CALL FOR PAPERS:
Linked Data in Linguistics
Representing and connecting language data and language metadata
http://ldl2012.lod2.eu

Workshop organized as part of the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS),
to be held in Frankfurt, Germany, March 7-9, 2012
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Date: March 7-9, 2012
Submission Deadline: August 14 (extended), 2011
Venue: Frankfurt am Main, Germany
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** Overview **
The explosion of information technology has led to a substantial growth in quantity, diversity and complexity of linguistic data accessible over the Internet. These resources become even more useful when linked with each other. This workshop will present principles, use cases, and best practices for using the linked data paradigm[a] to represent, exploit, store, and connect different types of linguistic data collections.
The intended audience includes empirically-working linguists and philologists interested in the representation, exchange and interlinking of linguistic data and metadata, computer scientists and computational linguists interested in the application of Semantic Web formalisms and technologies to language data, and developers of infrastructures for linguistic data and other researchers with an interest in both aspects.


** Linguistic data and metadata **
The last years have seen the rapid development of linguistic data collections available over the Internet. The workshop intends to address questions and use cases for the creation, publication and application of data collections including (but not limited to):

1. Language archives for (endangered) languages, that contain a wealth of textual material as well as audio and video (DOBES, PARADISEC, ELAR). How can this material be mobilized?
2. Typological databases such as the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), or the Typological Database System (TDS) provide rich repositories of information about languages and their respective features. An interesting feature would be to combine the information from these resources, for example “Is it true that OV languages [WALS feature 83A] are characterized by pitch accent [TDS, StressTyp data base]” ? How can such queries be accomplished?
3. Computational lexicography uses formalisms such as RDF, SKOS and OWL to encode dictionaries and to employ them in different applications. What are the practical benefits of this representation?
4. Lexical-semantic resources such as WordNet, FrameNet and general knowledge bases like DBpedia and Yago represent the very foundation of computational semantics, and are also available in OWL and RDF. How does this representation improve the accessibility and the application of these resources?
5. Linguistic corpora involve an increasing diversity of annotations such as syntax, semantics and coreference (e.g., PennTreeBank/PropBank/PennDiscourseTreebank, OntoNotes, SALSA/TIGER). How can such multi-layered corpora be represented, evaluated and connected to electronic lexicons, lexical-semantic resources, or metadata repositories?
6. Metadata repositories provide common vocabularies for the description of other types of linguistic data, thus enabling to compare and integrate them. This includes information about languages (e.g. in LL-MAP or Mulitree), but also information about linguistic data categories and phenomena (e.g. in GOLD and ISOcat). How do such common repositories improve the re-usability of linguistic resources in research and in Semantic Web applications?

It is the challenge of our time to store, interlink and exploit this wealth of data. Our workshop leverages the Digital Humanities paradigm within linguistics, focusing on the use of information technology to improve data-driven linguistic research.
This workshop invites researchers from the fields of language documentation, typology, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, as well as researchers from other empirically-oriented disciplines of linguistics who share an interest in data and metadata modelling with Semantic Web technologies such as RDF or OWL.

** Topics of interests **
We invite contributions related (but not limited) to one of the following topics:
1. Use cases and project proposals for the creation, maintenance and publication of linguistic data collections that are linked with other resources
2. Modelling linguistic data and metadata with OWL and/or RDF
3. Ontologies for linguistic data and metadata collections
4. Applications of such data, other ontologies or linked data from any subdiscipline of linguistics (may include work in progress or project descriptions)
5. Legal and social aspects of Linked Linguistic Data

** Goals **
Beside the discussion of projects, experiences and open questions, the workshop hopes to support the on-going development of a community of researchers interested in linked linguistic data. This involves the following aspects:

1. The primary goal is to establish interdisciplinary contact across the boundaries between different subdisciplines of applied linguistics, computational linguistics and neighbouring fields. We are under the impression that people coming from very different backgrounds encounter similar issues in their work and that there is potential for synergies here.
2. The second goal is to increase the amount of Linked Open Data on the web so that researchers can make use of the data already out there. In other words: we want to find the data giants on whose shoulders future generations would be able to stand, and convince them to make their data available as Linked Data.
3. The third goal is to discuss strategies, reasons and problems to publish linguistic data under open licensed, with the perspective to increase the prestige of data as a form of scientific production which does not need to shy away from comparison with more established genres like articles or monographs.


** Submission **
For submission details, please consult the workshop webpage:
http://ldl2012.lod2.eu/submission

** Important Dates **
August 14 (extended), 2011: Deadline for extended abstracts (four pages plus references)
September 9, 2011: Notification of acceptance
October 23, 2011: One-page abstract for DGfS conference proceedings
December 1, 2011: Camera-ready papers for workshop proceedings (eight pages plus references)
March 7-9, 2012: Workshop
March 6-9, 2012: DGfS Conference


** Invited speakers **
Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
Nancy Ide (American National Corpus, Vassar College)

** Workshop organizers **
Sebastian Nordhoff (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany)
Christian Chiarcos (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Sebastian Hellmann (University of Leipzig, Germany)


** Programme committee**
http://ldl2012.lod2.eu/program/invited-speakers-and-programme-committee

The workshop is endorsed and sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (http://www.eva.mpg.de) and the LOD2 project: Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data (http://lod2.eu)