Conf: LREC 2014 Workshop, Language Technology Service Platforms, May 31, 2014, Reykjavik

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 14:28:05 +0100
From: ELRA ELDA Information <info at elda.org>
Message-ID: <53172665.8020908 at elda.org>

[Apologies for multiple postings]

LREC 2014 Workshop Language Technology Service Platforms: Synergies, 
Standards, Sharing - May 31, 2014, Reykjavik
Contact: lrec-infra at lrec-conf.org

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Motivation and background
Increasingly, Human Language Technology (HLT) requires sophisticated
infrastructures to support research, development, innovation,
collaboration and deployment as services ready for production use. To
address this need, several supporting infrastructures have been
established over the past few years, and others are being built or
planned.  The LREC 2014 Workshop on Language Technology Service
Platforms brings together major infrastructural/coordination initiatives
from all over the world. The overall goal is to explore means by which
these and other infrastructure projects can best collaborate and
interoperate in order to avoid duplication of effort, fragmentation, and
above all, to facilitate the use and reuse of technologies and resources
distributed throughout the world.

Focus
Web services are an increasingly common means to provide access to
language technologies and resources. These services typically work in
combination with repositories of language resources and workflow
managers. This development brings with it its own set of issues in
relation to collaboration and interoperability, including:
interoperability of input to and output from language technologies 
deployed as web services;
means to provide services for evaluation/replicability of results and 
iterative development;
means to support multi-site collaborative work;
licensing and cataloguing of language technologies and resources;
sharing and access mechanisms to language technologies and resources;
quality assessment and sustainability of language technologies and 
resources.

Aims
This workshop aims to foster discussion on these (and related) issues in
order to arrive at a set of concrete plans for future collaboration and
cooperation as well as immediate next steps.
General discussions will focus on the following questions: How can the
various infrastructures collaborate, in both the near and long-term
future? What are the steps needed in order to share both language
technologies and resources? How can the projects and initiatives
(including not only those involved in the workshop, but also others)
join forces in order to eventually create a global infrastructure for
Human Language Technologies?

The goal is to leave the workshop with a resolution that 1. lists all 
active infrastructure and platform initiatives, 2. describes the 
consensus of all initiatives involved in the workshop, 3. outlines the 
requirements for collaboration and 4. proposes solutions.

Researchers and technologists interested in platforms, services, sharing
of language resources etc. are encouraged to participate in the workshop
in order to make sure that their voice is heard. As described above, the
consensus and outcome of the workshop will be put down in writing in a
short resolution document meant to be used by the whole community for
public relation and dissemination purposes, especially with regard to
discussions with journalists, administrators, politicians and funding
agencies.

Preliminary program plan
The first session will provide short introductions to the 
infrastructural/coordination initiatives involved in the organisation.
In order to outline some concrete next steps for the immediate future, 
there will be sessions devoted to surveying two to four currently 
implemented solutions to crucial problems, with an eye toward assessing 
and comparing the various solutions in order to determine immediate 
action items. These sessions will address topics such as:
interoperability and the use of standards, for example, syntax and 
semantics used to exchange information between web services and/or 
technologies that may not have been developed at the same site (i.e., 
that do not necessarily utilize the same formats, categories, etc.)
implemented means to provide evaluation/replicability and means to 
enable multi-site collaboration
licensing for data and tools shared over networks and services.

Contribute to an overview of the Language Resources and Technologies 
landscape!
In order to facilitate the discussion we ask workshop participants to
answer the following questions and to send their answers to the
organisers (see Contact mail below) at the beginning of May. A summary
of the responses will be provided at the workshop to inform and to focus
the discussion.

(1) Access -- How do you make information about your tools and/or 
    resources available to the world? How and where do you find
    information on tools and resources you would like to use?
(2) Obstacles to Data and Technology Exchange -- What do you see as the
    major obstacle(s) to the exchange of data between technologies?
(3) Data or Technology Gaps -- Are there tools, technologies or
    resources that do not exist at this time that are required to answer
    your research or development questions?
(4) Interoperability and Standards -- What syntax and semantics do you
    use to exchange information between web services and/or tools that
    may not have been developed at the same site (i.e., do not
    necessarily utilize the same formats, categories, etc.)?
(5) Evaluation -- What have you implemented to provide
    evaluation/replicability?
(6) Licensing -- How are you handling licensing for data shared over
    networks and services?
(7) Collaboration -- How would you propose to promote collaboration
    among the various infrastructure projects located around the world?

We also welcome any additional comments or views that you wish to
express.

We look forward to welcoming you in Reykjavik!

Organising Initiatives
COCOSDA
ELRA -- European Language Resource Association
FLaReNet
Language Applications (LAPPS) Grid
Language Grid
META-NET
MLi -- Towards a MultiLingual Data & Services infrastructure
MUSE FP7 -- ClowdFlows initiative
Research Data Alliance

Organisers
Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Italy and ELRA, France)
Khalid Choukri (ELRA, France)
Christopher Cieri (LDC, USA)
Tomaz( Erjavec (Joz(ef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College, USA)
Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan)
Oleksandr Kolomiyets (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS and IMMI, France)
Yohei Murakami (Kyoto University, Japan)
Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
Senja Pollak (Joz(ef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, USA)
Georg Rehm (DFKI GmbH, Germany)
Herman Stehouwer (Max Planck, Germany)
Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI GmbH, Germany)
Andrejs Vasil,jevs (Tilde, Latvia)
Peter Wittenburg (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The
Netherlands)