LREC 2008 - 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

Palais des Congrès, MARRAKECH - MOROCCO

MAIN CONFERENCE : 28-29-30 MAY 2008

WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS : 26-27 MAY and 31 MAY- 1 JUNE 2008

The sixth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) will be organised in 2008 by ELRA in cooperation with a wide range of international associations and organisations, including AAMT, AMTA, ACL, ALTA, COCOSDA and Oriental COCOSDA, EACL, EAMT, ELSNET, EURALEX, GWA, IAMT, KnowledgeWeb, LDC, NEMLAR Network, SIGLEX, TEI, Technolangue French Program, WRITE and with major national and international organisations including the European Commission - Information Society and Media, Unit E.2 “Content and Knowledge”.

CONFERENCE AIMS

In 10 years - the first LREC was held in Granada in 1998 - LREC has become the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). The aim of LREC is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support to investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs) : text, speech, multimodality

• Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs
• Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
• Methodologies and tools for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge
• Ontologies and knowledge representation
• Terminology
• Integration between (multilingual) LRs, ontologies and Semantic Web technologies
• Metadata descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup

Exploitation of LRs in different types of systems and applications

• For : information extraction, information retrieval, speech dictation, mobile communication, machine translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, etc.
• In different types of interfaces : (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensorial interactions, voice activated services, etc.
• Communication with neighbouring fields of applications, e.g. e-government, e-culture, e-health, e-participation, mobile applications, etc.
• Industrial LRs requirements, user needs

Issues in Human Language Technologies evaluation

• HLT Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
• Validation, quality assurance, evaluation of LRs
• Benchmarking of systems and products
• Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces, interactions and dialogue systems
• Usability and user satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation

• National and international activities and projects
• Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs
• Open architectures
• Organisational, economical and legal issues

Special Highlights

LREC targets the integration of different types of LRs - spoken, written, and other modalities - and of the respective communities. To this end, LREC encourages submissions covering issues which are common to different types of LRs and language technologies.

LRs are currently developed and deployed in a much wider range of applications and domains. LREC 2008 recognises the need to encompass all those data that interact with language resources in an attempt to model more complex human processes and develop more complex systems, and encourages submissions on topics such as :

• Multimodal and multimedia systems, for Human-Machine interfaces, Human-Human interactions, and content processing
• Resources for modelling language-related cognitive processes, including emotions
• Interaction/Association of language and perception data, also for robotic systems

PROGRAMME

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels.

There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

On-line submission form for abstracts is now available : please go to the “Abstract submission” section on the LREC2008 web site (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008) and follow the procedure instructions. Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster or demo presentations must consist of about 1500-2000 words.

WORKSHOPS, TUTORIALS AND PANELS

Submission of workshop, tutorial and panel proposals should be made by e-mail to the following e-mail address :

[Email]

and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

Proposals for workshops and tutorials should be no longer than three pages, and include :

• For workshops :
  • The title
  • A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that the workshop will address
  • The reasons why the workshop is of interest
  • The names and affiliations, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers, email and web site addresses of the organising committee, which should consist of at least three people knowledgeable in the field, coming from different institutions
  • The name and the e-mail address of the member of the workshop organising committee designated as the contact person
  • The desirable duration of the workshop (half day or full day)
  • A summary of the intended call for participation
  • An estimate of the approximate audience size
  • A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room requirements

The workshop proposers will be responsible for the organisational aspects (e.g. workshop call preparation and distribution, review of papers, notification of acceptance, assembling of the workshop proceedings using the ELRA specifications, etc.).

• For tutorials :
  • The title
  • A brief technical description of the tutorial content
  • The reasons why the tutorial is of interest
  • The names and affiliations, postal addresses, phone and fax numbers, email and web site addresses of the tutorial speakers, with brief descriptions of their technical background
  • The name and e-mail address of one tutorial speaker designated as the contact person
  • The duration of the tutorial (half day is the expected usual length)
  • An estimate of the approximate audience size
  • A list of audio-visual or technical requirements and any special room requirements

The tutorial proposers will be responsible for the organisational aspects (e.g. assembling of the tutorial material, etc.).

Proposals for panels should contain the following information :

• The title
• A brief technical description of the specific technical issues that the panel will address
• The reasons why the panel is of interest
• Name of the panel organiser/s ; affiliation and postal address ; phone and fax numbers ; e-mail address ; web site address
• The name and the e-mail address of the designated contact person

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials : 31 October 2007

• Submission of proposals for oral and poster/demo papers : 31 October 2007

• Notification of acceptance of panels, workshops and tutorials proposals : 22 November 2007

• Notification of acceptance of oral papers, posters : 4 February 2008

• Final version of papers for the proceedings : 25 March 2008

• Conference : 28-30 May 2008

• Pre-conference workshops and tutorials : 26 and 27 May 2008

• Post-conference workshops and tutorials : 31 May and 1 June 2008

CONSORTIA AND PROJECT MEETINGS

Consortia or projects wishing to take this opportunity for organising meetings should contact well in advance the organisers at the following e-mail address : [Email].

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa, Italy (Conference chair)

Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France

Bente Maegaard, CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

Jan Odijk, Nuance Communications International, Belgium and UIL-OTS, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Stelios Piperidis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), Athens, Greece

Daniel Tapias, Telefónica Móviles España, Madrid, Spain

The composition of the committees as well as instructions and addresses for registration and accommodation in Marrakech will be detailed on the conference website at http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/.

PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings on CD will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format. In addition a Book of Abstracts will be printed.