Appel: ACL Workshop on Balto-Slavonic NLP and IE

Wed Mar 7 09:13:53 UTC 2007

Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:01:56 +0100
From: Ralf Steinberger <ralf.steinberger at jrc.it>
Message-id: <003001c75ca1$0c4902f0$d547bf8b at IPSC.TLD>
X-url: http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007
X-url: http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/
X-url: http://lml.bas.bg/IESL2003
X-url: http://nl.ijs.si/mpsl03
X-url: http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles
X-url: http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007/submission
X-url: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40
X-url: http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007</a

SECOND CALL  FOR  PAPERS

------------------------

Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing 2007 (BSNLP 2007)

with Special Theme: Information Extraction and Enabling Technologies

June 29, 2007 

Prague, Czech Republic

http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007

BSNLP will be held in conjunction with the ACL 2007 conference
(http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/)

and is co-organised by the European Commission's Joint Research
Centre.

TOPIC AND MOTIVATION:

The recent political and economic changes in Central and Eastern
Europe and the related on-going enlargement of the European Union
brings into focus new cultures and languages. Among them, the
languages from the Balto-Slavonic group have an outstanding role
because of their rich cultural heritage and the widespread use - over
400 million speakers.

The topic of the workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP)
for the Balto-Slavonic languages, with the focus on Information
Extraction (IE) and enabling technologies for this language
family. The task of IE is to identify a predefined set of concepts
from natural language text. The spectrum of IE tasks ranges from
named-entity recognition, through relation extraction and co-reference
resolution to the identification of complex events and cross-document
entity profile extraction. Although a considerable amount of
IE-related work exists, most of the studies are concentrated on a few
major languages. Research on this topic, as well as on general-purpose
NLP tools in the context of Balto-Slavonic languages, is still in its
early stage and is progressing relatively slowly. Due to some specific
phenomena like the highly inflectional character and relatively free
word order, a construction of IE systems and other language processing
tools (question-answering, text summarization, machine translation)
for these languages is an intriguing and challenging task.

This workshop can be seen as the follow-up to the successful workshop
on Information Extraction for Slavonic and Other Central and Eastern
European Languages (http://lml.bas.bg/IESL2003) held in conjunction
with the RANLP 2003 conference. It is also related to the EACL 2003
workshop on Morphological Processing of Slavic Languages
(http://nl.ijs.si/mpsl03). In particular, we would strongly encourage
submissions describing systems, resources or solutions that are made
available to the wider public, as these would help to promote
computational linguistics applications for these languages.

AREAS OF INTEREST include, but are not limited to:

A. Specific challenges for Balto-Slavonic NLP, in particular in the
context of IE and underlying technologies

- text segmentation
- morphological analysis
- morphology models
- morpho-syntactic disambiguation
- named-entity recognition 
- named-entity disambiguation (e.g., geo-referencing)
- named-entity lemmatisation
- term and keyword extraction
- name variant recognition and merging
- syntactic parsing and chunking
- co-reference resolution
- word sense disambiguation
- corpus-based knowledge acquisition

B. Multilingual IE frameworks and techniques applied to these languages

- tools and resources (freely available for research purposes will be
  preferred)

- experience with, and evaluation of, linguistic data and processing
  resources

- comparative evaluation between languages

C. IE solutions for these languages:

- scenario template filling / event extraction
- relation extraction
- automatic pattern learning
- corpus studies and statistical techniques for IE
- IE from Web sources
- IE-based ontology population
- IE evaluation
- IE techniques for Question/Answering and Answer Extraction
- Utilisation of IE-based techniques in other NLP applications

INTENDED AUDIENCE

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and
practitioners working on NLP for Balto-Slavonic languages, in
particular on IE and core technologies supporting IE for these
languages. The workshop will give an opportunity to exchange ideas and
experience, to discuss hard-to-tackle problems in this field of
research, and to make available resources more widely known.

SUBMISSION

Papers should describe original work and should indicate the state of
completion of the reported results. In particular, an overlap with
previously published work should be clearly mentioned. Submissions
will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of
presentation, usability, and significance/relevance to the workshop.

Submissions should follow the two-column format of the ACL 2007
main-conference proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages,
including references. We recommend to use either the LaTeX style file
or the Microsoft-Word style file, which can be found at
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles.

The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include
the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-citations and
other references that could reveal the author's identity should be
avoided.

Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted
papers is Adobe PDF. Papers must be submitted no later than April 1,
2006 using the submission webpage
http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007/submission.

Submissions will be reviewed by 3 members of the Program Committee. 

Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to
produce camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the ACL
workshop proceedings.

IMPORTANT DATES

Workshop Paper Submission deadline: April 1
Notification of Acceptance: April 25
Camera-ready Version: May 9
Workshop: June 29, 2007.

LOCATION

Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, is located in the centre of
Europe. It is one of the most valuable historical city reserves in
Europe. The historical core of the city is listed in the UNESCO World
Cultural and Natural Heritage Register.

The workshop itself will take place in the TOP HOTEL Praha, located in
the quiet neighbourhood of the Prague 4 district, only 15-20 minutes
from the historic centre of Prague.

Prague is easily reachable by car, bus or train from Central Europe
(only 3-hour drive from Vienna or Budapest or 4 hours from Berlin or
Munich), by cheap flights from the rest of Europe, and by several
direct flights from overseas.

FURTHER INFORMATION

For further information please write to bsnlp2007 at jrc.it or check the
workshop web page http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Tania Avgustinova (University of Saarland / DFKI, Germany)
Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield, UK)
Tomaz Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Vaclav Kubon (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic)
Anna Kupsc (Loria, France)
Ruta Marcinkeviciene (Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania)
Agnieszka Mykowiecka (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Bruno Pouliquen (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Marko Tadic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Agata Savary (University of Tours, France)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Wojciech Skut (Google Inc., USA)
Ralf Steinberger (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Dusko Vitas (University of Beograd, Serbia)
Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finland) 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR

Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Bruno Pouliquen (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Ralf Steinberger (Joint Research Centre, Italy)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Message diffuse par la liste Langage Naturel <LN at cines.fr>
Informations, abonnement : http://www.atala.org/article.php3?id_article=48
English version       : 
Archives                 : http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/ln.html
                                http://liste.cines.fr/info/ln

La liste LN est parrainee par l'ATALA (Association pour le Traitement
Automatique des Langues)
Information et adhesion  : http://www.atala.org/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------