Appel: LREC : workshop Customizing Knowledge in NLP Applications

[Alexis Nasr]

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                             Deadline Extended:
                                 March 15
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                           FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

                Customizing Knowledge in NLP Applications:
                     Strategies, Issues and Evaluation

             A workshop at the Third International Conference
                   on Language Resources and Evaluation
                    http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2002/


The workshop addresses one of the key challenges in the development of
NLP applications: bridging a generic framework with domain/task specific
requirements. The issue reduces to the problem of customization of
linguistic software and the degree to which this effort can be limited
once a given component (i.e., grammar, lexicon, thesaurus, interpreter,
tagger, etc.) is used across applications and across domains.

As natural language products play an increasingly more prominent role in
the market for knowledge management, information extraction, search and
navigation, the suppliers of technologies still struggle with the
ability to produce high-qualitysoftware which can be deployed to new
domains and relatively similar tasks in a short time within budget.

The issue of genericity versus specificity plays out in a number of
areas; the key to solving the problem is that of identifying whether
there is a particular locus to the dilemma: the architecture of the
system, the language resources, the application components.

The problem of customization directly affects the architecture, the
development process as well as the evaluation benchmarks for NLP
systems. Although the notion of "knowledge bottleneck" has been
essentially attached to NLP systems relying on knowledge representation
strategies, even statistical NLP systems suffer from a customization
problem.  The goal of the workshop is to emphasize the tension as well
as the potential for crossfertilization between knowledge-based and
corpus-based approaches to customization. While both approaches are
needed, the key issue is how to reconcile potential contrasts and define
the optimal balance between the two in order to maximise benefits for
the content creation/management/delivery applications of focus, e.g.
categorization, search, navigation, retrieval, extraction,
personalization, generation etc.

SUBMISSIONS

The workshop aims at bringing together people from both academia and
industry to address the variety of topics in the areas of customization,
knowledge representation and acquisition, and metrics for measuring
complexity. We invite submissions of papers in all areas of
customization of NLP components, including, but not limited to, the
following topics:

* The locus of generic and specific information in NLP systems;
* Generic and domain specific language resources;
* Knowledge acquisition and knowledge development strategies;
* Customization strategies in statistical NLP;
* Customization strategies in knowledge-based NLP systems;
* Modularization of applications for purposes of reducing customization
efforts;
* Criteria, strategies and metrics for assessing "degree of
customization."

Papers should be submitted electronically to r-knippen at attglobal.net and
should be in Word or postscript format.

Papers should be no longer than 3,000 words, including the abstract.
Contributors should also provide their affiliation and email contact.

Presentations will be allotted 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute
discussion.

Upon notification of acceptance, authors will be provided with the LREC
stylesheet and make any necessary reformatting for the camera-ready
version to be published in the proceedings.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for workshop submission	15th March 2002
Notification of Acceptance 		1st April 2002
Final version of paper for proceedings 	15th April 2002
Workshop 				27th May 2002 (14:30 to 20:00)

WORKSHOP REGISTRATION

The registration fees for the workshop are:
* If you are not attending LREC: 70 EURO
* If you are attending LREC: 45 Euro

These fees cover the following: a copy of the proceedings of the
attended workshop, coffee-breaks and refreshments.

Participation in the workshop is limited by the venue.

Requests for participation will be processed on first come first served
basis.

Registration will be handled by the LREC Secretariat.

FURTHER DETAILS

For any further questions relating the workship itself, visit the
conference website at http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2002/ or e-mail
federica_busa at yahoo.com.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Federica Busa		Webegg			federica_busa at yahoo.com
Evelyne Viegas 		Microsoft Corporation	evelynev at microsoft.com
Antonio Sanfilippo 	SRA International	antonio_sanfilippo at sra.com
Robert Knippen		LingoMotors Inc.	r-knippen at attglobal.net
Connie Parkes		Dictaphone	Cornelia.Parkes at dictaphone.com
Saliha Azzam		Microsoft Corporation	salihaa at microsoft.com
Piek Vossen		Irion Technologies
Remi Zajac		Systran Corporation
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