Workshop on Advances in Text Input Methods (WTIM 2011)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on Advances in Text Input Methods (WTIM 2011)

Collocated with the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2011)
November 13, 2011, Chaing Mai, Thailand

Workshop website: http://sites.google.com/site/wtim2011/
IJCNLP conference website: http://www.ijcnlp2011.org/
# UPDATED July 25, 2011 Workshop paper submission due date NOTE: this is different from the paper submission due on the IJCNLP conference website
# UPDATED August 12, 2011 Workshop paper acceptance notification
# Aug 19, 2011 Camera-ready deadline
# Nov 13, 2011 Workshop
Submission URL: https://www.softconf.com/ijcnlp2011/IME/

Call for Papers
Methods of text input have entered a new era. The number of people who have access to computers and mobile devices is skyrocketing in regions where people cannot type their native language characters directly. It has also become commonplace to input text not through a keyboard but through different modes such as voice and handwriting recognition. Even when people type with a keyboard, it is done differently from a few years ago - adaptive software keyboards, word prediction and spell correction are just a few examples of such recent changes in text input experience. The changes are now global and ubiquitous: users are no longer willing to input text without the help of new generation input methods regardless of language, device or situation.

The challenges in text input have many underlying NLP problems in common. For example, a high quality dictionary is called for, but it is far from obvious how to construct and maintain one. A dictionary also needs to be stored in some data structure, whose optimal design may depend upon the usage. Prediction and spell correction can be very annoying if they are not smart enough. For many applications, user input can be very noisy (imagine voice recognition or typing on a small screen), so the input methods must be robust against such noise. Finally, there is no standard data set or evaluation metric, which is necessary for quantitative analysis of user input experience.

The goal of this workshop is bring together the researchers and developers of text input technologies around the world, and share their innovations, research findings and issues across different applications, devices, modes and languages. We hope that the workshop will deepen our understanding of the field as a whole, and facilitate further innovation in each application area.

We welcome participation on a wide range of topics and languages covering the text input. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Phonetic input for the languages of the world: transliteration-based approach to non- Roman script languages
- Input for soft keyboards and devices with hardware limitations: input systems for phones, game devices, tablet PCs
- Investigations in new input modes: text input via speech, handwriting and/or gesture
- Predictive input technologies: auto-completion and next word prediction for IME; spell correction
- User feedback and community-specific data: understanding the user and usage for a better input experience
- Models: research and practice of statistical input methods
- Evaluation: aspects of measuring user experience in text input
- Issues in commercial input engine deployment: data compression, cloud-based IME, user interface design

Important Dates
- July 1, 2011 - new submission due date- Workshop paper submission due date NOTE: this is different from the paper submission due on the IJCNLP conference website
- August 5, 2011 Workshop paper acceptance notification
- Aug 19, 2011 Camera-ready deadline
- Nov 13, 2011 Workshop

Submission information
Paper submission to WTIM2011 will be accepted on or before June 17, 2011 in PDF format via the START system:
https://www.softconf.com/ijcnlp2011/IME/.
Submissions should follow the instructions at the IJCNLP workshop page
(http://www.ijcnlp2011.org/ijcnlp2011/front/show/workshop). We accept up to 8 pages for full papers plus additional 2 pages for references. In addition to full length papers, we also invite system description papers, up to 4 pages of content and 2 pages of references. Short papers are expected to be presented as demos at the workshop.

Organizers (alphabetical order)
Hideto Kazawa (Google, Japan)
Hisami Suzuki (Microsoft Research, USA)
Taku Kudo (Google, Japan)

Program Committee (alphabetical order)
Achraf Chalabi (Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center, Egypt)
Frank Yung-Fong Tang (Google, USA)
Haifeng Wang (Baidu, China)
Hiroyuki Tokunaga (Preferred Infrastructure, Japan)
Jianfeng Gao (Microsoft Research, USA)
Kalika Bali (Microsoft Research India)
Kazuma Takaoka (JUSTSYSTEMS, Japan)
Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Mamoru Komachi (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
Mike Schuster (Google, USA)
Monojit Choudhury (Microsoft Research India)
Shinsuke Mori (Kyoto University, Japan)
Thanaruk Theeramunkong (SIIT, Thailand)
Virach Sornlertlamvanich (NECTEC, Thailand)
Yoh Okuno (Yahoo! Japan)

E-mail contact
wtim-organizers googlegroups.com