ACL2003 Resources Information Infrastructure Workshop
_________________________________________________________________
CALL for PAPERS
Towards a Resources Information Infrastructure
Workshop at ACL2003 in Sapporo (Japan)
July 11 and 12 2003
Organised by ENABLER / ELSNET
Description
The problem addressed by this workshop is the well-known information
problem. People are creating, exploring and exploiting language
resources all over the world. Those who are working with resources
know a lot about their own and other resources, and they are generally
prepared to share this knowledge, their expertise and in many cases
even their resources with others via publications in journals,
presentations at conferences, and via the web.
Unfortunately this information, however public, is not accessible in
any systematic way for those who need resources, who want to know what
sort of resources exist, how resources should be annotated, which
standards to adhere to, which tools to use, etc etc. We will call this
problem the 'Resources Information Problem'.
The problem has also a geographical dimension: As work on specific
languages is very often concentrated in specific parts of the world,
much relevant information has a tendency to stay in one geographical
place. This is an obstacle for those who are working on these same
languages in different parts of the world, and it makes it harder to
port knowledge and expertise gained on one language to other
languages.
The above observation are far from novel, and it would be naive to
think that the problems will ever go away. At the same time one can
observe that there are organisations (associations, agencies,
projects, networks, etc) that have access to parts or fragments of
this information and that have their own infrastructures that
facilitate access to this information by internal or external people.
The purpose of this workshop is to investigate how we can exploit the
existing infrastructures to a maximum in order to facilitate
world-wide access to information on language resources. The role of
the workshop will be to bootstrap this process.
Approach
* First of all we will try to make an initial map of the language
resources landscape world-wide. This map will include actors,
organisations, repositories, standards, projects, tool libraries,
etc etc. All participants will be asked beforehand to submit
pointers to such items. They will be collected and published.
* At the workshop we will invite representatives of a number of
organisations that can be seen as key actors in the field, and
they will be asked to present ideas about the way their
organisation could contribute to solving the Resources Information
Problem. These ideas could range from very concrete and
immediately implementable proposals to longer term and visionary
actions.
* A round table discussion at the workshop will aim at the creation
of convergence, coherence and synergies between the proposed
actions. The intended output is a catalogue of actions to
facilitate access to resources information that could be
implemented (almost) immediately, a skeleton plan for longer term
actions, and firm commitment from key players to make these things
happen.
Target audience
Representatives of parties that could play a key role in providing
access to resources information, such as (but not limited to)
* Resources distribution agencies, e.g. LDC and ELDA/ELRA
* Professional organisations, e.g. ACL, ISCA, and their regional
branches, e.g. EACL, AACL, JACL, Asian NLP federation
* Networks and resources infrastructure projects, e.g. ENABLER,
ISLE. ELSNET
* Committees, e.g. ICWLR, COCOSDA
* National resources or infrastructure projects, e.g. Technolangue,
Collate
* International actions, e.g. OLAC
* Researchers and developers interested in improving the
language resources infrastructure for our community
Invited and submitted papers
We expect to invite some 15 representatives to give their
presentations, but in addition we are issuing an open call for papers
addressing the resources information problem and possible solutions.
These papers will be reviewed in the usual way.
Submission format
Please submit full papers of maximum 8 pages (including references,
figures etc). Authors should follow the main conference ACL style
format. Electronic submission only. Send the pdf, postscript, or MS
Word form of your submission to: Steven Krauwer
(steven.krauwer@elsnet.org) who will also answer any queries regarding
the submission.
Important Dates
Submission deadline for workshop papers: 13 April 2003
Notification of accepted papers: 14 May 2003
Deadline for camera ready copies 29 May 2003
Workshop dates: 11-12 July 2003
Workshop Format
It will be a two-day workshop, with invited and submitted
presentations in the mornings, and topical panels and round
table discussion in the afternoons, including an open meeting of
the newly created International Coordination Committee for
Written Language Resources.
Programme Committee
As this workshop is jointly proposed by ELSNET and ENABLER (two EU
funded projects aimed at providing collaboration infrastructures), we
have invited all ca 60 members of the ELSNET and ENABLER Boards to
constitute the core programme committee. We may want to invite
additional members from Asia and other parts of the world in order to
ensure sufficient geographical coverage.
A full list of PC members will be published on the workshop
website at http://www.elsnet.org/acl2003-workshop
The workshop will be jointly chaired by Steven Krauwer (ELSNET) and
Nicoletta Calzolari/Antonio Zampolli (ENABLER)
Historical note
This workshop can be seen as a follow-up of the workshop organised at
ACL2000 in Hong Kong, entitled 'Towards infrastructures for global
collaboration'. One of the conclusions of this workshop was that the
field of language resources would offer good opportunities for
collaborative actions, and the first concrete goal was the creation of
an international resources federation, a first step towards which is
now embodied by the proposal to set up an International Committee for
Written Language Resources.
The proposed workshop should lead to the definition of concrete
actions to be carried out under the auspices of ICWLR, in
collaboration with other organisations.
Contact info
Steven Krauwer (steven.krauwer@elsnet.org),
ELSNET (http://www.elsnet.org)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 08 2003 - 19:58:57 MET