Appel: ACL-HLT 2011 Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 01:06:32 +0100
From: Pierre Zweigenbaum <pz at limsi.fr>
Message-Id: <201012190106.32742.pz at limsi.fr>
X-url: http://www.limsi.fr/~pz/bucc2011-comparable-corpora/
X-url: http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml

Apologies for multiple postings
Please distribute to colleagues

============================================================

    4th WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA

    Comparable Corpora and the Web

    Co-located with ACL-HLT 2011
    Portland, Oregon
    24 June 2011

    DEADLINE FOR PAPERS: 1st April 2011
    http://www.limsi.fr/~pz/bucc2011-comparable-corpora/
    Submission: https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/comparable/

    Endorsed by ACL SIGWAC
    (Special Interest Group on Web as Corpus)

    INVITED SPEAKER
      Kevin Knight, Information Sciences Institute, USC
      "Putting a Value on Comparable Data"

============================================================

MOTIVATION
In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research
in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In
language engineering, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use
comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications
such as statistical machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In
linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest in
themselves by making possible inter-linguistic discoveries and
comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that
comparable corpora are documents in one or several languages that are
comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions. We
believe that the linguistic definitions and observations related to
comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for
applications of statistical NLP. As such, it is of great interest to
bring together builders and users of such corpora.

Parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical
machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons
and terminologies. However, beyond a few language pairs such as
English-French or English-Chinese and a few contexts such as
parliamentary debates or legal texts, they remain a scarce resource,
despite the creation of automated methods to collect parallel corpora
from the Web. Interest in non-parallel forms of comparable corpora in
language engineering primarily ensued from the scarcity of parallel
corpora. This has motivated research concerning the use of comparable
corpora: pairs of monolingual corpora selected according to the same
set of criteria, but in different languages or language varieties.
Non-parallel yet comparable corpora overcome the two limitations of
parallel corpora, since sources for original, monolingual texts are
much more abundant than translated texts. However, because of their
nature, mining translations in comparable corpora is much more
challenging than in parallel corpora. What constitutes a good
comparable corpus, for a given task or per se, also requires specific
attention: while the definition of a parallel corpus is fairly
straightforward, building a non-parallel corpus requires control over
the selection of source texts in both languages.

With the advent of online data, the potential for building and
exploring comparable corpora is growing exponentially. Comparable
documents in languages that are very different from each other pose
special challenges as very often, the non-parallelness in sentences
can result from cultural and political differences.

TOPICS
The theme of the workshop will be "Comparable Corpora and the
Web". Nevertheless we solicit contributions to other topics as well,
including the following:

Building Comparable Corpora:
 * Human translations
 * Automatic and semi-automatic methods
 * Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the Web
 * Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
 * Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora
 * Rare and minority languages
 * Across language families
 * Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora

Applications of comparable corpora:
 * Human translations
 * Language learning
 * Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization
 * Bilingual projections
 * Machine translation
 * Writing assistance

Mining from Comparable Corpora:
 * Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from comparable
   corpora

 * Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of single
  words and multi-word expressions; proper names, named entities, etc.

IMPORTANT DATES
  1st April 2010    Deadline for submission
   25 April 2011    Notification
      6 May 2011    Final version
    24 June 2011    Workshop

SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Submissions should follow the ACL HLT 2011 length and formatting
requirements for long papers of six to eight (6--8) pages of content
with two (2) additional pages of references, found at
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml . They should be submitted as PDF
documents to the following address:

  https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/comparable/

For further information, please contact Pierre Zweigenbaum
pz(erase_at)limsi(erase_dot)fr

ORGANISERS
  Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI, CNRS, Orsay,
      and ERTIM, INALCO, Paris (France)
  Reinhard Rapp, Universities of Mainz (Germany)
      and Tarragona (Spain)
  Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds (UK)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
  Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Labs, US)
  Caroline Barrière (National Research Council Canada)
  Chris Biemann (Microsoft / Powerset, San Francisco, US)
  Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
  Hervé Déjean (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
  Kurt Eberle (Lingenio, Heidelberg, Germany)
  Andreas Eisele (European Commission, Luxembourg)
  Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France)
  Silvia Hansen-Schirra (University of Mainz, Germany)
  Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
  Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd, UK)
  Natalie Kübler (Université Paris Diderot, France)
  Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
  Tony McEnery (Lancaster University, UK)
  Emmanuel Morin (Université de Nantes, France)
  Reinhard Rapp (University of Tarragona, Spain)
  Sujith Ravi (Information Sciences Institute, University of
      Southern California, US)
  Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
  Michel Simard (National Research Council, Canada)
  Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, US)
  Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver, Inc., US)
  Yujie Zhang (National Institute of Information and Communications
      Technology, Japan)
  Michael Zock (Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale, CNRS,
      Marseille, France)
  Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS, France)

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