LREC 2010 - 7th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

Mediterranean Conference Center, Valletta, MALTA

MAIN CONFERENCE: 19 - 20 - 21 MAY 2010

WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 17 - 18 MAY and 22 - 23 MAY 2010

The seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) will be organised in 2010 by ELRA in cooperation with a wide range of international associations and organisations

Special Highlight: Contribute to building the LREC2010 Map!

LREC2010 recognises that time is ripe to launch an important initiative, the LREC2010 Map of Language Resources, Technologies and Evaluation. The Map will be a collective enterprise of the LREC community, as a first step towards the creation of a very broad, community-built, Open Resource Infrastructure. As first in a series, it will become an essential instrument to monitor the field and to identify shifts in shifts in the production, use, and evaluation of LRs and LTs over the years.

When submitting a paper, from the START page you will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that either have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research.

The Map will be disclosed at LREC, where some event(s) will be organised around this idea.

CONFERENCE AIMS

In 12 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, other associated media and modalities

• 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
• Validation, quality assurance, evaluation of LRs

Exploitation of LRs in different types of systems and applications

• For: information extraction, information retrieval, speech dictation, mobile communication, machine translation, summarisation, 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
• 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

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.

SUBMISSION AND DATES

Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster or demo presentations should consist of about 1500-2000 words.

• Submission of proposals for oral and poster/demo papers: 31 October 2009

Proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

• Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 31 October 2009

Submission will be electronic using START paper submission software that will be available at the conference website.

PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings on CD will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format. They will be added to the ELRA web archives before the conference.

A Book of Abstracts will be printed.

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

Mike Rosner, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Malta, Malta

Daniel Tapias, Telefónica Móviles España, Madrid, Spain