Language Resources and Evaluation Journal
Special Issue on "Collaboratively Constructed Language Resources"


KEYWORDS
Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Mechanical Turk, Games with a Purpose,
Folksonomies, Twitter, Social Networks


INTRODUCTION
In recent years, online resources collaboratively constructed by
ordinary users on the Web have considerably influenced the
language resources community. They have been successfully used for
example as a substitute for conventional language resources and as
semantically structured corpora. Particularly, knowledge acquisition
bottlenecks and coverage problems pertinent to conventional language
resources can be overcome by collaboratively constructed resources.

The resource that has gained the greatest popularity in this respect
so far is Wikipedia. However, other promising resources were recently
discovered, such as folksonomies, Twitter, the Wiki dictionary
Wiktionary, social Q&A sites like WikiAnswers, approaches based on
Mechanical Turk, or game-based approaches.

The benefits of using collaboratively constructed resources come along
with new challenges, such as the interoperability with existing
resources, or the quality of the extracted lexical semantic knowledge.
Interoperability between resources is crucial as no single resource
provides perfect coverage. The quality of collaboratively constructed
resources is a fundamental issue, as they often lack editorial control
or contain incomplete entries. These challenges actually present a
chance for natural language processing methods to improve the quality
of collaboratively constructed resources. Researchers have therefore
proposed techniques for link prediction or information extraction that
can be used to guide the "crowds" in constructing resources of better
quality.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
Specific topics include but are not limited to:
- Analysis of collaboratively constructed resources, such as
wiki-based resources, folksonomies, Twitter, or social networks;
- Using special features of collaboratively constructed resources
to create novel resource types, for example revision-based corpora,
simplified versions of resources, etc.;
- Analyzing the structure of collaboratively constructed resources
related to their use in computational linguistics and language
technology;
- Interoperability of collaboratively constructed resources with
conventional language resources and between themselves;
- Mining social and collaborative content for constructing structured
language resources (e.g. lexical semantic resources) and the
corresponding tools;
- Mining multilingual information from collaboratively constructed
resources;
- Game-based approaches to resource creation;
- Mechanical Turk for building language resources;
- Quality and reliability of collaboratively constructed language
resources.

We would also like to welcome papers outlining the challenges related
to using collaboratively constructed resources in computational
linguistics and language technology, and spanning the
cross-disciplinary boundaries to discourse analysis, social network
analysis, and artificial intelligence.


IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: Jul 1, 2010
Preliminary decisions: Oct 1, 2010
Submission of revised articles: Nov 1, 2010
Final versions due: Feb 1, 2011


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Submissions should be not exceed 30 pages, must be in English, and
follow the submission guidelines on the Language Resources and
Evaluation Web site
http://www.springer.com/education/linguistics/computational+linguistics/journal/10579

Submissions will be reviewed according to the standards of the LRE
journal. Papers should not have been submitted or published elsewhere
but may be substantially extended or refined versions of conference
papers.

Substantially extended and revised versions of papers accepted at
previous workshops concerned with collaboratively constructed
semantic resources, e.g. the ACL 2009 workshop on "Collaboratively
Constructed Semantic Resources" or the forthcoming COLING 2010
workshop on the same topic are encouraged.

http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/scientific-community/acl-ijcnlp-2009-workshop/
http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/scientific-community/coling-2010-workshop/

Authors are encouraged to send a brief email to Torsten Zesch
(lastname (at) tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de)
indicating their intention to submit an article as soon as possible,
including their contact information and the topic they intend to
address in their submissions.

To submit papers:
- Go to http://www.editorialmanager.com/chum/
- Register and login as an author
- Select "SI: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic" as Paper Type
- Follow the instructions on the screen


GUEST EDITORS
Iryna Gurevych and Torsten Zesch
UKP Lab
Technische Universität Darmstadt
http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de


PRELIMINARY GUEST EDITORIAL BOARD
Further responses are pending and will be announced later.

Anette Frank Heidelberg University
Christiane Fellbaum Princeton University
Diana McCarthy University of Sussex
Graeme Hirst University of Toronto
Gregory Grefenstette Exalead, Paris, France
Massimo Poesio University of Essex


ABOUT THE JOURNAL
Language Resources and Evaluation is the first publication devoted to
the acquisition, creation, annotation, and use of language resources,
together with methods for evaluation of resources, technologies, and
applications.