should a Corpus Describe, and How?
Corresponding to each emotion-related channel is one or more sets of signs
relevant to conveying emotion. For instance, paralinguistic signs exist at the
level of basic features - F0, intensity, formant-related properties, and so on;
at the level of linguistic features of prosody ; and at more global levels (tune
shapes, repetitions, etc). Even for speech, inventories of relevant signs need
to be developed, and for channels such as idle body movements, few descriptive
systems have been proposed. Few teams have the expertise to annotate many types
of sign competently, and so it is important to establish ways of allowing teams
that do have the expertise to make their annotations available as part of a
database. Mainly for lower level features, automatic transcription methods
exist, and their role needs to be clarified. In particular, tests of their
reliability are needed, and that depends on data that can serve as a reference.

How Should Access to Corpora be Provided?
Practically, it is clearly important to find ways of establishing a sustainable
and easily expandable multi-modal database for any sorts of emotion-related
data; to develop tools for easily importing and exporting data; to develop
analysis tools and application programmers interfaces to work on the stored data
and meta-data; and to provide ready access to existing data from previous
projects. Approaches to those goals need to be defined.

What Level of Standardisation is Appropriate?
Standardisation is clearly desirable in the long term, but with so many basic
issues unresolved, it is not clear where real consensus can be achieved and
where it is better to encourage competition among different options.

How Can Quality be Assessed?
It is clear that some existing corpora should not be used for serious research.
The problem is to develop quality assurance procedures that can direct potential
users toward those which can.

Ethical Issues in Database Development and Access:
Corpora that show people behaving emotionally are very likely to raise
ethical issues - not simply about signed release forms, but about the
impact of appearing in a public forum talking (for instance) about topics
that distress or excite them. Adequate guidelines need to be developed.

All of the questions above will be studied during the workshop and will
contribute to the study of practical, methodological and technical issues
central to developing emotional corpora (such as the methodologies to be
used for emotional database creation, the coding schemes to be defined, 
the technical settings to be used for the collection, the selection of
appropriate coders).

The Organising Committee:
Laurence Devillers / Jean-Claude Martin
Spoken Language Processing group/ Architectures and Models for
Interaction, LIMSI-CNRS,
BP 133, 91403 Orsay Cedex, France
 (+33) 1 69 85 80 62 /  (+33) 1 69 85 81 04 (phone)
 (+33) 1 69 85 80 88 / (+33) 1 69 85 80 88 (fax)
devil at limsi.fr / martin at limsi.fr
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/devil/
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/martin/

Roddy Cowie / School of Psychology
Ellen Douglas-Cowie / Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Queen's
University, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK
+44 2890 974354 / +44 2890 975348  (phone)
+44 2890 664144 / +44 2890 ******  (fax)
http://www.psych.qub.ac.uk/staff/teaching/cowie/index.aspx
http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/staff/douglas-cowie/
r.cowie at qub.ac.uk / e.douglas-Cowie at qub.ac.uk

Anton Batliner - Lehrstuhl fuer Mustererkennung (Informatik 5)
Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg - Martensstrasse 3
91058 Erlangen - F.R. of Germany
Tel.: +49 9131 85 27823 - Fax.: +49 9131 303811
batliner at informatik.uni-erlangen.de
http://www5.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/Personen/batliner/

Contact: Laurence Devillers lrec-emotion at limsi.fr

Important Dates:
1rt call for paper: 21 December
2nd call for paper: 29 January
Deadline for 1500-2000 words abstract submission: 12 February
Notification of acceptance: 12 March
Final version of accepted paper: 4 April
Workshop full-day: 26 May

Submissions:
The workshop will consist of paper and poster presentations. Submitted abstracts
of papers for oral and poster must consist of about 1500-2000 words.

Final submissions should be 4 pages long, must be in English, and follow the
submission guidelines at LREC2008.

The preferred format is MS word or pdf. The file should be submitted via
email to lrec-emotion at limsi.fr as soon as possible, authors are encouraged to
send to lrec-emotion at limsi.fr a brief email indicating their intention to
participate, including their contact information and the topic they intend
to address in their submissions.

Proceedings of the workshop will be printed by the LREC Local Organising
Committee.

Submitted papers will be blind reviewed.

Time Schedule And Registration Fee:
The workshop will consist of a full-day session, there will be time for
collective discussions. For this full-day Workshop, the registration fee will be
specified on http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:42:17
From: Kakia Chatsiou [achats at essex.ac.uk]
Subject: 3rd Language at the University of Essex Postgraduate Conference
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-326.html&submissionid=167701&topicid=3&msgnumber=2 

Full Title: 3rd Language at the University of Essex Postgraduate Conference 
Short Title: LangUE 2008 

Date: 15-Mar-2008 - 15-Mar-2008
Location: Essex, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Kakia Chatsiou
Meeting Email: achats at essex.ac.uk
Web Site: http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/pgr/LangUE/LangUE2008/Home.shtm 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 08-Feb-2008 

Meeting Description:

LangUE 2008
University of Essex

The Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex
invites you to its third postgraduate day-conference which will be held
at the University of Essex on Saturday, 15th March 2008.

The conference aims at bringing together postgraduate students to
present and discuss current research, results and problems from any
field of linguistics. 

Call for Papers and Posters

Abstracts of no more than 250 words are invited on any topic in linguistics. The
deadline for receipt of abstracts has now been extended to Friday 8th February 2008.

Abstracts should not include the name and affiliation of the author(s). For
further details, refer to the LangUE 2008 submission form
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/pgr/langue/LangUE2008/LangUE-subform.doc

All abstracts should be in accordance with this submission form. Abstracts
should be sent to langue at essex.ac.uk. Note that no late submissions will be
accepted. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Please specify whether you intend to present a paper or a poster.

Authors will be notified of acceptance by 15th February 2008.

Conference Format:
The conference will include presentation of papers, posters and a plenary panel.

Invited Plenary Speakers:
We are pleased to announce Prof. Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge, UK) and
Prof. Harald Clahsen (University of Essex, UK) as this year's invited plenary
speakers.

Registration:
All presenters and attendees must pre-register for the conference by Friday 29th
February 2008.

For more information on registration, visit the Registration Information page
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/pgr/langue/LangUE2008/reginfo.shtm

Accommodation and Travel Information:
For information on accommodation and travel information, please see
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/pgr/langue/LangUE2008/visitor.shtm

Best regards,

The LangUE Committee

Kholoud Al-Thubaiti
Claire Batterham
Aikaterini (Kakia) Chatsiou
Sirirat Na Ranong
Elena (Lena) Papadopoulou
Philip Tipton
Keisuke Yoshimoto

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