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Call for Papers



Post LREC-2008 Workshop:



Sustainability of Language Resources and Tools

for Natural Language Processing



Marrakech, Morocco

Saturday, 31 May 2008



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Sustainability of Language Resources and Tools for Natural Language Processing





One of the problems in Natural Language Processing and related fields is that

the sustainability of language resources (e.g., corpora) and of language technology

tools (e.g. annotation or query tools) are neglected on a regular basis.

This results in, for example, tools whose algorithms and data structures are poorly

documented and whose area of application is evident only to the people who

built the software. Similar issues arise with regard to language resources:

often, these are tailored to the needs of an individual application or of

a project with a very specific research question. When the project is finished it

becomes next to impossible (especially for third parties) to gain access to the

resource that may have taken several months or even years to create.



The very complex question of how to ensure or maybe even guarantee

sustainability is related to several key issues spanning a broad spectrum

across several closely related fields: in the area of language documentation,

seven dimensions of portability (content, format, discovery, access, citation,

preservation, rights) have been suggested. Another area of research is

primarily concerned with annotation technology, especially the problem of

building generic annotation frameworks as well as representing several

different layers of linguistic annotation referring to one specific set of

primary data by means of standoff annotation. Closely related work deals with

the standardisation of annotation frameworks, especially with regard to the

level of impact a specific linguistic theory has on their vocabularies and

markup grammars. A last area concerns the fostering of sustainability through specific

Software Engineering processes for Computational Linguistics and Natural Language

Processing tools, applications and resources. At the moment, we are not aware

of previous work in this latter field.





Providing sustainability for linguistic tools and language resources becomes

increasingly important for the research community. Nowadays, this is also

acknowledged by funding organisations -- they often encourage research

projects to make sure that language resources will still be accessible and

(re-)usable in ten, 15, or 20 years time.



The problem of ensuring sustainability is a multi-faceted one and depends on

several individual subtasks. At least one of these tasks should

be addressed by contributions to this workshop. The topics of interest include

but are not limited to:



- Archiving linguistic data and resources



- Annotation technology, e.g., generic corpus annotation frameworks; the

relationship of linguistic theories to corpus annotation; metadata

annotation schemes, and related tools and applications



- Reusability of treebanks, e.g., annotations according to one specific

linguistic framework should be applicable to NLP tasks that are based on

different linguistic paradigms



- Sustainability in Software Engineering for Computational Linguistics



- Copyright issues, e.g., legal restrictions, copyright of web pages (for

example, in a web as corpus approach), software patents, intellectual

property, national and international issues etc.



- Privacy protection, e.g., automatic anonymisation of language data



- Sustainability, maintenance, and adaptability of NLP applications and tools,

e.g., to new domains, to new linguistic resources, or even to new

linguistic frameworks or theories



- Querying linguistic data, e.g., the usability and adaptability of query

interfaces or query toolboxes



- Usability and acceptance of NLP software, e.g., corpus query interfaces







SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS



Submissions should not exceed ten (10) pages, including references. We

strongly recommend the use of the LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word

document template that will be made available on the LREC Conference

Web site. A description of the required format will be made available to

those who are unable to make direct use of these style files.



Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted

papers is Adobe PDF. The papers must be submitted no later than

15th February 2008. Papers submitted after that time will not be

reviewed. For details of the submission procedure, please consult the

submission webpage reachable via the workshop website.



Questions regarding the submission procedure should be directed to

andreas.witt(a)uni-tuebingen.de





IMPORTANT DATES



Deadline for submission of Papers : 15th February 2008

Notification of Acceptance : 18th March 2008

Deadline for final paper submission: 2nd April 2008





ORGANIZING COMMITTEE



Lou Burnard, Oxford University

Khalid Choukri, ELRA/ELDA

Georg Rehm, Tübingen University

Thomas Schmidt, University of Hamburg

Andreas Witt, Tübingen University





PROGRAM COMMITTEE



o Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan University, USA

o Jeannine Beeken, Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie, The Netherlands

o Jean Carletta, University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, UK

o Dan Cristea, University of Iasi, Romania

o Stefanie Dipper, Bochum University, Germany

o Jost Gippert, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany

o Erhard Hinrichs, Tübingen University, Germany

o Marc Kupietz, Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim, Germany

o Sandra Kübler, Indiana University, Computational Linguistics, USA

o D. Terence Langendoen, NSF, USA

o Joakim Nivre, Växjö University & Uppsala University, Sweden

o Massimo Poesio, University of Trento, Italy

o Kiril Ribarov, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

o Laurent Romary, Max-Planck Digital Library, Germany

o Hinrich Schuetze, Stuttgart University, Germany

o Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK

o Gary F. Simons, SIL International, USA

o Manfred Stede, Potsdam University, Germany

o Simone Teufel, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, UK

o Peter Wittenburg, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

o Martin Wynne, Oxford Text Archive, UK

o Heike Zinsmeister, Heidelberg University, Germany