Language-related workshops in Chiang Mai / Calls for Papers

[Doug Cooper]

[apologies for cross-posting]

The 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing,
sponsored by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, will
be held in Chiang Mai, Thailand,  November 8-13, 2011.

Workshops 1, 4, and 5 being held at this conference may be of particular
interest.   Workshops 1 and 5 have websites with calls for submissions;
I've copied the details of workshop 4 at the end of this letter  (the complete
workshop list is at http://www.ijcnlp2011.org/ijcnlp2011/front/show/workshop )

_________________________________________________________

WS1: Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing (SANLP) 
- Morphology and Segmentation
Link: 	http://www.sanlp.org/wssanlp2011
Proposer(s): 	M. G. Abbas Malik, (Assistant Professor), COMSATS Institute of 
Information Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, (abbas.malik at gmail.com)
Length: 	One Day
Submissions Deadline : June 1, 2011
Probable date: 	November 8, 2011

WS5: The 9th Workshop on Asian Language Resources
Link: 	http://www.dlsu.edu.ph/conferences/alr9/2011/
Proposer(s): 	Rachel Edita O. Roxas, Center for Language Technologies, College 
of Computer Studies, De La Salle University, Philippines, 2401 Taft Avenue, 
Malate, Manila, Philippines, (rachel.roxas at delasalle.ph)
Length: 	Two Days
Deadline for paper submissions - June 1, 2011
Probable date: 	November 12 - 13, 2011

WS4: Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm
Proposer(s): 	Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del 
CNR Via Moruzzi 1 56124 Pisa, Italy, (glottolo at ilc.cnr.it)
Length: 	One Day
Deadline for paper submissions:     May 20, 2011
Probable date: 	November 12, 2011
Link:  none -- details for this workshop are shown below.

_The Context _ [of WS4]

Some of the current major initiatives in the area of language resources –
FLaReNet (http://www.flarenet.eu/), Language Grid
(http://langrid.nict.go.jp/en/index.html) and META-SHARE (www.meta-share.org,
www.meta-net.eu) – have agreed to organise a joint workshop on infrastructural
issues that are critical in the age of data sharing and open data, to discuss
state of the art, international cooperation, future strategies and priorities,
road-mapping.

It is an achievement, and an opportunity for our field, that recently a number
of strategic-infrastructural initiatives have been started all over the world.
This is also a sign that funding agencies recognise the strategic value of our
field and the importance of helping a coherent growth also through a number of
coordinated actions. Some of these initiatives, two European and an Asian, have
agreed to join forces to foster a debate that may lead to future coordinated
actions all over the world.

FLaReNet aims at providing recommendations for future initiatives in the field
of Language Resources and Technologies: we are aware that it is important to
discuss future policy and priorities not only on the European scene, but also
in a worldwide context. This is true both when we try to highlight future
directions of research, and – even more – when we analyse which
infrastructural initiatives are needed. The growth of the field should be
complemented by common efforts that try to look for synergies and to overcome
fragmentation.

The Language Grid aims at constructing a multilingual service infrastructure
on the Internet that allows users to share language services such as online
dictionaries, bilingual corpora, and machine translations, and create new
language services by combining existing services to support intercultural
collaboration. The Language Grid is operated by Kyoto and Bangkok
operation centers in a federated fashion. More than 110 language services
are registered and shared by 140 groups in 18 countries.

META-SHARE aims to build an open, integrated, secure and interoperable
exchange facility for language resources (data and tools) for the Human
Language Technologies domain and other applicative domains (e.g., digital
libraries, cognitive systems, robotics, etc) where language plays a critical
role. It aims to act as an infrastructure that will enable language resources
documentation, cataloguing, uploading and storage, downloading and exchange,
aiming to support a resources economy at large.

Cooperation is an issue that needs to be prepared. This joint strategic
Workshop plans to continue a discussion, started on several occasions in the
last years, on the usefulness and the interest of promoting international
cooperation among various initiatives and communities around the world, within
and around the field of Language
Resources and Technologies.

_Topic and Content_

The three organising projects will contribute with reports on their activities
aiming at boosting a constructive and fruitful debate. In particular,

     * FLaReNet will bring in its final recommendations and priorities deriving
       from the various events it organised, summarised in the FLaReNet
       Blueprint of actions and infrastructures
       (http://www.flarenet.eu/sites/default/files/D8.2b.pdf).

     * The Language Grid proposes a service-oriented language infrastructure
       that shifts from language resources to language services, and
       institutional design for operating the infrastructure in a federated
       fashion (http://servicegrid.net/en/index.html).

     *   META-SHARE will present the principles underlying its design and
       governance model, its proposed architecture for language resources
       sharing and collaborative building as well as the technical and legal
       instruments supporting its operation.


The Workshop aims at addressing (some of the) technological, market and policy
challenges posed by the “sharing and openness paradigm”, the major role that
language resources can play and the consequences of this paradigm on language
resources themselves.  Examples of topics and issues to be addressed are:

     * Sharing Language Resources and Language Technologies
     * Need for global information on Language Resources and Language
       Technologies: relevant initiatives in the various regions/countries
     * Interoperability and Reusability
     * Linguistic web services and language applications development
     * Metadata and Cataloguing
     * Legal issues
     * Infrastructures, policies, gaps and critical areas
     * Common roadmap and strategies: local, regional, international frameworks
     * International cooperation, models for collaboration and agreements on
       joint initiatives

The proposed Workshop will be a place where colleagues interested on
infrastructural initiatives get together to discuss and promote collaboration
actions.  This should also lead to discussing the modalities of how to 
organise the
cooperation among various initiatives.

We think that organising this workshop in Thailand we can attract
participation of many Asian initiatives and can lead to fruitful collaboration
between Asian and other international initiatives.

_Important dates_
Deadline for paper submissions:     May 20, 2011
Notification of paper acceptance:    July 1, 2011
Camera-ready copies due (firm):      July 22, 2011

_Workshop Chairs_
Nicoletta Calzolari  (ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy)
Toru Ishida  (Kyoto University, Japan)
Stelios Piperidis  (ILSP, Athens, Greece)
Virach Sornlertlamvanich (NECTEC, Thailand)

_Scientific Committee _
Sophia Ananiadou
Nuria Bel
Emily Bender
Steven Bird
Nicoletta Calzolari
Thatsanee Charoenporn
Key-Sun Choi
Khalid Choukri
Chris Cieri
Yoshihiko Hayashi
Chu-Ren Huang
Nancy Ide
Hitoshi Isahara
Toru Ishida
Steven Krauwer
Joseph Mariani
Monica Monachini
Yohei Murakami
Jan Odijk
Stelios Piperidis
James Pustejovsky
Claudia Soria
Virach Sornlertlamvanich
Thepchai Supnithi
Take Tokunaga
Dan Tufis
Kiyotaka Uchimoto
Hans Uszkoreit
Peter Wittenburg

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