APPEL: Workshop on COMPILING AND PROCESSING SPOKEN LANGUAGE CORPORA

Fri Jan 16 17:12:47 UTC 2004

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2ND CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on

COMPILING AND PROCESSING SPOKEN LANGUAGE CORPORA

http://lands.let.kun.nl/CPSLC/

Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal
24th May 2004

Workshop to be held in conjunction with the 4th International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) Main
conference: 26-27-28 May 2004 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/

Aim

The aim of the workshop is to bring together people working on the
development (compilation and processing) of spoken language corpora.*
The workshop will provide participants with the opportunity to
exchange views and share experiences. Moreover, the workshop is
instrumental in taking stock of and evaluating the present
state-of-the-art. The workshop thus aims to contribute to the
development of a future roadmap that will guide the development of
standards, tools, etc. for use with spoken language corpora.

*The term ?spoken language corpora? is used here to distinguish such
corpora from speech corpora or speech databases: speech corpora are
collections of spoken data that are typically recorded for specific
purposes by specific users (speech corpora/databases such as SpeechDat
Car that are used for developing consumer applications). Usually such
databases lack the richness of linguistic annations that is pursued
for spoken language corpora.

Background and motivation

Despite the wide experience gained in the compilation of written
language corpora, working with spoken language data is not immediately
straightforward as spoken language involves many novel aspects that
need to be taken care of. The fact that spoken language is transient
is sometimes offered as an explanation for why it is more difficult to
collect spoken data than it is to compile a corpus of written
data. However, it is not just the capturing of data that is anything
but trivial. Once the (audio) data have been collected and stored, the
next step is to produce some kind of transcript (whether orthographic
or phonetic). Further annotations such as POS tagging, lemmatisation,
syntactic annotation, and prosodic annotation may then build upon this
transcription. Among the problems encountered in the processing of
spoken language data are the following:

     * There is as yet little experience with the large scale
transcription of spoken language data. Procedures and guidelines must
be developed, and tools implemented.

     * Well-established practices that have originated from working on
written language corpora do not hold up when trying to cope with the
idiosyncracies of the spoken language. This is true for all levels of
linguistic annotation. Annotation schemes need to be reconsidered and
tools must be adapted.

     * In so far as standards have emerged (eg CES), they need to be
adapted in order to be able to cater for the needs of spoken language
corpora.

* By their very nature, spoken language corpora bring together speech
and language technologists and linguists from various
backgrounds. Ideally, such corpora should address the needs of all
these different user groups. Often, however, there is a conflict of
interest. For example, the quality of recordings of spontaneous
conversations in noisy environments although highly interesting and
worthwhile from a linguistic perspective will prove too poor to be of
any use to someone doing research into speech recognition.

Workshop topics

Topics of interest include orthographic transcription, phonetic
transcription, prosodic annotation, segmentation, POS tagging and
lemmatisation, parsing, and discourse analysis. Contributions on the
development and implementation of standards or guidelines for spoken
language corpora (annotation schemes, meta-data descriptions) are also
invited, as are contributions describing software for the exploitation
of spoken language corpora.

Format of the Workshop

The workshop will comprise of oral presentations of previously
submitted papers that went through a double peer review process. The
proceedings of the workshop will be published by the local organising
committee.

Important dates

24th January 2004 Deadline for submission of (full) papers

1st March 2004 Notification of acceptance and preliminary programme

21st March 2004 Deadline for submission of final versions of accepted
papers for the proceedings

3rd April 2004 Definitive programme 24th May 2004 Workshop

Submissions

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for oral
presentation. Only full papers in English will be accepted, and the
length of the paper should not exceed 6000 words (or the equivalent in
space for diagrams).  Submissions in MS Word, Postscript, PDF or RTF
should be submitted through the workshop website:
http://lands.let.kun.nl/CPSLC/

Registration

Workshop participants need to register through the LREC website:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/ The fee for this half-day workshop
is 50 Euro for conference participants and 85 for others and includes
a coffee break and the workshop proceedings.

Organising committee

Nelleke OOSTDIJK, University of Nijmegen
Gjert KRISTOFFERSEN, University of Bergen
Geoffrey SAMPSON, University of Sussex

Programme committee

Daan BROEDER	Max Planck Institute
Emanuela CRESTI	University of Florence
Gjert KRISTOFFERSEN	University of Bergen
Tony MCENERY	University of Lancaster
Nelleke OOSTDIJK	University of Nijmegen
Pavel IRCING	University of Western Bohemia
Geoffrey SAMPSON	University of Sussex
Antonio Moreno SANDOVAL	University of Madrid
Jean VERÓNIS	Université de Provence

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