Call for Papers
Background and Motivation

While computing has become almost ubiquitous in the US and Europe, its spread in Asia is more recent. However, despite the fact that Asia is a dense area in terms of linguistic diversity (or perhaps because of it), many Asian languages are very inadequately supported on computers. Even basic NLP tools are not available for these languages. This is a major bottleneck in the development of advanced NLP applications and language resources and it also has a social cost.

NLP/CL based technologies are now becoming important and future intelligent systems will use more of these techniques. Most of the NLP/CL tools and technologies are tailored for English or European languages. Recently, there has been a rapid growth of IT industry in many Asian countries. This is now the right time to address the problem mentioned above, namely lack of computing support and basic NLP tools for less privileged languages. Only when a basic infrastructure for supporting regional languages becomes available can we hope for a more equitable availability of opportunities made possible by language technology. There have already been attempts in this direction (some of them are mentioned below) and this workshop will try to take them further, especially in the Asian context.
Workshop Goals

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in archiving language data, developing language resources, providing basic computing support and creating natural language tools for less privileged languages. Some of these languages are (arguably) Malayalam, Gujarati, Maithili, Assamese, Burmese, Nepali and even tribal languages. They may or may not be low density languages, but the common feature among them is that they are not adequately supported on the computers and not many CL/NLP tools or resources exist for them. The workshop is open to any less privileged (in the above sense) language of the world, even though the focus will be on Asian languages.

We also invite novel approaches which can exploit the similarities among many languages. One of these could be a relatively more privileged language and can be treated as a pivot language around which resources and tools are developed for related but less privileged languages with minimum effort. For example, in the South Asian context, Hindi could be treated as the pivot language and resources and tools for languages like Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati etc. could be developed as extensions of the resources and tools for Hindi. Perhaps minimally supervised algorithms could be used to achieve this.

Papers are invited on substantial, original and unpublished research on following aspects of NLP for LPL, including but not limited to:

* Archiving and creation of interoperable data and metadata for less privileged languages.
* Support for less privileged language on computers. This includes input methods, display, fonts, encoding converters, spell checkers, more linguistically aware text editors etc.
* Basic NLP tools such as sentence marker, tokenizer, morphological analyzer, transliteration tools, language and encoding identifiers etc.
* Advanced NLP tools such as POS taggers, local word grouper, approximate string search, tools for making development of language resources easier.

Submission

Paper submission is through the centralized workshop submission page. Papers have to be written in English. There are two categories of papers: long and short. Long papers can be up to 8 pages long, while the maximum length for short papers is 5 pages (including references, figures, tables etc.). All selected papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

The papers should be formatted using the LaTeX styles or MS Word templates recommended for the main IJCNLP conference. These documents are available here. Reviewing will be blind. The draft papers should not contain any information that can identify the authors, as far as possible.
Important Dates

* Paper Submission Deadline: Sept 21, 2007
* Notification of Paper Acceptance: Oct 26, 2007
* Camera Ready Submission Deadline: Nov 16, 2007

Program Committee
Steven Bird, University of Melbourne, Australia

Rajeev Sangal, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

Michael Maxwell, University of Maryland, USA

Lakshmi Bai, IIIT, Hyderabad India

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington, USA

Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR - Pisa, Italy

Sarmad Hussain, CRULP, Pakistan

Greville Corbett, University of Surrey, UK

Anil Kumar Singh, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

Sobha L., AU-KBC, Chennai, India

Rachel Edita Roxas, Dela Salle University, Manila, Philippines

Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Nicholas Thieberger, University of Melbourne, Australia

Monojit Choudhury, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

Xabier Artola, University of the Basque Country, Spain

Khalid Choukri, ELRA - Paris, France

Samar Husain, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

Indra Budi, University of Indonesia, Indonesia

Rajat Mohanty, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India

Jeff Good, University at Buffalo, USA

Prasad Pingali, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

Harshit Surana, IIIT, Hyderabad, India

Contact Person
Anil Kumar Singh
Language Technologies Research Centre
International Institute of Information Technology
Gachibowli, Hyderabad, India

Phone: 91-40-23001412, 91-40-23001967/9 Extension 144
Fax: 91-40-23001413
Email: anil@research.iiit.ac.in