Portability Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT)

 

Please note that the poster abstract submission deadline has been extended to 8th March 2002

Motivation and Aims

There are more than 6000 languages in the world, yet only a small number possess the resources required for implementation of Human Language Technologies (HLT). This imbalance in technical resources available to languages of the world is likely to result in a significant linguistic divide that further exacerbates global social and economic inequities unless decisive action is taken relatively soon. One potential means of ameliorating this imbalance in technology resources is through encouraging research in the portability of human language technology for multilingual application.

Portability issues in HLT are important in the structuring and acquisition of local language resources. The primary objective of the workshop is to bring together participants from academia and industry to discuss and disseminate the current state of the art in multilingual research and development in the context of cross-language HLT transfer. Major challenges for HLT-portability research will also be discussed.

The workshop will focus on the following topics and languages:

• Linguistic corpora and portability (new models, language maps, novel systems for creating and managing multilingual data);
• Automatic Speech Recognition (generic design in acoustic modelling, task portability, cross-language portability):

• Acoustic modelling (monolingual and multilingual modelling, cross-language transfer, finite state automata, decision trees and data-driven methods);
• Dictionary development (word-definition issues, automatic dictionary acquisition);
• Language modelling (the Internet as a linguistic resource, language modelling in spoken language processing).
• Natural Language Processing (cross-language transfer of HLT):
• Parsing;
• Translation.

The proposed workshop is intended to continue the series of SALTMIL (ISCA SIG) LREC workshops related to the integration of local and global languages ("Language Resources for European Minority Languages" (LREC'98)) as well as the workshop on "Developing Language Resources for Minority Languages: Re-usability and Strategic Priorities" (LREC'00)).

Workshop Agenda

Workshop Organizing and Program Committee

Julie Carson-Berndsen	University College Dublin	Dublin, Ireland
Steven Greenberg	International Computer Science Institute	Berkeley, USA
Bojan Petek	University of Ljubljana	Ljubljana, Slovenia
Kepa Sarasola	University of the Basque Country	Donostia, Basque Country

Submission

Papers are invited that describe research and development in the area of Human Language Technology portability. All contributed papers will be presented in poster format. Each submission should include: title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, postal address, telephone and fax numbers. Abstracts (maximum 500 words, plain-text format) should be sent via email to: Bojan Petek, bojan.petek@uni-lj.si
All contributed papers will be printed in the workshop proceedings.

Important Dates

Deadline for workshop abstract submission	8th March 2002
Notification of acceptance	15th March 2002
Final version of the paper for the workshop proceedings	8th April 2002
Workshop	1st June 2002

Workshop Registration Fees

The registration fees for the workshop are:

• If you are not attending LREC: 70 Euro
• If you are attending LREC: 45 Euro

These fees cover the following: a copy of the proceedings of the attended workshop, coffee-breaks and refreshments.
Participation in the workshop is limited by the venue. Requests for participation will be processed on first come first served basis.
Registration will be handled by the LREC Secretariat.