This message was posted to several lists. We apologize for any cross-postings.
FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS - Note: EXTENDED DEADLINE 18 February
Workshop on
COMPILING AND PROCESSING SPOKEN LANGUAGE CORPORA
http://lands.let.kun.nl/CPSLC/
Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal
24th May 2004
Workshop to be held in conjunction with
the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC
2004)
Main conference: 26-27-28 May 2004
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/
Aim
The aim of the workshop is to bring together people working on the
development (compilation and processing) of spoken language corpora.* The
workshop will provide participants with the opportunity to exchange views
and share experiences. Moreover, the workshop is instrumental in taking
stock of and evaluating the present state-of-the-art. The workshop thus
aims to contribute to the development of a future roadmap that will guide
the development of standards, tools, etc. for use with spoken language corpora.
*The term ‘spoken language corpora’ is used here to distinguish such
corpora from speech corpora or speech databases: speech corpora are
collections of spoken data that are typically recorded for specific
purposes by specific users (speech corpora/databases such as SpeechDat Car
that are used for developing consumer applications). Usually such databases
lack the richness of linguistic annations that is pursued for spoken
language corpora.
Background and motivation
Despite the wide experience gained in the compilation of written language
corpora, working with spoken language data is not immediately
straightforward as spoken language involves many novel aspects that need to
be taken care of. The fact that spoken language is transient is sometimes
offered as an explanation for why it is more difficult to collect spoken
data than it is to compile a corpus of written data. However, it is not
just the capturing of data that is anything but trivial. Once the (audio)
data have been collected and stored, the next step is to produce some kind
of transcript (whether orthographic or phonetic). Further annotations such
as POS tagging, lemmatisation, syntactic annotation, and prosodic
annotation may then build upon this transcription. Among the problems
encountered in the processing of spoken language data are the following:
* There is as yet little experience with the large scale
transcription of spoken language data. Procedures and guidelines must be
developed, and tools implemented.
* Well-established practices that have originated from working on
written language corpora do not hold up when trying to cope with the
idiosyncracies of the spoken language. This is true for all levels of
linguistic annotation. Annotation schemes need to be reconsidered and tools
must be adapted.
* In so far as standards have emerged (eg CES), they need to be
adapted in order to be able to cater for the needs of spoken language corpora.
* By their very nature, spoken language corpora bring together
speech and language technologists and linguists from various backgrounds.
Ideally, such corpora should address the needs of all these different user
groups. Often, however, there is a conflict of interest. For example, the
quality of recordings of spontaneous conversations in noisy environments
although highly interesting and worthwhile from a linguistic perspective
will prove too poor to be of any use to someone doing research into speech
recognition.
Workshop topics
Topics of interest include orthographic transcription, phonetic
transcription, prosodic annotation, segmentation, POS tagging and
lemmatisation, parsing, and discourse analysis. Contributions on the
development and implementation of standards or guidelines for spoken
language corpora (annotation schemes, meta-data descriptions) are also
invited, as are contributions describing software for the exploitation of
spoken language corpora.
Format of the Workshop
The workshop will comprise of oral presentations of previously submitted
papers that went through a double peer review process. The proceedings of
the workshop will be published by the local organising committee.
Important dates
18th February 2004 Extended deadline for submission of (full) papers
1st March 2004 Notification of acceptance and preliminary programme
21st March 2004 Deadline for submission of final versions of
accepted papers for the proceedings
3rd April 2004 Definitive programme
24th May 2004 Workshop
Submissions
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for oral presentation.
Only full papers in English will be accepted, and the length of the paper
should not exceed 6000 words (or the equivalent in space for
diagrams). Submissions in MS Word, Postscript, PDF or RTF should be
submitted through the workshop website: http://lands.let.kun.nl/CPSLC/
Registration
Workshop participants need to register through the LREC website:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/
The fee for this half-day workshop is 50 Euro for conference participants
and 85 for others and includes a coffee break and the workshop proceedings.
Organising committee
Nelleke OOSTDIJK, University of Nijmegen
Gjert KRISTOFFERSEN, University of Bergen
Geoffrey SAMPSON, University of Sussex
Programme committee
Daan BROEDER Max Planck Institute
Emanuela CRESTI University of Florence
Gjert KRISTOFFERSEN University of Bergen
Tony MCENERY University of Lancaster
Nelleke OOSTDIJK University of Nijmegen
Pavel IRCING University of Western Bohemia
Geoffrey SAMPSON University of Sussex
Antonio Moreno SANDOVAL University of Madrid
Jean VERÓNIS Université de Provence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Feb 01 2004 - 08:34:56 MET