LRE-Rel: Language Resources and Evaluation for Religious Texts
LREC 2012 pre-conference workshop 22 May 2012 (morning)
Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/arabic/lre-rel.html

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite submissions for the first workshop on: Language Resources and Evalution for Religious Texts. The focus of this workshop is the application of computer-supported and Text Analytics techniques to religious texts ranging from: the faith-defining religious canon; authoritative interpretations and commentary; sermons; liturgy; prayers; poetry; and lyrics. We see this as an inclusive and cross-disciplinary topic, and the workshop aims to bring together researchers with a generic interest in religious texts to raise awareness of different perspectives and practices, and to identify some common themes.

We therefore welcome submissions on a range of topics, including but not limited to:

• analysis of ceremonial, liturgical, and ritual speech; recitation styles; speech decorum; discourse analysis for religious texts;
• formulaic language and multi-word expressions in religious texts;
• suitability of modal and other logic types for knowledge representation and inference in religious texts;
• issues in, and evaluation of, machine translation in religious texts;
• text-mining, stylometry, and authorship attribution for religious texts;
• corpus query languages and tools for exploring religious corpora;
• dictionaries, thesaurai, Wordnet, and ontologies for religious texts;
• measuring semantic relatedness between multiple religious texts;
• (new) corpora and rich and novel annotation schemes for religious texts;
• annotation and analysis of religious metaphor;
• genre analysis for religious texts;
• application in other disciplines (e.g. theology, classics, philosophy, literature) of computer-supported methods for analysing religious texts.

Important Dates
13.02.2012 Deadline for paper submissions
27.02.2012 Notification of acceptance
09.03.2012 Camera-ready copies due
22.05.2012 Workshop

Submissions
Papers should follow the LREC main conference formatting details (to be announced on the conference website: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/) and should be submitted either as a Word document or a .pdf file (preferably both) via the START conference manager for our workshop: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/LRE-Rel2012/

Papers will be reviewed by three members of the Programme Committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and possibly via special issue of an appropriate journal.

This year, when submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. For further information on this new initiative, please refer to: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/LRE-Map-2012

Workshop Organisers and Co-chairs, with contact persons identified via email address

Abdul Malik Al-Salman: King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Eric Atwell: University of Leeds, UK
Claire Brierley: University of Leeds, UK scscb@leeds.ac.uk
Azzeddine Mazroui: Mohammed First University, Morocco
Majdi Sawalha: University of Jordan sawalha.majdi@gmail.com
Abdul-Baquee M. Sharaf: University of Leeds, UK
Bayan Abu Shawar: Arab Open University, Jordan

Programme Committee

Nawal Alhelwal: Arabic Department, Princess Nora bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabia
Qasem Al-Radaideh: Computer Information Systems, Yarmouk University, Jordan
Abdul Malik Al-Salman: Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Eric Atwell: School of Computing, University of Leeds, UK
Amna Basharat: Foundation for Advancement of Science and Technology, FAST-NU, Pakistan
James Dickins: Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Leeds, UK
Kais Dukes: School of Computing, University of Leeds, UK
Mahmoud El-Haj: Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK
Nizar Habash: Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia University, US
Salwa Hamada: Electronics Research Institute, Egypt
Bassam Hasan Hammo: Information Systems, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Dag Haug: Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Norway
Moshe Koppel: Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Rohana Mahmud: Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Malaysia
Azzeddine Mazroui: Mathematics and Computer Science, Mohammed 1st University, Morocco
Tony McEnery: English Language and Linguistics, University of Lancaster, UK
Aida Mustapha: Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Putra, Malaysia
Mohamadou Nassourou: Computer Philology and Modern German Literature, University of Würzburg, Germany
Nils Reiter: Department of Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg University, Germany
Abdul-Baquee M. Sharaf: School of Computing, University of Leeds, UK
Bayan Abu Shawar: Information Technology and Computing, Arab Open University, Jordan
Andrew Wilson: Linguistics and English Language, University of Lancaster, UK
Nagwa Younis: English Department, Ain Shams University, Egypt
Wajdi Zaghouani: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, US

Further Information

If you have questions, please consult the workshop website at: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/arabic/lre-rel.html

Alternatively, contact: Claire Brierley scscb@leeds.ac.uk or Majdi Sawalha sawalha.majdi@gmail.com