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First call for papers

2nd Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora:
from parallel to non-parallel corpora

ACL-IJCNLP 2009
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August 6th, 2009
Suntec, Singapore
http://comparable2009.ust.hk/

Deadline for submission: May 1st, 2009
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OBJECTIVE

Following the success of the first Workshop on Building and Using
Comparable Corpora
(http://www.limsi.fr/~pz/lrec2008-comparable-corpora/) at LREC 2008,
this workshop aims to bring together language engineers as well as
linguists interested in the constitution and use of comparable
corpora, ranging from parallel to non-parallel corpora. In the larger
context of the joint ACL-IJCNLP, this workshop aims to solicit
contributions from researchers in different geographical regions, in
order to highlight in particular the issues with comparable corpora
across languages that are very different from each other, such as
across Asian and European languages. Research in minority languages
is also of particular interest.


MOTIVATION

Research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons
in the language engineering and the linguistics communities. In
language engineering, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use
comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications
such as statistical machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval.
In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest
themselves in providing intra-linguistic discoveries and
comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that
comparable corpora are documents in one to many languages, that are
comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions. It
was pointed out that parallel corpora are at one end of the spectrum
of comparability whereas quasi-comparable corpora are at the other
end. We believe that the linguistic definitions and observations in
comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for
applications to statistical NLP. As such, it is of great interest to
bring together builders and users of such corpora.

Parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical
machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons
and terminologies. However, beyond a few language pairs such as
English-French or English-Chinese and a few contexts such as
parliamentary debates or legal texts, they remain a scarce resource,
despite the creation of automated methods to collect parallel corpora
from the Web. Interests in non-parallel forms of comparable corpora
in language engineering primarily ensued from the scarcity of
parallel corpora. This has motivated research into the use of
comparable corpora: pairs of monolingual corpora selected according
to the same set of criteria, but in different languages or language
varieties. Non-parallel yet comparable corpora overcome the two
limitations of parallel corpora, since sources for original,
monolingual texts are much more abundant than translated
texts. However, because of their nature, mining translations in
comparable corpora is much more challenging than in parallel
corpora. What constitutes a good comparable corpus, for a given task
or per se, also requires specific attention: while the definition of
a parallel corpus is fairly straightforward, building a non-parallel
corpus requires control over the selection of source texts in both
languages.

With the advent of online data, the potential for building and
exploring comparable corpora is growing exponentially. Comparable
documents in languages that are very different from each other pose
special challenges as very often, the non-parallel-ness in sentences
can result from cultural and political differences.


INVITED SPEAKER

Kenneth Ward Church (Microsoft Research, Redmond)


TOPICS

We solicit contributions in but not limited to the following topics:

* Building Comparable Corpora
- Human translations
- Automatic and semi-automatic methods
- Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the Web
- Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
- Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora
- Rare and minority languages
- Across language families
- Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora
* Applications of Comparable Corpora
- Human translations
- Language learning
- Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization
- Bilingual projections
- Machine translation
- Writing assistance
* Mining from Comparable Corpora
- Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from
comparable corpora
- Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of
single words and multi-word expressions; proper names, named
entities, etc.


IMPORTANT DATES

May 1, 2009 Paper submissions
Jun 1, 2009 Notification of acceptance
Jun 7, 2009 Camera-ready copies due
Aug 6, 2009 Workshop date


SUBMISSION FORMAT

Please use the official style files for ACL/IJCNLP 2009 available at:
http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/main/authors/stylefiles/

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WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS

Pascale Fung, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI-CNRS (France)
Reinhard Rapp, University of Mainz (Germany)
and University of Tarragona (Spain)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Hamdulla Askar(Xinjiang University, China)
Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Labs, US)
Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Éric Gaussier (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France)
Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France)
Hitoshi Isahara (National Institute of Information and Communications
Technology, Japan)
Min-Ye Kan (National University of Singapore)
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd)
Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas, US)
Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver, Inc., US)
Grace Ngai (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong)
Carole Peters (ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, US)
Mandel Shi (Xiamen University, China)
Yujie Zhang (National Institute of Information and Communications
Technology, Japan)


WORKSHOP TECHNICAL SUPPORT

Ricky Chan Ho Yin, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology