LREC 2020, 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation -
Palais du Pharo, Marseille, France
11-16 May 2020

Main Conference: 13-14-15 May 2020
Workshops and Tutorials: 11-12 & 16 May 2020

Conference web site: https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/
Twitter: @LREC2020


First call for papers
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The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is glad to announce the
12th edition of LREC, organised with the support of national and
international organisations among which AFCP, AILC, ATALA, CLARIN, ILCB,
LDC, ...


Conference aims
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LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human
Language Technologies (HLT). LREC aims 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, on-going and planned activities, industrial uses and needs,
requirements coming from e-science and e-society, with respect both to
policy issues as well as to scientific/technological and organisational
ones.

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


Conference topics
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Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, sign,
gesture, image, in single or multimodal/multimedia data
- Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability
- Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
- Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge
- Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation
- LRs and Semantic Web (including Linked Data, Knowledge Graphs, etc.)
- LRs and Crowdsourcing
- Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up

Exploitation of LRs in 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, semantic search, text mining, inferencing,
reasoning, sentiment analysis/opinion mining, etc.
- Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and
multimodal/multisensory interactions, voice-activated services, etc.
- Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like
e-government, e-participation, e-culture, e-health, mobile applications,
digital humanities, social sciences, etc.
- Industrial LRs requirements
- User needs, LT for accessibility

LRs in the age of deep neural networks
- Semi-supervised, weakly-supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches
- Representation Learning for language
- Techniques for (semi-)automatically generating training data
- Cross-language NLP & Cross-domain NLP with reduction of human effort

Issues in LT evaluation
- LT evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
- Validation and quality assurance of LRs
- Benchmarking of systems and products
- Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems
- User satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation
- International and national activities, projects and initiatives
- Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs
- Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages
- Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures
- Replicability and reproducibility issues
- Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues


LREC 2020 hot topics

- Less Resourced and Endangered Languages

Special attention will be devoted to less resourced and endangered
languages: it is expected that LREC2020 makes room to activities carried out
to support indigenous languages, building on the United Nations/UNESCO
International Year of Indigenous Languages being celebrated in 2019.

- Language and the Brain

Studying the neural basis of language helps in understanding both language
processing and the brain mechanisms. LREC2020 will encourage all submissions
addressing language and the brain. Among possible subtopics, submissions
could focus on new datasets and resources (neuroimaging, controlled corpora,
lexicons, etc.), methods aiming at new multimodal experimentations (e.g. EEG
in virtual reality), language processing applications (e.g. brain decoding,
brain-computer interfaces), etc.

- Machine/Deep Learning

The availability of LRs is a key element of the development of high quality
Human Language Technologies based on AI/Machine Learning approaches, and
LREC is the best place to get access to this data, in many languages and for
many domains. In addition to submissions addressing ML issues based on large
quantities of data, those applied to languages for which only small, noisy
or sparse data exist are also most welcomed.


Describe and share your LRs!
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In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map – now a normal step in the
submission procedure of many conferences – LREC recognises the importance of
sharing resources and making them available to the community. When
submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs
(data, tools, web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC
repository set up by ELRA. Your LRs will be made available to all LREC
participants before the conference, to be re-used, compared, analysed. This
effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description,
contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and
share data.


Programme
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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. We will also organise an
Industrial Track and a Reproducibility Track: for these there will be
separate Calls.


Submissions and dates
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Submission of oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: 25 November 2019

LREC2020 asks for full papers from 4 pages to 8 pages (plus more pages
for references if needed) , which must strictly follow the LREC
stylesheet which will be available on the conference website. Papers
must be submitted through the LREC2020 submission platform (it uses
START from Softconf) and will be peer-reviewed.

Submission of proposals for workshops, tutorials and panels: 24 October 2019

Proposals should be submitted via an online form on the LREC website and
will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.


Proceedings
------------------------
The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same
format.

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.

LREC 2010, LREC 2012 and LREC 2014 Proceedings are included in the Thomson
Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index. The other editions are being
processed.

LREC Proceedings are indexed in Scopus (Elsevier).

Substantially extended versions of papers selected by reviewers as the most
appropriate will be considered for publication in a special issue of the
Language Resources and Evaluation Journal published by Springer (a
SCI-indexed journal).


Conference programme committee
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Nicoletta Calzolari – CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio
Zampolli”, Pisa - Italy (Conference chair)
Frédéric Béchet – LIS-CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille- France
Philippe Blache – CNRS & Aix-Marseille University, Marseille- France
Christopher Cieri – Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia - USA
Khalid Choukri – ELRA, Paris - France
Thierry Declerck – DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany
Hitoshi Isahara – Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi - Japan
Bente Maegaard – Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen,
Copenhagen - Denmark
Joseph Mariani – LIMSI-CNRS, 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


Conference editorial committee
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Sara Goggi – CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”,
Pisa - Italy
Hélène Mazo – ELDA/ELRA, Paris - France