##################### 2.nd Call for Papers #########################
~~~~~~~~~Announcing Deadline EXTENSION and Keynote Speakers~~~~~~~~~~

SLATE 2018 - Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies
(http://www.slate-conf.org)
21th - 22th June 2018
Campus de Couros – University of Minho (Portugal)


####### Symposium introduction and Tracks information ################

We often use languages. First, to communicate between ourselves. Later,
to communicate with computers. And more recently, with the advent of
networks, we found a way to make computers communicate between themselves.
All these different forms of communication use languages, different
languages, but that still share many similarities.
In SLATE we are interested in discussing these languages.
Being languages such a broad subject, SLATE is organized in three
main tracks:

1) HCL Track: Processing Human-Computer Languages
The HCL track is where researchers, developers and educators
exchange ideas and information on the latest academic or industrial
work on Programming Language or DSL design, processing, static or
dynamic analysis, assessment, and applications.
2) CCL Track: Processing Computer-Computer Languages
The CCL track provides a broad space for presenting and discussing
languages for communication between computers, including those used
for visualization and presentation of information to the end user.
Mark-up Languages (XML or alike)--examples of usage and associated
technologies--are on of the main concerns.
3) HHL Track: Processing Human-Human Languages
The HHL track is dedicated to the discussion of research projects
and ideas involving Natural Language Processing and their industrial
applications.

A detailed topic list for each one of these tracks is presented below.

**HCL Track: Processing Human-Computer Languages**
- Programming language concepts, methodologies and tools;
- Language and Grammars, design, formal specification and quality;
- Design of novel language constructs and their implementation;
- Domain Specific Languages design and implementation;
- Programming, refactoring and debugging environments;
- Dynamic and static analysis: Program Slicing;
- Program Comprehension;
- Compilation and interpretation techniques;
- Code generation and optimization;
- Program visualization and animation;
- Programming languages teaching methods;
- Languages for modeling;
- Dynamic languages;
- Programmer profiling;
- Cross-fertilization of different technological spaces (modelware, grammarware, ontologies, etc).

**CCL Track: Processing Computer-Computer Languages**
- IoT data protocols;
- Semantic data description frameworks;
- Semantic Web languages;
- Ontology engineering;
- XML Databases and Big Data;
- Publishing and document storage formats;
- HTML5 and web formatting;
- Industry specific XML based standards;
- Web APIs and service marketplaces;
- Service Oriented Architectures;
- E-learning systems, standards and interoperability;
- Data and graph visualization languages.

**HHL Track: Processing Human-Human Languages**
- Computational morphology, syntax and semantics;
- Machine translation and tools for computer assisted translation;
- Computational terminology and lexicography;
- Speech synthesis and understanding;
- Information retrieval, extraction and automatic question answering;
- Corpora linguistics;
- NLP system and resource evaluation;
- Public tools and resources for NLP;
- Ontologies and knowledge representation;
- Statistical Methods applied to NLP;
- Language teaching support tools.

############## Invited Talks #########################################

**From Eliza to Siri,
A brief survey on Natural Language Understanding**
**Luísa Coheur — Instituto Superior Técnico / INESC-ID, Portugal**

Natural Language Understanding is usually defined as the task of mapping
natural language into some meaning representation that the computer
is able to understand. Natural Language Understanding models are at
the core of several applications in the area of Human Language
Technologies, ranging from simple tasks in which short commands are
uttered to robots, to complex dialogue systems or reading comprehension
exercises. However, natural language is much more difficult to conquer
than we tend to believe, and, therefore, Natural Language Understanding
research is still far from being able to offer general, mature and fully
automatic solutions.
In this talk, I will review the main ideas behind old and current Natural
Language Understanding models. I will describe the main achievements,
but also the challenges that still need to be surpassed in what I
consider to be the holy grail of Human Language Technologies.

**Norma-Simplex:
Exploring the Full Spectrum of Languages**
**Nuno Carvalho — United Nations University (UNU-EGOV), Portugal**

Languages come in many flavours and with different purposes.
This talk illustrates the heterogeneous use of languages in different
settings in the context of the Norma-Simplex project, an infrastructure
for legal documents analysis, assessment, and re-factoring. From the
programming languages used to perform different tasks, to the markup
languages used to store models and interchange information between systems,
including the natural languages techniques being explored in between.

***TBA***
**Kent Pitman - HyperMeta Inc., USA**

############# SLATE Publication Policy #############################

Paper types:
Full papers - 8 to 14 pages, presented in 20+5 minutes, complete work,
including a validation or discussion;
Short papers - 6 to 8 pages, presented in 10+5 minutes, ongoing work,
well anchored in the literature, but not yet fully validated;
Lightning talks - no publication, presented in 3 to 5 minutes, research
ideas or work that has just started.

All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings,
under an ISBN reference, on paper and digital support.
They will also integrate the OASIcs series: http://www.dagstuhl.de/publikationen/oasics/.
In addition, the authors of selected papers will be invited to submit
extended versions to appropriate journals (more information will be
posted later on the conference website).

Papers should be written using the OASIcs LaTeX template
(http://drops.dagstuhl.de/styles/oasics-v2016/oasics-v2016-authors.tgz),
using the English language.
Please refer to our website (http://slate-conf.org/2018/submissions)
for details about the document preparation.

########################## Important Dates ##########################

Full papers
Paper Submission: April 1, 2018 (**Extended - Firm deadline**)
Paper Authors' Notification: April 30, 2018
Final Paper Submission: May 25, 2018

Short Papers
Paper Submission: April 30, 2018
Paper Authors' Notification: May 11, 2018
Final Paper Submission: May 25, 2018

Other Dates
Accepted Paper's Author's Registration Deadline: Jun 15, 2018
Conference: June 21 and 22, 2018

########################## Committees ################################

Program Committee Chairs

* Pedro Rangel Henriques (Universidade do Minho, Portugal) -- General Chair
* Xavier Gómez Guinovart (Universidade de Vigo, Spain) -- HHL Track Chair
* António Menezes Leitão (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal) -- HCL Track Chair
* José Paulo Leal (Universidade do Porto, Portugal) -- CCL Track Chair

Local Organizing Committee

* Pedro Rangel Henriques (Universidade do Minho, Portugal)
* Alberto Simões (Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, Portugal)
* Maria João Varanda Pereira (Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Portugal)
* José Carlos Ramalho (Universidade do Minho, Portugal)
* José João Dias de Almeida (Universidade do Minho, Portugal)
* Sara Santos Fernandes (United Nations University – Operating Unit on Policy Driven Electronic Governance, UNU-EGOV)
* Goreti Pereira (Universidade do Minho, Portugal)


The full program committee for each Track can be found in the
Conference homepage.

######################### Contact and Updates ########################
Updates are regularly posted in the Symposium Webpage and notified
through different social networks
(e.g., @slateorg at Twitter; check the symposium webpage for details)

Organizers can be contacted using slate2018@easychair.org.

Pedro Rangel Henriques
Departamento de Informática da Universidade do Minho