Corpora: LREC 2000 Call for Papers

Priscilla Rasmussen (rasmusse@cs.rutgers.edu)
Fri, 12 Nov 99 11:55:23 EST

[Our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement]

Please note that the submission deadline is soon approaching.

***** REMINDER: CALL FOR PAPERS *******

The European Language Resources Association (ELRA), the Institute
for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP, Athens, Greece), and
the National Technical University of Athens, Greece are pleased to
announce:

The 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC2000)

(The detailed announcement is available on the web at:
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html)

Location: Athens, Greece
Dates: 31 May - 2 June 2000

The Second International Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation has been initiated by ELRA and is organised in cooperation
with other Associations and Consortia, including ACL, ALLC, COCOSDA,
ORIENTAL COCOSDA, EAFT, EAGLES, EDR, ELSNET, ESCA,
EURALEX, FRANCIL, LDC, PAROLE, TELRI, etc., and with major
national and international organisations, including the European
Commission - DG XIII, ARPA, NSF, the IC/863 HTRDP Project (China),
the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the ICSP
Permanent Committee (Korea), The Natural Language Technical
committee of JEIDA (Japan), and the Japanese Project for
International Coordination in Corpora, Assessment and Labelling.
Cooperation and support from other institutions is currently being
sought.

CONFERENCE AIMS

In the framework of the Information Society, the pervasive character
of human language technologies (HLT) and their relevance to all
the fields of Information Society Technologies (IST) has been
widely recognised.

Two issues are currently considered to be particularly relevant:
1) the availability of language resources and
2) the methods for the evaluation of resources, technologies and
products.
Substantial mutual benefits can be expected from addressing
these issues through international cooperation.

The term language resources (LR) refers to sets of language
data and descriptions in machine readable form, used specifically
for building and evaluating natural language and speech algorithms
or systems, for software localisation industries and language
services, for language enabled information and communication
services, for electronic commerce, electronic publishing, language
studies, subject-area specialists and end users.

Examples of language resources are written and spoken corpora,
computational lexica, grammars, terminology databases, and
basic software tools for the acquisition, preparation, collection,
management, customisation and use of these and other resources.

The relevance of evaluation for Language Engineering is increasingly
recognised. This involves assessment of the state of the art for a
given technology, measuring the progress achieved within a
programme, comparing different approaches to a given problem and
choosing the best solution, knowing its advantages and drawbacks,
assessment of the availability of technologies for a given application,
product benchmarking, and assessment of user satisfaction.

Language engineering and R&D in language technologies have
made important advances in the recent past in various aspects of
both written and spoken language processing. Although the evaluation
paradigm has been studied and used in large national and international
programmes, including the US ARPA HLT programme, the EU LE
programme Francophone Aupelf-Uref programme and others, and in the
localisation industry (LISA and LRC), it is still subject to substantial
unresolved basic research problems.

The aim of this conference is to provide an overview of the state of
the art, to discuss problems and opportunities, and to exchange
information regarding ongoing and planned activities, language
resources and their applications. We also intend to discuss
evaluation methodologies and demonstrate evaluation tools, and
explore possibilities and promote initiatives for international
cooperation in the areas mentioned above.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

The following non-exhaustive list gives some examples of topics
which could be addressed by papers submitted to LREC2000:

I. Issues in the design, construction and use of Languages
Resources (LR) (theoretical & best practice):

* Guidelines, standards, specifications, and models for LR
* Organisational issues in the construction, distribution, and
use of LR
* Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, creation,
annotation, management, access, distribution, and use of LR
* Legal aspects and problems in the construction, access, and
use of LR
* Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LR
* Methods for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge
(e.g. terms, lexical information, language modelling) from LR
* Monolingual and multilingual LR
* Multimodal and multimedia LR
* LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia
cultural industry
* Industrial production and use of LR
* Integration of various modalities in LR (spoken, visual, gestual,
textual)
* Exploitation of LR in different types of applications (language
technology, information retrieval, vocal interfaces, electronic
commerce, etc.)
* Industrial LR requirements and the community's response
* Analysis of user needs for LR
* Mechanisms of LR distribution and marketing
* Economics of LR
* Customisation and use of LR
* Research issues relevant for LR

II. Issues in Human Language Technologies evaluation:

* Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LR
* Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for
benchmarking and evaluation
* Evaluation in written language processing (text retrieval,
terminology extraction, message understanding, text alignment,
machine translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing,
semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation, text understanding,
summarisation, localisation, etc.)
* Evaluation in spoken language processing (speech recognition
and understanding, voice dictation, oral dialog, speech synthesis,
speech coding, speaker and language recognition, etc.)
* Evaluation of document processing (document recognition, on-line
and off-line machine and hand-written character recognition, etc.)
* Evaluation of (multimedia) document retrieval and search systems
* Evaluation of multimodal systems
* Qualitative and perceptive evaluation
* Evaluation of products and applications
* Blackbox, glassbox and diagnostic evaluation of systems
* Situated evaluation of applications
* Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
* From evaluation to standardisation of LR
* Research issues relevant to evaluation

III. General issues:

* National and international activities and projects
* LR and the needs/opportunities of the emerging multimedia
cultural industry
* Priorities, perspectives, strategies in the field of LR national
and international policies
* Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for international
cooperation

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, presentations of
accepted papers, poster sessions, referenced demonstrations and panels.

Pre-Conference Workshops will be organized on the 29th and 30th of
May and post-Conference Workshops on the 3rd and 4th of June 2000.

Please consult the conference Web site
(http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html) for complete
information about submission guidelines, contact people, submission
dates, various conference committees and members, and other
general information.

IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER

* 20 NOVEMBER 1999:
Submission of proposals for papers, posters, referenced demos,
panels and workshops
* 10 DECEMBER 1999:
Notification of acceptance of workshop and panel proposals
* 2 FEBRUARY 2000:
Notification of acceptance of papers, posters, referenced demos
* 2 APRIL 2000:
Final version of the articles for the proceedings
* 31 MAY - 2 JUNE 2000:
Conference

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, Italy
George Carayannis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing,
Athens, Greece
Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
Harald H=F6ge, Siemens, Munich, Germany
Bente Maegaard, CST, Copenhagen, Denmark
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy (Conference chair)


For general information about the conference, please contact:

LREC Secretariat: Ms. Despina Scutari
Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP)
6, Artemidos & Epidavrou Str.
15125 Marousi, Athens, GREECE
Tel: +301 6800959 ; Fax: +301 6854270
e-mail: LREC2000@ilsp.gr
LREC2000 website:
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/lrec2000.html

For general information about ELRA, please contact:

Khalid CHOUKRI
55-57 Rue Brillat-Savarin
75013 Paris FRANCE
Tel. +33 1 43 13 33 33 - Fax. +33 1 43 13 33 30
e-mail: choukri@elda.fr
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html