Call for papers

The 5th Biennial Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing
(BSNLP 2015)
Hissar, Bulgaria
10-11 September 2015
http://bsnlp-2015.cs.helsinki.fi

Held in conjunction with:
RANLP 2015: Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing 2015
http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2015
5-11 September 2015

The 5th edition of BSNLP workshop will be officially sponsored by ACL Special
Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing (http://sigslav.cs.helsinki.fi)

THEME AND MOTIVATION

The languages from the Balto­-Slavic group play an important role due to their
diverse cultural heritage and widespread use ­­ with over 400 million speakers
worldwide. The recent political and economic developments in Central and
Eastern Europe have brought Balto-­Slavic societies and their languages into
focus in terms of rapid technological advancement and rapidly expanding
consumer markets.

This Workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Balto-Slavic
languages. The NLP tasks in urgent need of attention include, but are not
limited to:

* morphological analysis and generation
* morphosyntactic tagging and parsing
* semantic parsing
* lexical semantics
* named-­entity recognition
* co­reference resolution
* information extraction
* question answering
* information retrieval
* text summarization
* machine translation
* sentiment analysis

Research on theoretical and applied topics in the context of many Balto-Slavic
languages is still in its early stages. The linguistic phenomena specific to
Balto­-Slavic languages such as rich morphological inflection and free word
order­make the construction of NLP tools for these languages a challenging and
intriguing task.

The goal of this Workshop is to bring together academic researchers and
industry practitioners working on NLP for Balto­Slavic languages. In
particular, the Workshop will serve to stimulate the research on NLP techniques
for Balto­Slavic languages, and to foster the creation of tools for these
languages. The Workshop will provide a forum for exchanging ideas and
experience, discussing difficult­-to-­tackle problems in this field of
research, and making the available resources more widely­ known. One
fascinating aspect of this sub­family of languages is the striking structural
similarity, as well as an easily recognizable core vocabulary and inflectional
inventory spanning the entire group of languages ­­ despite the lack of mutual
intelligibility ­­which creates a special environment, in which researchers can
fully appreciate the shared problems and solutions and communicate naturally.

This Workshop continues the tradition established by the previous BSNLP
Workshops:

* the First BSNLP workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2007 Conference
in Prague, Czech Republic;
* the Second BSNLP workshop held in conjunction with IIS 2009:
Intelligent Information Systems, in Cracow, Poland;
* the Third BSNLP, held in conjunction with TSD 2011, 14th
International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue in Plzen, Czech
Republic;
* the Fourth BSNLP, held in conjunction with ACL 2013 Conference in
Sofia, Bulgaria.

SUBMISSION

We accept two types of submissions: (a) full papers and (b) short papers.

Long papers should describe original unpublished work and should indicate the
state of completion of the reported results. Short papers should describe work
in progress, small focused contributions and/or interactive software
demonstrations.

Overlap with previously published work should be clearly mentioned. The authors
should indicate along with their submission if the paper has been submitted
elsewhere, e.g., for the main conference. In particular, in case the paper is
rejected by the main conference, it should be indicated in the submission.

All submissions, both long and short papers, will be judged on correctness,
novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, usability, and
significance/relevance to the Workshop. Submissions will be reviewed by at
least three members of the Program Committee.

Reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Self ­citations and other references that reveal the
authors' identities should be avoided.

In particular, submissions describing systems, resources, or solutions that are
made available to the wider public would be strongly encouraged, as this would
help to promote computational linguistics applications for Balto-Slavic
languages.

Long paper submissions should follow the two-column format of RANLP 2015
proceedings not exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus two (2) additional
pages for references. Short paper submissions should follow the same format,
and should not exceed five (5) pages for content plus two (2) additional pages
Gfor references. Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines of
RANLP 2015, which are contained in the style files, and must be in PDF.
Camera-ready versions of accepted papers must be provided in LaTeX format.

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the workshop is English.

PROGRAMME

The workshop will consists of:

* presentations of accepted papers,
* one or two invited talks by prominent researchers in Balto­Slavic NLP,
* a session dedicated to the organisational matters of the recently
created ACL Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language
Processing (SIGSLAV)
* a discussion on potential shared tasks for Slavic languages

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 26 June, 2015
Notification of acceptance: 25 July, 2015
Camera-­ready papers due: 6 August, 2015
Workshop: 10/11 September, 2015

ORGANIZERS

Jakub Piskorski, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Jan Šnajder, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Hristo Tanev, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Ispra, Italy
Roman Yangarber, University of Helsinki, Finland

PUBLICATION

The papers accepted for BSNLP 2015 will be published in BSNLP Workshop
Proceedings.

After the Workshop, we intend to make a selection of the best papers based on
this year's and previous years' Workshops, and to publish extended versions of
these papers in a dedicated volume on Balto-Slavic NLP, as a book or as a
special journal issue. We are currently in the process of negotiating with
reputable publishers.

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be extended)

Tomaž Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Darja Fišer (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Radovan Garabik (Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia)
Maxim Gubin (Facebook Inc., Menlo Park CA, USA)
Tomas Krilavicius (Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania)
Vladislav Kubon (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic)
Petya Osenova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Karel Pala (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)
Maciej Piasecki (Wrocław University of Technology, Poland)
Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)
Lidia Pivovarova (University of Helsinki/St.Petersburg State University, Russia)
Tanja Samardžić (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Agata Savary (University of Tours, France)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Inguna Skadina (University of Latvia, Latvia)
Jan Šnajder (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Stan Szpakowicz (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Marko Tadić (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Marcin Woliński (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)