=======================================================
Named Entities Workshop: Shared Task on Transliteration (NEWS 2009 : An
ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop)
-------------------------------------------------------

* Workshop Focus

Named Entities (NEs) play a critical role in Natural Language Processing
(NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, such as search, machine
translation, document clustering, summarization, information extraction,
etc. While identifying and analyzing NEs in a given natural language is a
challenging research problem by itself, the phenomenal growth in the
Internet user population, especially among the non-English speaking parts of
the world, has extended this problem to the cross-language arena, making the
handling of NEs in multiple languages critically important.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in
various aspects of NEs in natural language text. In addition, the NEWS
workshop will feature a shared task on Machine Transliteration of NEs.


* Topics of Interest

This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of NEs,
including identification, analysis, extraction, mining, transformation and
applications of NE to NLP and IR systems. The topics of interest include,
but are not limited to the following:

NE Analysis
- Distributional characteristics of NEs in mono- & multi-lingual corpora
- Orthographic/phonetic characteristics of NEs
- NE origin/genre recognition
- Social network analysis and entity resolution NE extraction
- Language-independent monolingual NE extraction
- Cross-language NE extraction
- General Techniques
- Specific datasets (Wikipedia, news, etc.)
- Unsupervised and semi-supervised methods for NE extraction
- Complex NEs, domain-specific term extraction
- NE set expansion
- Creation of annotated data
Machine Transliteration
- Computational phonology, incl. modeling of phonological rules,
structure,
behavior, etc.
- Transliteration modeling
- Phonetic, grapheme)phoneme and phoneme)grapheme conversions
- Statistical & machine learning based approaches, transliteration unit
alignments
- Forward and backward transliterations
- Learning transliteration from comparable corpora
- Transliteration lexicon construction
- Romanization of Asian languages
- Transliteration evaluation metrics
Applications
- Monolingual and Cross-Language IR, Information Extraction and
Management
- Machine Translation
- Question Answering
- Computational Journalism


* Important Dates

*** Task Details to be announced soon ***
Research Paper Submission Deadline 1-May-2009
Acceptance Notification 1-Jun-2009
Camera-Ready Copy Deadline 7-Jun-2009
Workshop Date 7 Aug 2009


* Shared Task on Transliteration

Transliteration of NEs is necessary in many applications, such as machine
translation, corpus alignment, cross-language IR, information extraction and
automatic lexicon acquisition. This calls for high-performance
transliteration systems, which is the focus of the shared task in this
workshop. Details of the task will be made available soon in the workshop
homepage,


* Organizing Committee
+ Haizhou Li Institute for Infocomm Research + A Kumaran Microsoft
Research India + Sanjeev Khudanpur Johns Hopkins University + Raghavendra
Udupa Microsoft Research India + Min Zhang Institute for Infocomm
Research + Monojit Choudhury Microsoft Research India

* Program Committee

+ Kalika Bali Microsoft Research India
+ Rafael Banchs UPC, Spain
+ Sivaji Bandyopadhyay Univ of Jadavpur, India
+ Pushpak Bhattacharyya IIT-Bombay, India
+ Monojit Choudhury Microsoft Research India
+ Marta Ruiz Costa-jussà UPC, Spain
+ Jianfeng Gao Microsoft Research, USA
+ Gregory Grefenstette Exalead, France
+ Sanjeev Khudanpur John Hopkins University, USA
+ Kevin Knight ISI, USA
+ Greg Kondrak Univ of Alberta, Canada
+ Olivia Kwong City Univ, Hong Kong
+ Gina-Anne Levow Univ of Chicago, USA
+ Arul Menezes Microsoft Research, USA
+ Jong-Hoon Oh NICT, Japan
+ Yan Qu Advertising.com, USA
+ Dan Roth Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
+ Sunita Sarawagi IIT-Bombay, India
+ Sudeshna Sarkar IIT-Kharagpur, India
+ Richard Sproat Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
+ Keh-Yih Su Behavior Design Corporation, Taiwan
+ Raghavendra Udupa Microsoft Research India
+ Vasudeva Varma IIIT-Hyderabad, India
+ Min Zhang Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore

* Workshop & Contact Information

For current information about the workshop, please refer to the workshop
homepage, http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/workshops/NEWS2009/. For any
specific information please contact: news09o@microsoft.com.






=======================================================

Named Entities Workshop: Shared Task on Transliteration

(NEWS 2009 : An ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop
)

-------------------------------------------------------

* Workshop Focus

Named Entities (NEs) play a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP)
and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, such as search, machine translation,
document clustering, summarization, information extraction, etc. While
identifying and analyzing NEs in a given natural language is a challenging
research problem by itself, the phenomenal growth in the Internet user
population, especially among the non-English speaking parts of the world,
has extended this problem to the cross-language arena, making the handling
of NEs in multiple languages critically important.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in
various aspects of NEs in natural language text. In addition, the NEWS workshop
will feature a shared task on Machine Transliteration of NEs.


* Topics of Interest

This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of NEs,
including identification, analysis, extraction, mining, transformation and
applications of NE to NLP and IR systems. The topics of interest include,
but are not limited to the following:

NE Analysis
- Distributional characteristics of NEs in mono- & multi-lingual corpora
- Orthographic/phonetic characteristics of NEs

- NE origin/genre recognition

- Social network analysis and entity resolution
NE extraction

- Language-independent monolingual NE extraction

- Cross-language NE extraction
- General Techniques
- Specific datasets (Wikipedia, news, etc.)

- Unsupervised and semi-supervised methods for NE extraction

- Complex NEs, domain-specific term extraction

- NE set expansion

- Creation of annotated data
Machine Transliteration
- Computational phonology, incl. modeling of phonological rules, structure,
behavior, etc.
- Transliteration modeling
- Phonetic, grapheme)phoneme and phoneme)grapheme conversions
- Statistical & machine learning based approaches, transliteration unit
alignments
- Forward and backward transliterations
- Learning transliteration from comparable corpora
- Transliteration lexicon construction
- Romanization of Asian languages
- Transliteration evaluation metrics
Applications
- Monolingual and Cross-Language IR, Information Extraction and Management
- Machine Translation
- Question Answering
- Computational Journalism


* Important Dates

*** Task Details to be announced soon ***
Research Paper Submission Deadline 1-May-2009
Acceptance Notification 1-Jun-2009
Camera-Ready Copy Deadline 7-Jun-2009
Workshop Date 7 Aug 2009


* Shared Task on Transliteration

Transliteration of NEs is necessary in many applications, such as machine
translation, corpus alignment, cross-language IR, information extraction and
automatic lexicon acquisition. This calls for high-performance transliteration
systems, which is the focus of the shared task in this workshop. Details of
the task will be made available soon in the workshop homepage,


* Organizing Committee
+ Haizhou Li Institute for Infocomm Research
+ A Kumaran Microsoft Research India
+ Sanjeev Khudanpur Johns Hopkins University
+ Raghavendra Udupa Microsoft Research India
+ Min Zhang Institute for Infocomm Research
+ Monojit Choudhury Microsoft Research India

* Program Committee

+ Kalika Bali Microsoft Research India

+ Rafael Banchs UPC, Spain

+ Sivaji Bandyopadhyay Univ of Jadavpur, India

+ Pushpak Bhattacharyya IIT-Bombay, India

+ Monojit Choudhury Microsoft Research India

+ Marta Ruiz Costa-jussà UPC, Spain

+ Jianfeng Gao Microsoft Research, USA

+ Gregory Grefenstette Exalead, France

+ Sanjeev Khudanpur John Hopkins University, USA

+ Kevin Knight ISI, USA

+ Greg Kondrak Univ of Alberta, Canada

+ Olivia Kwong City Univ, Hong Kong

+ Gina-Anne Levow Univ of Chicago, USA

+ Arul Menezes Microsoft Research, USA

+ Jong-Hoon Oh NICT, Japan

+ Yan Qu Advertising.com, USA

+ Dan Roth Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

+ Sunita Sarawagi IIT-Bombay, India

+ Sudeshna Sarkar IIT-Kharagpur, India

+ Richard Sproat Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

+ Keh-Yih Su Behavior Design Corporation, Taiwan

+ Raghavendra Udupa Microsoft Research India

+ Vasudeva Varma IIIT-Hyderabad, India

+ Min Zhang Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore

* Workshop & Contact Information

For current information about the workshop, please refer to the workshop
homepage, http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/workshops/NEWS2009/. For any
specific information please contact: news09o@microsoft.com.