[apologies for cross-postings]
CALL FOR PAPERS
*Workshop on Language Resources (LRs) and Human Language Technologies
(HLT) for Semitic Languages - Status, Updates, and Prospects
*
To be held in conjunction with the 7th International Language Resources
and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2010)
*17 May 2010, Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valetta, Malta*
*Deadline for submission: 26 February 2010
*
Description
The Semitic family includes languages and dialects spoken by a large
number of native speakers (around 300 million). Prominent members of
this family are Arabic (and its varieties), Hebrew, Amharic, Tigrinya,
Aramaic, Maltese and Syriac. Their shared ancestry is apparent through
pervasive cognate sharing, a rich and productive pattern-based
morphology, and similar syntactic constructions. In addition, there are
several languages which are used in the same geographic area such as
Amazigh or Coptic, which, while not Semitic, have common features with
Semitic languages, such as borrowed vocabulary.
The recent surge in computational work for processing Semitic languages,
particularly Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Modern Hebrew (MH), has
brought modest improvements in terms of actual empirical results for
various language processing components (e.g., morphological analyzers,
parsers, named entity recognizers, audio transcriptions, etc.).
Apparently, reusing existing approaches developed for English or French
for processing Semitic language text/speech, e.g., Arabic parsing is not
as straightforward as initially thought. Apart from the limited
availability of suitable language resources, there is increasing
evidence that Semitic languages demand modeling approaches and
annotations that deviate from those found suitable for English/French.
Issues such as the pattern-based morphology, the frequently head-initial
syntactic structure, the importance of the interface between morphology
and syntax, and the difference between spoken and written forms
(especially in Colloquial Arabic(s)) exemplify the kind of challenges
that may arise when processing Semitic languages. For language
technologies, such as information retrieval and machine translation,
these challenges are compounded by sparse data and often result in
poorer performance than for other languages.
This Workshop intends to follow on topics of paramount importance for
Semitic-language NLP that were discussed at previous events (LREC,
MEDAR/NEMLAR Conferences, the workshops of the ACL Special Interest
Group for Semitic languages, etc.) and which are worth revisiting.
The workshop will bring together people who are actively involved in
Semitic language processing in a mono- or cross/multilingual context,
and give them an opportunity to update the community through reports on
completed or ongoing work as well as on the availability of LRs,
evaluation protocols and campaigns, products and core technologies (in
particular open source ones). We also invite authors to address other
languages spoken in the Semitic language area (languages such as
Amazigh, Coptic, etc.). This should enable participants to develop a
common view on where we stand and to foster the discussion of the future
of this research area. Particular attention will be paid to activities
involving technologies such as Machine Translation and Cross-Lingual
Information Retrieval/Extraction, Summarization, etc. Evaluation
methodologies and resources for evaluation of HLT will be also a main
focus.
We expect to elaborate on the HLT state of the art, identify problems of
common interest, and debate on a potential roadmap for the Semitic
languages. Issues related to sharing of resources, tools, standards,
sharing and dissemination of information and expertise, adoption of
current best practices, setting up joint projects and technology
transfer mechanisms will be an important part of the workshop.
Topics of Interest
This full-day workshop is not intended to be a mini-conference, but as a
real workshop aiming at concrete results that should clarify the
situation of Semitic languages with respect to Language Resources and
Evaluation. We expect to launch at least two evaluation campaigns:
Comparative evaluation of Morphology taggers and Named Entities
Recognizers.
Among the many issues to be addressed, below follow a few suggestions:
? Issues in the design, the acquisition, creation, management,
access, distribution, use of Language Resources, in particular in a
bilingual/multilingual setting (Standard Arabic, Hebrew, Colloquial
Arabic, Amazigh, Coptic, Maltese, etc.)
? Impact on LR collections/processing and NLP of the crucial issues
related to "code switching" between different dialects and languages
? Specific issues related to the above-mentioned languages such as
the role of morphology, named entities, corpus alignment, etc.
? Multilinguality issues including relationship between Colloquial
and Standard Arabic
? Exploitation of LR in different types of applications
? Industrial LR requirements and community's response
? Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for benchmarking
and evaluation for written and spoken language processing;
? Focus on some key technologies such as MT (all approaches e.g.
Statistical, Example-Based, etc.), Information Retrieval, Speech
Recognition, Spoken Documents Retrieval, CLIR, Question-Answering,
Summarization, etc.
? Local, regional, and international activities and projects and
needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for regional and
international cooperation.
We invite submissions on computational approaches to processing
text/speech in all Semitic and Semitic-area languages. The call is open
for all kinds of computational work, e.g., work on computational
linguistic processing components (e.g., analyzers, taggers, parsers), on
state-of-the-art NLP applications and systems, on leveraging resource
and tool creation for the Semitic language family, and on using
computational tools to gain new linguistic insight. We especially
welcome submissions on work that crosses individual language boundaries,
heightens awareness amongst Semitic-language researchers of shared
challenges and breakthroughs, and highlights issues and solutions common
to any subset of the Semitic languages family.
Workshop general chair:
Khalid Choukri, [email protected], ELRA/ELDA, Paris, France
Workshop co-chairs:
Owen Rambow, Columbia University, New York, USA
Bente Maegaard , University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Ibrahim A. Al-Kharashi, Computer and Electronics Research Institute,
King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
Organizing Committee information
The Organizing, Program, and the Scientific Committees will be listed on
the web pages.
Important Dates
Deadline for abstract submissions: 26 February 2010
Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2010
Final version of accepted paper: 11 April 2010
Workshop full-day: 17 May 2010
Submission Details
Submissions should comply with LREC standards (including the LREC Map
initiative) and must be in English. Abstracts for workshop contributions
should not exceed Four A4 pages (excluding references). An additional
title page should state: the title; author(s); affiliation(s); and
contact author's e-mail address, as well as postal address, telephone
and fax numbers.
Submission will use the LREC START facility:
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/SemiticLanguages2010/
Expected deadline is 26 February 2010.
Submitted papers will be judged based on relevance to the workshop aims,
as well as the novelty of the idea, technical quality, clarity of
presentation, and expected impact on future research within the area of
focus.
Registration to LREC'2010 will be required for participation, so
potential participants are invited to refer to the main conference
website for all details not covered in the present call
(http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/)
Formatting instructions for the final full version of papers will be
sent to authors after notification of acceptance and will be identical
to LREC main conference instructions.
/When submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be kindly
asked to provide relevant information about the resources that have been
used for the work described in their paper or that are the outcome of
their research. For further information on this new initiative, please
refer to
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources.
/
//
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