LREC 2012 8th ELRA Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

Istanbul Convention & Exhibition Centre (ICEC, Lütfi Kirdar Centre) Istanbul, Turkey

MAIN CONFERENCE: 23-24-25 MAY 2012

WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 21-22 MAY and 26-27 MAY 2012

The eighth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) will be organised in 2012 by ELRA with the support of a wide range of international associations and organisations.

Conference Aims

Since the first LREC held in Granada in 1998, LREC has become the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Language Technologies (LT). The aim of LREC is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support to investigations in language sciences, progress and innovation in language technologies and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.

Conference Topics

Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs): text, speech, multimodality

• Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability

• Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation

• Methodologies and tools for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge

• Ontologies and knowledge representation

• Terminology

• Integration between (multilingual) LRs, ontologies and Semantic Web technologies

• Integration between (multilingual) LRs and multimedia technologies

• Metadata descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup

Exploitation of LRs in different types of systems and applications

• Sign language, multimedia information and multimodal communication

• LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval, audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer Aided Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation, speech translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, etc.

• Different types of interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensorial interactions, voice activated services, etc.

• Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application, like e-government, e-culture, e-health, e-participation, mobile applications, etc.

• Industrial LRs requirements, user needs

Issues in Language Technologies evaluation

• LT Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures

• Validation, quality assurance, evaluation of LRs

• Benchmarking of systems and products

• Usability evaluation of LT-based user interfaces, interactions and dialogue systems

• Usability and user satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation

• National and international activities and projects

• International collaboration and co-operation

• Multilingual issues

• Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs

• Language coverage and diversity, Less Resourced languages, Endangered languages

• Open, linked and shared data and tools, Open and collaborative architectures

• Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues

Hot Topic: Speech & Multimodal Resources

Speech and Multimodal Resources are the special topics for LREC 2012, and submissions dedicated to these modalities are encouraged! Also papers integrating speech and/or multimodal with written resources are particularly welcome.

Special Highlight: Contribute to building the LREC Language Library!

After the success of the LRE Map introduced in LREC 2010 – now used in many Conferences as a normal step in the submission procedure – LREC 2012 recognises that time is ripe to launch another important initiative, the LREC Language Library!

The LREC Language Library will also be a collaborative enterprise of the LREC Community, an important contribution to the community-built Open Resource Infrastructure. ELRA will prepare an LREC Repository, part of the META-SHARE network, hosting a number of resources on all modalities (speech, text, images, etc.) in as many languages as possible.

When submitting a paper, you will be invited to process some pieces of this data, in the appropriate language(s) for you, in one or more of the possible dimensions that your submission addresses (e.g. POS-tag the data, extract/annotate named entities, annotate temporal information, disambiguate word senses, transcribe audio, etc.) and put the processed data back in the LREC Repository. The processed data will be made available to all the LREC participants before the conference, to be compared and analysed, and at LREC we will organise some event around them with your help!

This collaborative work on annotation/transcription/extraction/… over the same data and on a large number of processing dimensions will set the ground for a large Language Library, linked to the LRE Map for the description of the data, where everyone can deposit/create processed data of any sort – all our “knowledge” about language.

Programme

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels, in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio Zampolli Prize.

As usual, there is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered.

Submissions and dates

Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster or demo presentations should consist of about 1500-2000 words.

Submission of proposals for oral and poster/demo papers: 15 October 2011
Proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 15 October 2011
Proceedings

The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format. In addition a Book of Abstracts will be printed.

Conference Programme Committee

Nicoletta Calzolari – CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa – Italy (Conference chair)

Khalid Choukri – ELRA, Paris – France

Thierry Declerck – DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken – Germany

Mehmet Uğur Doğan – TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM, SLTC, Kocaeli – Turkey

Bente Maegaard – CST, University of Copenhagen – Denmark

Joseph Mariani – LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, Orsay – France

Asuncion Moreno – Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona – Spain

Jan Odijk – UIL-OTS, Utrecht – The Netherlands

Stelios Piperidis – Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens – Greece