Appel: 1st CfP Language Resource Merging, LREC 2012 Workshop

Wed Dec 21 21:45:51 UTC 2011

Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:04:59 +0100
From: ELRA ELDA Information <info at elda.org>
Message-ID: <4EEF529B.2080304 at elda.org>
X-url: http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share
X-url: http://www.panacea-lr.eu/

[Apologies for multiple postings]

**1st Call for Papers**
LREC 2012 Workshop on: Language Resource Merging

22 May 2012 -- Afternoon Session

*CONTEXT*

The availability of adequate language resources has been a well-known
bottleneck for most high-level language technology applications,
e.g. Machine Translation, parsing, and Information Extraction, for at
least 15 years , and the impact of the bottleneck is becoming all the
more apparent with the availability of higher computational power and
massive storage, since modern language technologies are capable of using
far more resources than the community produces. The present landscape is
characterized by the existence of numerous scattered resources, many of
which have differing levels of coverage, types of information and
granularity. Taken singularly, existing resources do not have sufficient
coverage, quality or richness for robust large-scale applications, and
yet they contain valuable information (Monachini et al. 2004 and 2006;
Soria et al. 2006; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu et
al. 2011). Differing technology or application requirements, ignorance
of the existence of certain resources, and difficulties in accessing and
using them, has led to the proliferation of multiple, unconnected
resources that, if merged, could constitute a much richer repository of
information augmenting either coverage or granularity, or both, and
consequently multiplying the number of potential language technology
applications. Merging, combining and/or compiling larger resources from
existing ones thus appears to be a promising direction to take.
The re-use and merging of existing resources is not altogether unknown.
For example, WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) has been successfully reused in a
variety of applications. But this is the exception rather than the rule;
in fact, merging, and enhancing existing resources is uncommon, probably
because it is by no means a trivial task given the profound differences
in formats, formalisms, metadata, and linguistic assumptions.  The
language resource landscape is on the brink of a large change,
however. With the proliferation of accessible metadata catalogues, and
resource repositories (such as the new META-SHARE
(http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share) infrastructure), a potentially large
number of existing resources will be more easily located, accessed and
downloaded. Also, with the advent of distributed platforms for the
automatic production of language resources, such as PANACEA
(http://www.panacea-lr.eu/), new language resources and linguistic
information capable of being integrated into those resources will be
produced more easily and at a lower cost. Thus, it is likely that
researchers and application developers will seek out resources already
available before developing new, costly ones, and will require methods
for merging/combining various resources and adapting them to their
specific needs.  Up to the present day, most resource merging has been
done manually, with only a small number of attempts reported in the
literature towards (semi-)automatic merging of resources (Crouch & King
2005; Pustejovsky et al. 2005; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009;
Necsulescu et al. 2011). In order to take a further step towards the
scenario depicted above, in which resource merging and enhancing is a
reliable and accessible first step for researchers and application
developers, experience and best practices must be shared and discussed,
as this will help the whole community avoid any waste of time and
resources.

*
AIMS OF THE WORKSHOP*
This half-day workshop is meant to be part of a series of meetings
constituting an ongoing forum for sharing and evaluating the results of
different methods and systems for the automatic production of language
resources (the first one was the LREC 2010 Workshop on Methods for the
Automatic Production of Language Resources and their Evaluation
Methods).  The main focus of this workshop is on (semi-)automatic means
of merging language resources, such as lexicons, corpora and
grammars. Merging makes it possible to re-use, adapt, and enhance
existing resources, alongside new, automatically created ones, with the
goal of reducing the manual intervention required in language resource
production, and thus ultimately production costs.

*WORKSHOP TOPICS*
The topics of the workshop are related to best practices, methods,
techniques and experimental results regarding the merging of various
types of language resources, such as lexicons and corpora, especially in
support of language technology applications. In particular, new methods
for automatic merging with a view towards reducing human intervention
will be most welcome.

Topics for submission include, but are not limited to:
- Experiments on (semi-)automatic merging of automatically produced
  resources

- Experiments on the merging of two or more existing resources
  containing the same or different levels of linguistic information

- Studies or experiments on merging resources at different levels of
  granularity (corpora, lexicons, grammars)

- Studies or experiments on unifying, mapping or converting encoding
  formats

- Comparison between different resources and mapping algorithms to
  provide desired merging

- Use of linguistic information from different sources in high-level
  language applications

- Use of new, merged language resources in language technology
  applications

*SUBMISSIONS*

Interested participants must submit a preliminary paper of about 4-6
pages including references (between 2000-2500 words). For the submission
please use the online form on START LREC Conference Manager at:
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/MergingLR2012/ When submitting a paper
from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential
information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies,
standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work
described in the paper or are a new result of your research.
For further information on this new initiative, please refer to
http://www.lrecconf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012
Papers will be peer-reviewed by the workshop Program Committee.

*IMPORTANT DATES*
· Deadline for paper submission: 15 February 2012
· Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2012
· Submission of camera-ready version of papers: 31 March 2012
· Workshop date: 22 May 2012 -- Afternoon Session

*ORGANIZING COMMITTEE*
Núria Bel, UPF, Barcelona, Spain
Maria Gavrilidou, ILSP-"Athena", Athens, Greece,
Monica Monachini, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Valeria Quochi, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Laura Rimell, University of Cambridge, UK
Contacts
lrec12_workshop_merging at ilc.cnr.it

*PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:*
Victoria Arranz, ELDA, Paris, France
Paul Buitelaaar, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Nicoletta Calzolari, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Olivier Hamon, ELDA, Paris, France
Ales( Horák, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, Mass. USA
Bernardo Magnini, FBK, Trento, Italy
Paola Monachesi, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Jan Odijk, , Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Muntsa Padró, IULA, Barcellona, Spain
Karel Pala, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Thierry Poibeau University of Cambridge, UK and CNRS, Paris, France
Benoît Sagot, INRIA, Paris, France
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Maurizio Tesconi, CNR-IIT, Pisa

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