Announcement and Call for Papers

ICGL2010: The Second International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources

City University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong SAR, China

18 – 20 January 2010

http://icgl.ctl.cityu.edu.hk/

Language resources, including not only corpora but also lexicons, knowledge bases, ontologies, and grammars, support the development of language processing applications that are increasingly important to the global society. Substantial effort has been devoted to the creation of such resources for the world’s major languages over the past decades, and new projects are developing similar resources for less widely-used languages. Some standards and best practices have emerged for representing and linking language corpora and annotations. Efforts such as the “Global WordNet” and the development of framenets in multiple languages seek to create and link specific lexical and semantic resources across languages, and there are efforts to integrate such resources into general-purpose ontologies such as SUMO.

As the need for cross-lingual studies and applications grows, it is increasingly important to develop resources in the world’s languages that can be compared and linked, used and analyzed with common software, and that contain linguistic information for the same or comparable phenomena. We envision the eventual development of a “global web” of language resources, wherein, for example, linguistically-annotated corpora in multiple languages are inter-linked via the use of common categories, or categories that are mapped to one another; resources such as wordnets and framenets are linked not only to versions in different languages, but also to each other; and common representations enable analysis and use of resources in different languages and of different types within available systems. Interoperability also fosters universal access to language resources, enabling researchers who have fewer resources for performing costly and time-consuming transductions to have the same capabilities as others.

The Second International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources will bring together designers, developers, and users of language resources, tools, frameworks, and infrastructures from across the globe, in order to:

· assess the state of the art in methods and schemes for resource representation, annotation, processing, interlinkage, and access;

· consider the ways in which web technologies are and may be used to enable resource accessibility, interoperability and inter-linkage;

· consider the requirements for (and obstacles to) full interoperability, especially with regard to multi-lingual and multi-modal data;

· consider the requirements for achieving interoperability among multi-lingual resources of different types, including corpora, lexicons, knowledge bases, ontologies, etc., as well as the systems and frameworks that enable their creation and exploitation;

· work toward the definition of best practice guidelines and standards for language resource representation, annotation, and use that will enable interoperability;

· consider means to map or harmonize linguistic information in order to better enable cross-lingual studies;

· provide direction for developers of resources for less widely used languages;

· promote collaboration and cooperation among developers of language resources and tools across the globe;

· consider ways to provide central or distributed access to language resources developed throughout the world.

This year’s conference will include a special focus on the use of web-based technologies for interoperability and open access to language resources.

Topics

Paper submissions are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics:

· web-based technologies for resource interoperability, inter-linkage, and access;

· multi-lingual and/or multi-modal language resources, with focus on the mechanisms enabling interoperability;

· support for multi-linguality and multi-modality in systems/frameworks for resource creation, annotation, use, and access;

· existing and proposed standards for language resources, including standards for linguistic annotations at any and all linguistics levels;

· systems, frameworks, and architectures to support the development and use of interoperable language resources;

· evaluation of existing resources, systems and frameworks, and/or standards in terms of support for interoperability;

· harmonization, integration, and/or linking of language resources, including corpora, wordnets, framenets, ontologies, etc.;

· ontologies for language resources, especially for support of multi-linguality, multi-culturality, and multi-modality.

Proceedings

Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings. A selection of outstanding conference presentations will be published in a special issue of the journal Language Resources and Evaluation.

Submissions

Submissions should be no more than 8 pages in length, including bibliography and any appendices. Author instructions will be posted on the conference web site.

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: 15 October 2009

Notification of acceptance: 15 November 2009

Camera-ready papers due: 30 November 2009

Conference dates: 18 – 20 January 2010


Conference Organising Committee:

Conference Convener: Jonathan Webster, City University of Hong Kong

Conference Co-Chairs: Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA

Alex Chengyu Fang, City University of Hong Kong

Conference Secretary: Ernest Lam, City University of Hong Kong

Conference Webmaster: Kin Tat Ko, City University of Hong Kong

Conference Website: http://icgl.ctl.cityu.edu.hk/

Conference Inquiry: icgl2010@cityu.edu.hk