Appel: LREC 2012 Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

Tue Feb 7 19:57:34 UTC 2012

Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 10:37:38 +0100
From: "Reinhard Rapp" <reinhardrapp at gmx.de>
Message-ID: <C0F6E2D4CFD7412B97D923E1EEF25EDB at medion>
X-url: http://hnk.ffzg.hr/5bucc2012

***** FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS *****

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

  5th WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA

  Language Resources for Machine Translation
  in Less-Resourced Languages and Domains

  Co-located with LREC 2012
  Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre
  Saturday, 26 May 2012

  DEADLINE FOR PAPERS: 15 February 2012

  http://hnk.ffzg.hr/5bucc2012

  Endorsed by
   * ACL SIGWAC (Special Interest Group on Web as Corpus)
   * FLaReNet (Fostering Language Resources Network)
   * META-NET (Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance)

  INVITED SESSION ON PROJECTS INVOLVING COMPARABLE CORPORA:

   * ACCURAT - Inguna Skadina (http://www.accurat-project.eu/)
   * LetsMT! - Andrejs Vasiljevs (https://www.letsmt.eu/)
   * PANACEA - Nuría Bel (http://panacea-lr.eu/)
   * PRESEMT - Adam Kilgarriff (http://www.presemt.eu/)
   * TTC - Béatrice Daille (http://www.ttc-project.eu/)

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

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.

The scarcity of parallel corpora 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.

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. To exemplify such issues in a practical setting, this year's
special focus will be on

   Language Resources for Machine Translation
   in Less-Resourced Languages and Domains

with the aim of overcoming the shortage of parallel resources when
building MT systems for less-resourced languages and domains,
particularly by usage of comparable corpora for finding parallel data
within and by reaching out for "hidden" parallel data. Lack of
sufficient language resources for many language pairs and domains is
currently one of the major obstacles in further advancement of machine
translation.

TOPICS

We solicit contributions including but not limited to the following
topics:

Topics related to the special theme:

* comparable corpora use in MT
* comparable corpora processing tools/kits for MT
* parallel corpora usage
* parallel corpora processing tools/platforms
* MT for less-resourced languages
* MT for less-resourced domains
* open source SMT systems (Moses, etc.)
* publicly available SMT

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 (TENTATIVE)

  15 February 2012    Deadline for submission of full papers
     10 March 2012    Notification of acceptance
     20 March 2012    Camera-ready papers due
       26 May 2012    Workshop date

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Papers should follow the LREC main conference formatting details (to be
announced on the conference website http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/)
and should be submitted as a PDF-file of no more than ten pages via the
START workshop manager: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/BUCC2012/
Reviewing will be double blind, so the papers should not reveal the
authors' identity. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings.

Double submission policy: Parallel submission to other meetings or
publications are possible but must be immediately notified to the
workshop organizers.

When submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be asked to
provide information about the resources that have been used for the work
described in their paper or are an outcome of their research. For
details on this initiative, please refer to
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012.  Authors will also be
asked to contribute to the Language Library, the new initiative of LREC
2012.

For further information, please contact
   Reinhard Rapp reinhardrapp (at) gmx (dot) de
   or Marko Tadic marko.tadic (at) ffzg (dot) hr

ORGANISERS

  Reinhard Rapp, Universities of Mainz (Germany) and Leeds (UK)
  Marko Tadic,  University of Zagreb (Croatia)
  Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds (UK)
  Andrejs Vasiljevs, Tilde SIA, Riga (Latvia)
  Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI, CNRS, Orsay, and ERTIM, INALCO, Paris (France)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

* Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Labs, USA)
* Caroline Barrière (National Research Council Canada)
* Chris Biemann (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
* Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
* Hervé Déjean (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Andreas Eisele (DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany)
* Rob Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield, UK)
* Éric Gaussier (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France)
* Nikos Glaros (ILSP, Athens, Greece)
* Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead/Dassault Systemes, 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)
* Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver Inc., USA)
* Lene Offersgaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
* Reinhard Rapp (Universities of Mainz, Germany, and Leeds, UK)
* Sujith Ravi (Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, CA, USA)
* Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
* Michel Simard (National Research Council Canada)
* Inguna Skadina (Tilde, Riga, Latvia)
* Monique Slodzian (INALCO, Paris, France)
* Benjamin Tsou (The Hong Kong Institute of Education, China)
* Dan Tufis (Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania)
* Justin Washtell (University of Leeds, UK)
* Oliver Wilson (University of Edinburgh, UK)
* Michael Zock (LIF, CNRS Marseille, France)
* Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France)

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