Joint ISA-7, SRSL-3, and I2MRT LREC 2012 Workshop on Semantic Annotation and the Integration and Interoperability of Multimodal Resources and Tools

Istanbul, 26-27 May 2012.

BACKGROUND
Three initiatives join forces in this workshop, which is concerned with issues in semantic annotation for language resources, especially in relation to spoken and multimodal language data, and with the interoperability and integration of multimodal resources and tools.

ISA-7 is the Seventh Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation, and forms part of a series of workshops of ISO TC 37/SC 4 (Language Resources) jointly with ACLSIGSEM (Computational Semantics). These workshops bring together experts in the annotation of semantic information as expressed in text, speech, gestures, graphics, video, images, and in multiple modalities  combined. Examples of semantic annotation include the markup of events, time, space, dialogue acts, discourse relations, and semantic roles, for which the ISO organization pursues the establishment of annotation standards, in order to support the creation of interoperable semantic resources. SRSL-3 is the Third Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language in
Speech and Multimodal Corpora. In these workshops researchers convene who are working on speech and multimodal resources for the semantic annotation of related corpora, and take their inspiration from the observation that the semantic gap between the content conveyed by speech and other modalities and their formal representation is a burning issue in a range of tasks such as content mining, information extraction, dialogue processing, interactive story-telling, assisted health care,and human-robot interaction.

I2MRT (Integration and Interoperability for Multimodal Resources and Tools) is an initiative to address infrastructure aspects of the creation and use of interoperable multimodal resources. The main objectives of I2MRT are to create awareness of the need to make multimodal data visible via standardized methods and accessible via registered data centers; to discuss possibilities of harmonization and standardization with respect to multimodal annotation schemes and possible mappings between encoding schemes; to discuss ways to make cutting-edge technologies available to multimodality researchers that can currently only be used in specialized labs; and to build a community that is committed to work further on these issues.

PAPER SUBMISSION
Submission of papers will be electronically using the START conference management page of LREC 2012 for this workshop:
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/SAIIMRT2012/

When submitting a paper to the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, including also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or that 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
This 1.5 day workshop has two tracks, one related to interoperable semantic annotation, nd one related to multimodal resources and tools. For each track, research papers are
invited describing original, unpublished research. Research papers can be either long (6-8 pages) or short (3-4 pages). Short papers are also invited describing ongoing or proposed
projects or infrastructure-related activities. Topics for the tracks include, but are not limited to the following:

Track 'Interoperable Semantic Annotation':
* methodological aspects of semantic annotation
* semantic annotation and semantic interpretation
* the semantics of semantic annotations
* interoperability of spoken and written corpora
* content identification and segmentation in spontaneous speech
* semantic annotation in dialogue, with a focus on multimodality
* segmentation of multimodal interaction data into semantic units
* issues in semantic annotation in specific domains, such as time and space; relations in discourse and dialogue; semantic roles and predicate-argument structures
* developments in recent, current, and planned ISO projects on developing semantic annotation standards.

Track 'Integration and Interoperability for Multimodal Resources and Tools':
* encoding systems in use in multimodal applications
* metadata concepts to describe multimedia/multimodal resources
* attempts to harmonize encoding schemes and to map between them
* cutting-edge multimedia processing technology that may help multimodality researchers to speed up annotation work
* relevance and god examples of usability solutions to efficiently deal with the inherently imperfect results of any recognition technology
* possibilities to create strong data hubs with attention for legal and ethical aspects of transferring multimedia/multimodal data
* approaches to the creation of a service-oriented architecture in this field.

IMPORTANT DATES:
deadline for submitting papers: February 27
notification of acceptance: March 15
camera-ready papers: March 29
workshop dates: May 26 (full day) and May 27 (morning session)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Harry Bunt (co-chair)
Manuel Alcántara-Pla (co-chair)
Peter Wittenburg (co-chair)
Thierry Declerck
Dafydd Gibbon
Nancy Ide
Steven Krauwer
Kiyong Lee
Lorenza Mondada
James Pustejovsky
Laurent Romary
Oliver Schreer

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
Jan Alexandersson
Stefan Baumann
Jonas Beskow
Paul Buitelaar
Harry Bunt (co-chair)
Thierry Declerck
Alex Fang
Raquel Fernandez Rovira
Annette Frank
Dafydd Gibbon
Koiti Hasida
Nancy Ide
Michael Kipp
Kiyong Lee
Inderjeet Mani
Jean-Claude Martin
Lorenza Mondada
Martha Palmer
Volha Petukhova
Andrei Popescu-Belis
Rashmi Prasad
James Pustejovsky
Laurent Romary
Oliver Schreer
Mark Steedman
Mariet Theune
Isabel Trancoso

MORE INFORMATiON:
For more information please contact either one of the three workshop co-chairs:
Harry Bunt, harry.bunt@uvt.nl
Manuel Alcántara Pla, manuel.alcantara@uam.es
Peter Wittenburg, peter.wittenburg@mpi.nl