Appel: 1st CfP Workshop on Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages, LREC 2012 Workshop

Wed Dec 21 21:48:24 UTC 2011

Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:33:04 +0100
From: ELRA ELDA Information <info at elda.org>
Message-ID: <4EEF5930.9080206 at elda.org>
X-url: http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
X-url: http://AfLaT.org/

[Apologies for multiple postings]

Call for Papers:
Workshop on "Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced 
languages"
8th SALTMIL Workshop on Minority Languages and the 4th workshop on 
African Language Technology (AfLaT2012).

A full-day workshop at LREC 2012

Tuesday, 22 May 2012.

Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre, Istanbul, Turkey
SALTMIL: http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
AfLaT: http://AfLaT.org/
LREC 2012: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/

Paper submission: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/Less-
RessourcedLang2012/

Papers are invited for the above full-day workshop, in the format
outlined below. Most submitted papers will be presented in poster form,
though some authors may be invited to present in lecture format. Context
and focus The 8th International Workshop of the ISCA Special Interest
Group on Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages (SALTMIL,
http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil) and the 4th Workshop on African Language
Technology (AfLaT2012) will be held as a joint effort in Istanbul, in
May 2012, as part of the 2012 International Language Resources and
Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012). Entitled "Language technology for
normalisation of less-resourced languages", the workshop is intended to
continue the series of SALTMIL/LREC workshops on computational language
resources for minority languages, held in Granada (1998), Athens (2000),
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2002) and Lisbon (2004), Genoa (2006),
Marrakech (2008) and Malta (2010) and the series of AfLaT workshops,
held in Athens (EACL2009), Malta (LREC2010) and Addis Ababa (AGIS11).
The Istanbul 2012 workshop aims to share information on tools and best
practices, so that isolated researchers will not need to start from
scratch. An important aspect will be the forming of personal contacts,
which can minimize duplication of effort. There will be a balance
between presentations of existing language resources, and more general
presentations designed to give background information needed by all
researchers.
While less-resourced languages and minority languages often struggle to
find their place in a digital world dominated by only a handful of
commercially interesting languages, a growing number of researchers are
working on alleviating this linguistic digital divide, through
localisation efforts, the development of BLARKs (basic language resource
kits) and practical applications of human language technologies. The
joint SALTMIL/AfLaT workshop on "Language technology for normalisation
of less-resourced languages" provides a unique opportunity to connect
these researchers and set up a common forum to meet and share the latest
developments in the field.

*Topics*

The workshop takes an inclusive approach to the word "normalisation",
considering it to include both technologies that help make languages
more "normal" in society and everyday life, as well as technologies that
normalise languages, i.e. help create or maintain a written standard or
support diversity in standards. We particularly focus on the challenges
less-resourced and minority languages face in the digital world. Papers
are invited that describe research and development in the following
areas in the area of technologies for language normalisation, including
(but not limited to) topics such as:

* Keyboard layouts and entry methods
* Standardisation in machine readable lexicons/dictionaries
* Computer-aided language learning (CALL)
* Dealing with language variants in NLP
* Automatic identification of varieties, dialects
* Corpus construction and annotation
* Terminology development and management
* MT between varieties of the same language
* Spelling correction/normalisation
* Machine translation (MT)
* Morphological analysers
* Part-of-speech taggers and parsers
* Speech recognition and synthesis
* Information extraction/retrieval
* Localisation efforts
* Mobile phones as a platform for HLT

*Schedule*
09.00 Registration/Opening
09.30 Invited talk 1
11.00 Oral Papers (3x 25+5mins)
12.30 Lunch
14:00 Oral Papers (3x 25+5mins)
16:00 Poster Session
17:00 Panel Discussion
17:30 SALTMIL Assembly
18:30 Closing

*Organisers (SALTMIL and AfLaT)*

* Mikel L. Forcada (SALTMIL): Machine Translation Group, School of
  Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
* Guy De Pauw (AfLaT): CLiPS - Computational Linguistics Group,
  University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
* Gilles-Maurice de Schryver(AfLaT): African Languages and Cultures,
  TshwaneDJe HLT, South Africa & Ghent University, Belgium
* Kepa Sarasola(SALTMIL): Dept. of Computer Languages, University of the
  Basque Country
* Francis M. Tyers(SALTMIL), Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes
  Informàtics, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
* Peter Waiganjo Wagacha(AfLaT): School of Computing & Informatics,
  University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya

*Programme committee*
* Iñaki Alegria: University of the Basque Country
* Núria Bel, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
* Lars Borin, Göteborgs universitet, Sweden
* Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa, South Africa
* Mikel L. Forcada, Universitat d'Alacant
* Dafydd Gibbon, University of Bielefeld, Germany
* Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
* Hrafn Loftsson, University of Reykjavik
* Guy De Pauw, CLiPS, Universiteit Antwerpen
* Laurette Pretorius, University of South Africa, South Africa
* Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Odetunji Odejobi, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria
* Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Universitat d'Alacant
* Kepa Sarasola, University of the Basque Country
* Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis University, USA
* Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Universiteit Gent
* Francis M. Tyers, Universitat d'Alacant
* Peter Waiganjo Wagacha, University of Nairobi

*Submissions*
We expect short papers of max 6,000 words (up to 6 pages) describing
research addressing one of the above topics, to be submitted as PDF
documents by using the LREC2012 START conference management system (URL:
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/Less-RessourcedLang2012//).
Submissions should be anonymized. When submitting a paper through the
START page, authors will be kindly asked to provide relevant information
about the resources that have been used for the work described in their
paper or that are the outcome of their research. For further information
on this initiative, please refer to
http://www.lrecconf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012. Authors will also be
asked to contribute to the Language Library, the new initiative of
LREC2012.  Submissions of papers should follow the same style as the
papers for the main LREC conference (an Author's Kit made of specific
guidelines and downloadable templates will be published on the
conference web site in due time). All contributions (including invited
papers) will be included in the workshop proceedings (CD). They will
also be published on the SALTMIL website.

*Important dates*
* 27 February 2012: Deadline for submission
* 14 March 2012: Notification
* 28 March 2012: Final version
* 22 May 2012: Workshop

*Registration*
Registration details will be announced in due course

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