Appel: ACL2003 Resources Information Infrastructure Workshop

[Alexis Nasr]

        ACL2003 Resources Information Infrastructure Workshop
   _________________________________________________________________

                            CALL for PAPERS

             Towards a Resources Information Infrastructure

                 Workshop at ACL2003 in Sapporo (Japan)

                          July 11 and 12 2003

                     Organised by ENABLER / ELSNET

Description

 The problem addressed by this workshop is the well-known information
 problem. People are creating, exploring and exploiting language
 resources all over the world. Those who are working with resources
 know a lot about their own and other resources, and they are generally
 prepared to share this knowledge, their expertise and in many cases
 even their resources with others via publications in journals,
 presentations at conferences, and via the web.

 Unfortunately this information, however public, is not accessible in
 any systematic way for those who need resources, who want to know what
 sort of resources exist, how resources should be annotated, which
 standards to adhere to, which tools to use, etc etc. We will call this
 problem the 'Resources Information Problem'.

 The problem has also a geographical dimension: As work on specific
 languages is very often concentrated in specific parts of the world,
 much relevant information has a tendency to stay in one geographical
 place. This is an obstacle for those who are working on these same
 languages in different parts of the world, and it makes it harder to
 port knowledge and expertise gained on one language to other
 languages.

 The above observation are far from novel, and it would be naive to
 think that the problems will ever go away. At the same time one can
 observe that there are organisations (associations, agencies,
 projects, networks, etc) that have access to parts or fragments of
 this information and that have their own infrastructures that
 facilitate access to this information by internal or external people.

 The purpose of this workshop is to investigate how we can exploit the
 existing infrastructures to a maximum in order to facilitate
 world-wide access to information on language resources. The role of
 the workshop will be to bootstrap this process.

Approach

   * First of all we will try to make an initial map of the language
     resources landscape world-wide. This map will include actors,
     organisations, repositories, standards, projects, tool libraries,
     etc etc. All participants will be asked beforehand to submit
     pointers to such items. They will be collected and published.
   * At the workshop we will invite representatives of a number of
     organisations that can be seen as key actors in the field, and
     they will be asked to present ideas about the way their
     organisation could contribute to solving the Resources Information
     Problem. These ideas could range from very concrete and
     immediately implementable proposals to longer term and visionary
     actions.
   * A round table discussion at the workshop will aim at the creation
     of convergence, coherence and synergies between the proposed
     actions. The intended output is a catalogue of actions to
     facilitate access to resources information that could be
     implemented (almost) immediately, a skeleton plan for longer term
     actions, and firm commitment from key players to make these things
     happen.

Target audience

 Representatives of parties that could play a key role in providing
 access to resources information, such as (but not limited to)
   * Resources distribution agencies, e.g. LDC and ELDA/ELRA
   * Professional organisations, e.g. ACL, ISCA, and their regional
     branches, e.g. EACL, AACL, JACL, Asian NLP federation
   * Networks and resources infrastructure projects, e.g. ENABLER,
     ISLE. ELSNET
   * Committees, e.g. ICWLR, COCOSDA
   * National resources or infrastructure projects, e.g. Technolangue,
     Collate
   * International actions, e.g. OLAC
   * Researchers and developers interested in improving the
     language resources infrastructure for our community

Invited and submitted papers

 We expect to invite some 15 representatives to give their
 presentations, but in addition we are issuing an open call for papers
 addressing the resources information problem and possible solutions.
 These papers will be reviewed in the usual way.

Submission format

 Please submit full papers of maximum 8 pages (including references,
 figures etc). Authors should follow the main conference ACL style
 format. Electronic submission only. Send the pdf, postscript, or MS
 Word form of your submission to: Steven Krauwer
 (steven.krauwer at elsnet.org) who will also answer any queries regarding
 the submission.

Important Dates

 Submission deadline for workshop papers:   13 April 2003
 Notification of accepted papers:             14 May 2003
 Deadline for camera ready copies             29 May 2003
 Workshop dates:                          11-12 July 2003

Workshop Format

 It will be a two-day workshop, with invited and submitted
 presentations in the mornings, and topical panels and round
 table discussion in the afternoons, including an open meeting of
 the newly created International Coordination Committee for
 Written Language Resources.

Programme Committee

 As this workshop is jointly proposed by ELSNET and ENABLER (two EU
 funded projects aimed at providing collaboration infrastructures), we
 have invited all ca 60 members of the ELSNET and ENABLER Boards to
 constitute the core programme committee. We may want to invite
 additional members from Asia and other parts of the world in order to
 ensure sufficient geographical coverage.

 A full list of PC members will be published on the workshop
 website at http://www.elsnet.org/acl2003-workshop


 The workshop will be jointly chaired by Steven Krauwer (ELSNET) and
 Nicoletta Calzolari/Antonio Zampolli (ENABLER)

Historical note

 This workshop can be seen as a follow-up of the workshop organised at
 ACL2000 in Hong Kong, entitled 'Towards infrastructures for global
 collaboration'. One of the conclusions of this workshop was that the
 field of language resources would offer good opportunities for
 collaborative actions, and the first concrete goal was the creation of
 an international resources federation, a first step towards which is
 now embodied by the proposal to set up an International Committee for
 Written Language Resources.

 The proposed workshop should lead to the definition of concrete
 actions to be carried out under the auspices of ICWLR, in
 collaboration with other organisations.

Contact info

 Steven Krauwer (steven.krauwer at elsnet.org),
 ELSNET (http://www.elsnet.org)




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