Call for Participation
INTERSPEECH 2012 
Speaker Trait Challenge 

Personality, Likability, Pathology

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge

_____________________________________________

The Challenge

Whereas the first open comparative challenges in the field of paralinguistics targeted more 'conventional' phenomena such as emotion, age, and gender, there still exists a multiplicity of not yet covered, but highly relevant speaker states and traits. In the last instalment, we focused on speaker states, namely sleepiness and intoxication. Consequently, we now focus on speaker traits. The INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge broadens the scope by addressing three less researched speaker traits: the computational analysis of personality, likability, and pathology in speech. Apart from intelligent and socially competent future agents and robots, main applications are found in the medical domain.

In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge shall help bridging the gap between excellent research on paralinguistic information in spoken language and low compatibility of results.

Three Sub-Challenges are addressed:

. In the Personality Sub-Challenge, the personality of a speaker has to be determined based on acoustics potentially including linguistics for the OCEAN five personality dimensions, each mapped onto two classes.

. In the Likability Sub-Challenge, the likability of a speaker's voice has to be determined by a learning algorithm and acoustic features. While the annotation provides likability in multiple levels, the classification task is binarised.

. In the Pathology Sub-Challenge, the intelligibility of a speaker has to be determined by a classification algorithm and acoustic features.

The measures of competition will be Unweighted Average Recall of the two classes. Transcription of the train and development sets will be known. All Sub-Challenges allow contributors to find their own features with their own machine learning algorithm. However, a standard feature set will be provided per corpus that may be used. Participants will have to stick to the definition of training, development, and test sets. They may report on results obtained on the development set, but have only five trials to upload their results on the test sets, whose labels are unknown to them. Each participation will be accompanied by a paper presenting the results that undergoes peer-review and has to be accepted for the conference in order to participate in the Challenge. The organisers preserve the right to re-evaluate the findings, but will not participate themselves in the Challenge. Participants are encouraged to compete in all Sub-Challenges. 
Overall, contributions using the provided or equivalent data are sought in (but not limited to) the following areas:

. Participation in the Personality Sub-Challenge
. Participation in the Likability Sub-Challenge
. Participation in the Pathology Sub-Challenge
. Novel features and algorithms for the analysis of speaker traits
. Unsupervised learning methods for speaker trait analysis
. Perception studies, additional annotation and feature analysis on the given sets
. Context exploitation in speaker trait assessment

The results of the Challenge will be presented at Interspeech 2012 in Portland, Oregon. Prizes will be awarded to the Sub-Challenge winners. If you are interested and planning to participate in the Speaker Trait Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the Challenge, please send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your interest and visit the homepage: 
http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge

_____________________________________________  

Organisers:

Björn Schuller (TUM, Germany)
Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Anton Batliner (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Elmar Nöth (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, UK)
Felix Burkhardt (Deutsche Telekom, Germany)
Rob van Son (Netherlands Cancer Institute, Netherlands)
_____________________________________________  



If you want to participate, please find the License Agreement at:

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/IS12-STC-Agreement.pdf

Thank you for excusing cross-postings.


All the best,

Björn Schuller
On behalf of the Organisers


___________________________________________

Dr. Björn Schuller
Senior Lecturer

Technische Universität München
Institute for Human-Machine Communication
D-80333 München
Germany
+49-(0)89-289-28548

schuller@tum.de
www.mmk.ei.tum.de/~sch
___________________________________________

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Colloque 'Voix Parlée et Voix Chantée' le 9 mars 2012 lors des 40èmes ENTRETIENS DE MEDECINE PHYSIQUE ET 

DE READAPTATION Montpellier Le Corum - Palais des Congrès

Programme:

-Physiologie de la voix parlée et de la voix chantée 

– Dysodie – Pathologies des cordes vocales

 – Paralysies des cordes vocales 

– Bilan clinique et instrumental de la dysphonie 

– Troubles de la voix chez les malades atteints de cancer ORL

 – La voix en musicothérapie.

Avec la participation entre autres de : J-P. Blayac (Montpellier), B. Amy de la Breteque (Aix en Provence), 

R. Garrel (Montpellier), A. Ghio (Aix en Provence), A. Giovanni (Marseille), N. Henrich (Grenoble), M. Puech (Toulouse), 

J. Revis (Aix en Provence) D. Robert (Marseille), V. Woisard (Toulouse)…

website http://www.empr.fr

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***********************************************************************
                            IEEE ICASSP 2012
  International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
                           March 25 - 30, 2012
               Kyoto International Conference Center, Kyoto JAPAN
                        http://www.icassp2012.org/
***********************************************************************
We are very glad to announce that paper submission will be open soon at 
the IEEE ICASSP 2012 web site (http://www.icassp2012.org/).  

Important Deadlines
Special Session & Tutorial Proposals Due
     August 11, 2011
Notification of Special Session & Tutorial Acceptance
     September 15, 2011
Submission of Regular Papers
     September 27, 2011
Notification of Paper Acceptance
     December 22, 2011
Revised Paper Upload Deadline
     January 19, 2012
Author's Registration Deadline
     January 26, 2012


CALL FOR PAPERS

The 37th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) will be held at the Kyoto International Conference Center in Kyoto, Japan, on March 25 - 30, 2012. 

The ICASSP meeting is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 50 lecture and poster sessions on:

 * Audio and acoustic signal processing
 * Bio imaging and signal processing
 * Design and implementation of signal processing systems
 * Image, video and multidimensional signal processing
 * Industry technology tracks
 * Information forensics and security
 * Machine learning for signal processing
 * Multimedia signal processing
 * Sensor array and multichannel signal processing
 * Signal processing education
 * Signal processing for communications and networking
 * Signal processing theory and methods
 * Speech processing
 * Spoken language processing

Welcome to Kyoto: The Cultural Heart of Japan. Kyoto is special because it reigned as the national capital of Japan for more than 1000 years. Seventeen UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Sites are situated in a cityscape dominated by 2000 temples and shrines. The rich heritage is also reflected in modern technical advances of Japanese frontier and leading industries. You and your family will be welcomed with all the hospitality of the cultural heart of Japan.

Submission of Papers: Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers, including figures and references, to the ICASSP Technical Committee. All ICASSP papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. The ICASSP 2012 website (http://www.icassp2012.org/) will provide you with further details. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.

Tutorial and Special Session Proposals: Tutorials will be held on March 25 and 26, 2012. Brief proposals must include title, outline, contact information, biography and selected publications for the presenter, a description of the tutorial, and material to be distributed to participants. Special sessions proposals must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited speakers. Tutorial and special session authors are referred to the ICASSP 2012 website for additional information regarding submissions.

For more detailed information, please visit the ICASSP 2012 official website, http://www.icassp2012.org/.

The ICASSP 2012 Organizing Committee

================================================================================
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If you need assistance with your E-Notice subscription, please contact Khanh Luu.

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 Call for Papers - 2012 International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML2012)

- Scalable Approach in the Era of Abundant Data -

These days, an enormous amount of multimedia data is available on various kinds of Web sites and devices. Until now, R&D of statistical speech processing has been focused on high-quality data annotation and parsimonious model construction using the annotated data. However, from now on, the R&D focus will shift to the issue of how to construct a model that is robust against diverse types of noise in a massive amount of data annotated with either no labels or only unreliable ones. Another subject that will receive attention is how to convert domain knowledge based on a massive amount of data into model construction in different domains that have sparse data, e.g., for speech recognition systems for rare languages with few data resources. In such R&D, it is difficult to use a large amount of data from the beginning and it is necessary to investigate scalable methods that suit various amounts and quality-levels of data and domain knowledge. In this workshop, considering the present circumstances, researchers in machine learning and in speech, natural language, and image processing will get together and discuss scalable approaches in the era of abundant data.

Location
Kyoto International Conference CenterKyoto, Japan
http://www.icckyoto.or.jp/en/index.html

Important dates
20/Jan/2012        Extended abstract submission deadline        
20/Feb/2012        Notification of acceptance        
31/Mar/2012        Workshop date

Invited Speakers        
Hal Daumé III (Univ. of Maryland)        
Mark Gales (Univ. of Cambridge)        
Ruslan Salakhutdinov (MIT)        
Dong Yu (Microsoft)

Language        
The working language of the conference is English.

Organizing Committee
General Chairs:        
Li Deng (Microsoft)        
Tomoko Matsui (ISM)

Local Chairs:        
Atsushi Nakamura (NTT)        
Tomoki Toda (NAIST)

Finance Chair:        
Daichi Mochihashi (ISM)

Technical Chairs:        
Mark Gales (Univ. of Cambridge)        
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen Univ. of Tech.)        
Koichi Shinoda (Tokyo Tech.)        
Masashi Sugiyama (Tokyo Tech.)

Publications Chair:        
Erik McDermott (Google)        
Shinji Watanabe (MERL)

Secretary:        
Yoko Katayama (ISM)

Support        
Network of Excellence for Statistical Machine Learning, Institute of Statistical Mathematics        
IEEE Signal Processing Society (Technical Co-Sponsor)

For more information please visit http://www.ism.ac.jp/IWSML2012/ or e-mail iwsml-sec@ism.ac.jp.

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CREST Symposium on Human-Harmonized Information Technology
        --- Behavior, Interaction, Music, and UGC ---

        http://www.ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/crest/sympo12/


Date: April 1-2, 2012

Venue: Kyoto University Clock Tower Centennial Hall, Kyoto, Japan
(http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/clocktower)

Sponsored by JST CREST 'Human-Harmonized Information Technology'
Co-sponsored by IEEE SPS Japan Chapter, Kansai Chapter and IEEE Kansai Section

The symposium features invited talks on frontier topics in speech,
music, and signal processing.  Sessions are organized by principal
investigators of four different CREST projects together with IEEE SPS
DL program.

The symposium is free of charge and prior registration is not required.


Program:

April 1 (Sunday) DAY1: Music and User-Generated Content

13:00-15:00 Session 1 organized by Tokuda's project

	Steve Renals (University of Edinburgh)
		Natural Speech Technology

	Alan Black (Carnegie Mellon University)
		Making Computers Really Talk like People

	Keiichi Tokuda (Nagoya Institute of Technology)
		Spoken dialogue system framework based on user-generated content

15:30-17:30 Session 2 organized by Goto's project

	Mark D. Plumbley (Queen Mary University of London)
		Making Sense of Sound and Music

	Meinard Mueller (Saarland University and MPI Informatik)
		Informed Feature Representations for Music and Motion

	Masataka Goto (AIST)
		Music Technologies for Enhancing Music Appreciation and Creation


April 2 (Monday) DAY2: Human Behavior and Interaction

 9:30-11:30 Session 3 organized by Takeda's project

	Juan-Carlos De Martin (Politecnico di Torin)
		Towards an Internet Science

	John Hansen (University of Texas at Dallas)
		Speech Communications - Driving Behavior and Safety: Can they co-exist?

	Kazuya Takeda (Nagoya University)
		Signal Modeling of Human Behavior


13:00-15:00 Session 4 organized by Kawahara's project

	Shri Narayanan (University of Southern California)
		Multimodal Human Behavioral Informatics
	
	Ivan Tashev (Microsoft)
		Audio for Kinect: pushing it to the limit

	Tatsuya Kawahara (Kyoto University)
		Multimodal Sensing and Recognition for Smart Posterboard


15:30-16:30 Session 5 IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer Program
	Tulay Adali (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
		ICA and IVA: Theory, Connections, and Applications

16:30-17:15 Session 6 organized by IEEE Kansai Section
	Mike Schuster (Google)
		Voice Search at Google

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===== DEADLINE EXTENSION AND FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS ====

=======================================================

                   PROPOR'2012

The 10th International Conference on the Computational

                 Processing of Portuguese

                 http://www.propor2012.org/

         Coimbra, Portugal April 17-20, 2012

      *** Paper Submission Deadline: November 13, 2011


    Keynote Speakers: Robert Berwick (MIT)
                      Paul Boersma (University of Amsterdam)

==============================**=========================

The International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese
(PROPOR) is the main event in the area of Human Language Processing that
is focused on theoretical and technological issues of written and spoken
Portuguese. The meeting has been a very rich forum for the exchange of
ideas and partnerships for the research communities dedicated to the
automated processing of Portuguese, promoting the development of
methodologies,resources and projects that can be shared among
researchers and practitioners in the field. The conference will
consist of 3 days of paper presentations,special tracks and workshops.

PROPOR is in its 10th edition and it has been hosted in Brazil and in
Portugal: Lisbon/PT (1993), Curitiba/BR (1996), Porto Alegre/BR (1998),
Evora/PT (1999), Atibaia/BR (2000), Faro/PT (2003), Itatiaia/BR (2006),
Aveiro/PT (2008) and Porto Alegre/BR (2010).

TOPICS OF INTEREST

We invite submissions of papers describing work on any topic of language
and speech processing of Portuguese from the industry or academia, including
but not limited to:

1.  Human speech production, perception and communication, including:
Linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language; phonetics,
phonology and morphology; paralinguistic and nonlinguistic cues (e.g.
emotion and expression);

2.  Linguistic Description and Theories: syntactic, semantic, prosodic and
anaphoric phenomena, in (computational) linguistic formalisms like HPSG,
LFG, Categorial Grammars, etc.;

3.  Natural Language Processing Tasks, including: parsing, tagging, chunking
and segmentation, annotation, evaluation, semantic role labelling, grammar
induction, subcategorization acquisition, sentiment analysis and opinion
mining, using symbolic or statistical methods, etc.;

4.  Natural Language Processing Applications, such as word sense
disambiguation dialect identification, machine translation, information
retrieval, plagiarism detection, dialogue systems, question answering,
subtitling, e-learning, etc.;

5.  Speech Technologies, such as spoken language generation and synthesis;
speech and speaker recognition; spoken language understanding;

6.  Speech Applications: Spoken language interfaces and dialogue systems;
systems for information retrieval and information extraction from speech;
systems for speech-speech translation; applications for aged and handicapped
persons; applications for learning and education;

7.  Resources, standardization and evaluation: Spoken language resources,
annotation and tools; Spoken language evaluation and standardization; NLP
resources (raw and annotated corpora, dictionaries, grammars, ontologies,
etc), annotation, tools; NLP evaluation and standardization;

8.  Language and Speech processing in academic disciplines, such as Speech
and Hearing sciences, Psychology, Health, Biology, Linguistics, Cognitive
Sciences, Engineering, Education.

IMPORTANT DATES

*    November 13, 2011 - Deadline for short and full paper submission
*    December 20, 2011 - Notification of acceptance
*    January 15, 2012 - Camera-ready papers due
*    April 17-20, 2012 - Conference

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Authors are
invited to submit two kinds of papers:

*  Full papers: reporting substantial and completed work, especially those
that may contribute in a significant way to the advancement of the area -
wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included.

*  Short papers: reporting ongoing work, position papers and potential ideas
to be discussed.

Authors will be able to express their preference for full/short papers
but the final decision is on the program chairs. Short papers may be
selected for oral or poster presentation and should be up to five (5)
pages of content and one (1) additional page of references in length.
Full papers will be presented in an oral session and should be up to
ten (10) pages of content and two (2) additional pages of references.

Submissions should be written in English. As in previous PROPOR editions,
full papers will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), the LNCS subseries. Selected short
papers will be taken under consideration for LNAI publication. Papers
must be submitted in PDF, following the LNAI format

( http://www.springer.de/comp/**lncs/authors.html < http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html>
),

using Springer Conference Service of PROPOR2012
http://senldogo0039.springer- ** sbm.com/ocs/home/PROPOR2012 < http://senldogo0039.springer-sbm.com/ocs/home/PROPOR2012>

Submissions will be evaluated by at least three reviewers. As reviewing will
be blind, the submission should not include the authors' names and
affiliations, neither contain self-references that reveal identity, like,
'We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...'. Instead, use citations such as
'Smith (1991) previously showed ...'. Submissions that do not conform to
these requirements will be rejected without review. Separate author
identification information is required as part of the submission process.

ORGANIZERS AND CONTACT

General Chair
Fernando Perdigao (Universidade de Coimbra / IT - Portugal)

Technical Program Chairs
Aline Villavicencio (UFRGS, Brazil)
Antonio Teixeira (Universidade de Aveiro/IEETA, Portugal)

Editorial Chair
Helena Caseli (UFSCar, Brazil)

Demos Chair
Alberto Abad (L2F INESC-ID, Portugal)

Local Organizing Committee
Luis Sa (Universidade de Coimbra/Instituto de Telecomunicacoes)
Sara Candeias (Instituto de Telecomunicacoes)
Ana R. Luis (Universidade de Coimbra/CELGA)
Carla Lopes (IPLEI/Instituto de Telecomunicacoes)
Hugo Goncalo Oliveira (UC/CISUC)

Contact Information

cc@propor2012.org

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EACL 2012
Thirteenth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for 
Computational Linguistics
Avignon, France
April 23-27, 2012
http://eacl2012.org
========================================================================
First Call For Papers
========================================================================

>>> Submission deadline: November 4, 2011 <<<

EACL 2012 is the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics. The conference invites the
submission of papers on substantial, original, and unpublished
research on all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived
to include disciplines such as psycholinguistics, speech, information
retrieval, multimodal language processing. The conference welcomes
theoretical, empirical, and application-orientated papers as well as
papers targeting emerging domains such as bioinformatics and social
media.  

The list of topics includes, but is not limited to:

  - phonetics, phonology, and morphology
  - word segmentation, tagging and chunking
  - syntax, parsing, grammar formalisms, and grammar induction
  - semantics
  - pragmatics, discourse, and dialogue
  - generation and summarization
  - information retrieval and  question answering
  - information extraction
  - sentiment analysis and opinion mining
  - machine translation and multilingual systems
  - spoken language processing and language modeling
  - dialogue systems and multimodal systems
  - language resources and tools
  - psychological and mathematical models of language and language
acquisition
  - machine learning and algorithms for natural language
  - natural language processing applications
  - evaluation methodology


Important Dates
---------------

Paper submission deadline: November 4, 2011 
Author response period: December 27-30, 2011
Notification of acceptance: January 13, 2012
Camera-ready papers due: March 9, 2012
Papers available on-line: April 19, 2012
EACL 2012 Conference: April 23 - 27, 2012

All deadlines refer to 11:59pm Samoa time (UTC/GMT -11 hours) 


Requirements
------------

Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed
work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state
of completion of the reported results. A paper accepted for
presentation 
at EACL 2012 cannot be presented at any other meeting with publicly
available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to
other conferences or workshops must indicate this on the submission
page. If the paper is accepted by both EACL 2012 and another meeting
or publication, it must be withdrawn from one of them. Furthermore,
its authors must notify the program chairs, within a week of receiving
the EACL 2012 acceptance notification, whether or not they have chosen
EACL 2012 for presentation of their work.


Review and Selection
--------------------

Reviewing of papers will be double-blind, and all submissions will
receive 
three independent reviews. Final decisions on the program will be made
by 
the Program Committee, consisting of the Program Co-Chairs and Area
Chairs.  
Submissions will be assessed with respect to appropriateness, clarity, 
soundness/correctness, meaningful comparison,
originality/innovativeness, 
and impact of ideas or results. 


Publication and Presentation
----------------------------

All papers that are accepted will be published in the proceedings of
the conference, and will be presented orally or as a poster
presentation 
as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which
papers 
will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be
based 
on the nature rather than on the quality of the work. Authors will be
also 
asked on submission to state their preferred mode of presentation. 
EACL 2012 will continue aiming to give poster presentations a high
status. 
There will be no distinction in the conference proceedings between
papers 
that are assigned different presentation modes.


Submission Information
----------------------

All submissions must be submitted electronically as PDF and must
follow the two-column format of EACL proceedings. Authors are strongly
recommended to use the style files available on the conference web
site. Papers may consist of up to nine (9) pages of content and any
number of additional pages containing references only.

EACL 2012 will also accept papers accompanied by the resource(s)
(software or data) described in the paper. In addition to the regular
review of the research quality of the paper, these papers will also be
reviewed for the quality of the resource that is being made
available. Acceptance or rejection decision will be made based on the
quality of both the research and the software/data component.

As reviewing will be double-blind, the paper should not include the
authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that
reveal the author's identity, e.g., 'We previously showed (Smith,
1991) ...', should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as 'Smith
previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...'. Authors should not use anonymous
citations and should not include any acknowledgments. Papers that do
not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

The deadline for submission is 11:59pm Samoa Time (UTC/GMT -11 hours)
on November 4, 2011.  Additional instructions for electronic submission 
will be posted on the conference website at http://eacl2012.org


Mentoring service
-----------------

EACL is providing a mentoring (coaching) service for authors from
regions of the world where English is less emphasized as a language of
scientific exchange. Many authors from these regions, although able to
read the scientific literature in English, have little or no
experience in writing papers in English for conferences such as the
E/ACL meetings. If you would like to take advantage of the service,
please upload your paper in PDF format by September 23, 2011 using the
paper submission software for the mentoring service which will be
available at the conference website. Questions about the mentoring
service should be referred to 


Invited speakers
----------------

TBA


Best paper awards
-----------------

TBA


Organization
------------

General Chair:          Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp,
Belgium)

Program Co-Chairs:      Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh, UK)
                        Lluis Marquez (Universitat Politcnica de
Catalunya, Spain)

Area Chairs:            TBA

Mentoring Chairs:       Caroline Sporleder (Saarland University,Germany)
                        Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen, The
Netherlands)
                        
Publications Chairs:    Adri de Gispert (University of Cambridge, UK)
                        Fabrice Lefevre (University of Cambridge, UK)

Local Chair:            Marc El-Beze (University of Avignon, France)
Local Co-Chair:         Tania Jimenez (University of Avignon, France)

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1st Call for Papers

6th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA
THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

LATA 2012

A Coruña, Spain

March 5-9, 2012

http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2012/

*********************************************************************

AIMS:

LATA is a yearly conference in theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the International Schools in Formal Languages and Applications developed at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona since 2002, LATA 2012 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas (bioinformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial intelligence, etc.).

VENUE:

LATA 2012 will take place in A Coruña, at the northwest of Spain. The venue will be the Faculty of Computer Science, University of A Coruña.

SCOPE:

Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:

- algebraic language theory
- algorithms for semi-structured data mining
- algorithms on automata and words
- automata and logic
- automata for system analysis and programme verification
- automata, concurrency and Petri nets
- automatic structures
- cellular automata
- combinatorics on words
- computability
- computational complexity
- computational linguistics
- data and image compression
- decidability questions on words and languages
- descriptional complexity
- DNA and other models of bio-inspired computing
- document engineering
- foundations of finite state technology
- foundations of XML
- fuzzy and rough languages
- grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, multidimensional, unification, categorial, etc.)
- grammars and automata architectures
- grammatical inference and algorithmic learning
- graphs and graph transformation
- language varieties and semigroups
- language-based cryptography
- language-theoretic foundations of artificial intelligence and artificial life
- parallel and regulated rewriting
- parsing
- pattern recognition
- patterns and codes
- power series
- quantum, chemical and optical computing
- semantics
- string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinformatics
- string processing algorithms
- symbolic dynamics
- symbolic neural networks
- term rewriting
- transducers
- trees, tree languages and tree automata
- weighted automata

STRUCTURE:

LATA 2012 will consist of:

- 3 invited talks
- 2 invited tutorials
- peer-reviewed contributions

INVITED SPEAKERS:

To be announced

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Eric Allender (Rutgers)
Miguel Á. Alonso (A Coruña)
Amihood Amir (Bar-Ilan)
Dana Angluin (Yale)
Franz Baader (Dresden)
Patricia Bouyer (Cachan)
John Case (Delaware)
Volker Diekert (Stuttgart)
Paul Gastin (Cachan)
Reiko Heckel (Leicester)
Sanjay Jain (Singapore)
Janusz Kacprzyk (Warsaw)
Victor Khomenko (Newcastle)
Bakhadyr Khoussainov (Auckland)
Claude Kirchner (Paris)
Maciej Koutny (Newcastle)
Salvador Lucas (Valencia)
Sebastian Maneth (Sydney)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, chair)
Giancarlo Mauri (Milano Bicocca)
Aart Middeldorp (Innsbruck)
Faron Moller (Swansea)
Angelo Montanari (Udine)
Joachim Niehren (Lille)
Mitsunori Ogihara (Miami)
Enno Ohlebusch (Ulm)
Dominique Perrin (Marne-la-Vallée)
Alberto Policriti (Udine)
Alexander Rabinovich (Tel Aviv)
Mathieu Raffinot (Paris)
Jörg Rothe (Düsseldorf)
Olivier H. Roux (Nantes)
Yasubumi Sakakibara (Keio)
Eljas Soisalon-Soininen (Aalto)
Frank Stephan (Singapore)
Jens Stoye (Bielefeld)
Howard Straubing (Boston)
Masayuki Takeda (Kyushu)
Wolfgang Thomas (Aachen)
Sophie Tison (Lille)
Jacobo Torán (Ulm)
Tayssir Touili (Paris)
Esko Ukkonen (Helsinki)
Frits Vaandrager (Nijmegen)
Manuel Vilares (Vigo)
Todd Wareham (Newfoundland)
Pierre Wolper (Liège)
Hans Zantema (Eindhoven)
Thomas Zeugmann (Sapporo)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Miguel Á. Alonso (A Coruña, co-chair)
Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona)
Carlos Gómez Rodríguez (A Coruña)
Jorge Graña (A Coruña)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair) 
Bianca Truthe (Magdeburg)
Jesús Vilares (A Coruña)
Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (including eventual appendices) and should be formatted according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs/lncs+authors?SGWID=0-40209-0-0-0). Submissions have to be uploaded at:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2012

PUBLICATIONS:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.

A special issue of a major journal will be later published containing peer-reviewed extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration will be open since July 16, 2011 until March 5, 2012. The registration form can be found at the website of the conference: http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2012/

Early registration fees: 500 Euro
Early registration fees (PhD students): 400 Euro
Late registration fees: 540 Euro
Late registration fees (PhD students): 440 Euro
On-site registration fees: 580 Euro
On-site registration fees (PhD students): 480 Euro

At least one author per paper should register. Papers that do not have a registered author who paid the fees by December 5, 2011 will be excluded from the proceedings.

Fees comprise access to all sessions, one copy of the proceedings volume, coffee breaks and lunches.

PhD students will need to prove their status on site.

PAYMENT:

Early (resp. late) registration fees must be paid by bank transfer before December 5, 2011 (resp. February 24, 2012) to the conference series account at Uno-e Bank (Julián Camarillo 4 C, 28037 Madrid, Spain):

IBAN: ES3902270001820201823142 – Swift/BIC code: UNOEESM1 (account holder: Carlos Martin-Vide – LATA 2012; address: Av. Catalunya, 35, 43002 Tarragona, Spain).

Please write the participant’s name in the subject of the bank form. Transfers should not involve any expense for the conference. People claiming early registration will be requested to prove that they gave the transfer order to the bank by the deadline.

On-site registration fees can be paid only in cash. A receipt for payments will be provided on site.

Besides paying the registration fees, it is required to fill in the registration form at the website of the conference.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper submission: October 7, 2011 (23:59h, CET)
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: November 18, 2011
Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: November 27, 2011
Early registration: December 5, 2011
Late registration: February 24, 2012
Starting of the conference: March 5, 2012
Submission to the post-conference special issue: June 9, 2012

FURTHER INFORMATION:

florentinalilica.voicu@urv.cat

POSTAL ADDRESS:

LATA 2012
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics
Rovira i Virgili University
Av. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona, Spain

Phone: +34-977-559543
Fax: +34-977-558386

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CALL FOR PAPERS: SLTU'2012

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The 8th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference will take place in Istanbul (Turkey) on May 21-27, 2012.
More information will be available soon on: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/lrec2012.htm

Submit an Abstract for Oral and Poster presentation:

To submit your abstract, please go to:
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/lrec2012/ Your abstract must consist of 1500 to 2000 words (about 3-4 pages; can contain references, tables, figures)  and must be formatted in PDF.
There is no template for the pdf abstract. The template will be made available online for the final papers.  Submissions are NOT anonymous.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
In addition to the LRE Map, for LREC2012 we introduce a new feature, the Language Library: it is an experiment of a collaboratively created repository which can be built with a small effort from each of you.

We suggest to submit your abstract and the corresponding LRE Map information as soon as possible. Note that you will be able to revise and re-submit an improved version of the abstract and the Map forms at any time (before the call closure).

Please do not wait until the last moment!

Submit a proposal for Workshop, Tutorial or Panel:

Submission of workshop, tutorial and panel proposals should be made via the LREC2012 conference website. The links for making your submission are the following:

http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/Submit-a-Workshop-Proposal.html
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?Submit-a-Tutorial-Proposal
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?Submit-a-Panel

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FIRST WORKSHOP ON INDIAN LANGUAGE DATA: RESOURCES AND EVALUATION (WILDRE)
Date: Monday, 21st May 2012 (morning session)
Venue: Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre, Turkey (Organized in under the platform of LREC2012 (21-27 May 2012))
Website: http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in/conf/wildre

WILDRE – the first workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation is being organized in Istanbul, Turkey on 21st May, 2012 under the LREC platform. India has a huge linguistic diversity and has seen concerted efforts from the Indian government and industry towards developing language resources. European Language Resource Association (ELRA) and its associate organizations have been very active and successful in addressing the challenges and opportunities related to language resource creation and evaluation. It is therefore a great opportunity for resource creators of Indian languages to showcase their work on this platform and also to interact and learn from those involved in similar initiatives all over the world.

The broader objectives of the WILDRE will be
• To map the status of Indian Language Resources
• To investigate challenges related to creating and sharing various levels of language resources
• To promote a dialogue between language resource developers and users
• To provide opportunity for researchers from India to collaborate with researchers from other parts of the world

DATES
February 12, 2012 Paper submissions due
March 18, 2012 Paper notification of acceptance
March 30, 2012 Camera-ready papers due
May 21, 2012 Workshop (morning session)

SUBMISSIONS
Papers must describe original, completed or in progress, and unpublished work. Each submission will be reviewed by two program committee members.
Accepted papers will be given up to 10 pages (for full papers) 5 pages (for short papers and posters) in the workshop proceedings, and will be presented oral presentation or poster.
Papers should be formatted according to the style-sheet, which will be provided on the LREC 2012 website (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/).
Please submit papers in PDF/doc format to:
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/WILDRE2012/
We are seeking submissions under the following category
• Full papers (10 pages)
• Short papers (work in progress – 5 pages)
• Posters (innovative ideas/proposals, research proposal of students)
• Demo (of working online/standalone systems)
Though our area of interest covers all NLP/language technology related activity for Indian languages, we would like to focus on the resource creation in the following areas-
• Text corpora
• Speech corpora
• Lexicons and Machine-readable dictionaries
• Ontologies
• Grammars
• Annotation of corpora
• Language resources for basic NLP, IR and Speech Technology tasks, tools and
• Infrastructure for constructing and sharing language resources
• Standards or specifications for language resources applications
• Licensing and copyright issues

Both submission and review processes will handled electronically using the Start interface of the LREC website. The workshop website will provide the submission guidelines and the link for the electronic submission.

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 initiative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012 . Authors will also be asked to contribute to the Language Library, the new initiative of LREC2012
Conference Chairs
• Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
• Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India Lab, Bangalore
• Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai

Program Committee

1. A. Kumaran, MSRI, Bangalore
2. A G Ramakrishnan, I.I.Sc Bangalore
3. Amba Kulkarni, University of Hyderabad
4. Chris Cieri, LDC, University of Pennsylvania
5. Dafydd Gibbon, Universität Bielefeld, Germany
6. Dipti Mishra Sharma, IIIT, Hyderabad
7. Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
8. Hema Murthy, IIT, Chennai
9. Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France
10. Kalika Bali, MSRI, Bangalore
11. Khalid Choukri, ELRA, France
12. L Ramamoorthy, LDC-IL, CIIL, Mysore
13. Monojit Choudhary, MSRI Bangalore
14. Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy
15. Niladri Shekhar Dash, ISI Kolkata
16. Shivaji Bandhopadhyay, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
17. Shyamal Das Mondal, IIT Kharagpur
18. Sobha L, AU-KBC Research Centre, Anna University
19. Soma Paul, IIIT, Hyderabad
20. Umamaheshwar Rao, University of Hyderabad

Workshop contact:

diwakar.mishra@gmail.com
Diwakar Mishra, Special Center for Sanskrit Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

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First Workshop on Language Resources and Technologies for Turkic Languages

May 21, 2012 (afternoon session)
First Call for Papers

Turkic languages (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazakh, Tatar, Uzbek and many others) are spoken as native languages by more than 150 million people all around the world. Turkic languages have complex agglutinative morphology with very productive inflectional and derivational processes leading to a very large vocabulary size. They also have a very free constituent order with almost no formal constraints. Furthermore, due to various historical and social reasons these languages have employed a wide-variety of writing systems and still do so. These aspects bring numerous challenges to computational processing of these languages in tasks such as language modeling, parsing, statistical machine translation, speech-to-speech translation, etc. Time is now ripe to focus on the development of language resources and computational processing techniques for these languages to bring their status up to par with more studied languages in the context of speech and language processing.
We are pleased to invite you to the 'First Workshop on Language Resources and Technologies for Turkic Languages' to be held during LREC 2012 in Istanbul. This half-day workshop will be the first attempt to bring together the researchers, commercial interests and other stakeholders actively involved in developing and using speech and language technologies for Turkic languages. The workshop invites submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of speech and language technologies for Turkic languages. Selected contributions will be presented as short-oral presentations or posters. Topics include but are not limited to:
• Morphological and Syntactic Analysis for Turkic languages
• Novel language modeling techniques for Turkic languages
• Development and adaptation of language and speech resources for Turkic languages
• Machine translation into/from/between Turkic languages
• Challenges for speech recognition and generation for Turkic languages


Submission Information

Submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Each submission will be judged on its originality, technical content, and relevance to the workshop. Contributions accompanied by language resources and datasets that are described in the paper are particularly encouraged. Paper submissions up to 4 pages (excluding references) must conform to the official LREC 2012 style guidelines (will be distributed soon on the LREC website). Submissions should be in PDF format and submitted through the START online submission system https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/TurkicLanguage2012/. Since the reviewing will not be blind, submissions must include the authors' names and affiliations. Double submissions to other conferences are not allowed. More information on the submission procedure will be available in the next call of the papers.

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 initiative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012. Authors will also be asked to contribute to the Language Library, the new initiative of LREC2012.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: February 27, 2012
Notification of acceptance: March 19, 2012
Camera-ready submission deadline: March 30, 2012
Workshop: May 21, 2012 (afternoon session)


Organizing Committee

Kemal Oflazer, Carnegie Mellon University - Qatar
Mehmed Özkan, Boğaziçi University
Mehmet Uğur Doğan, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Microsoft
Alper Kanak, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
İlknur Durgar El-Kahlout, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Şeniz Demir, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Yücel Bicil, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM

Program Committee

Adil Alpkoçak, Dokuz Eylül University
Ahmet Cüneyd Tantuğ, İstanbul Technical University
Arzucan Özgür, Boğaziçi University
Atakan Kurt, Fatih University
Banu Diri, Yıldız Technical University
Barış Bozkurt, Bahçeşehir University
Bilge Say, Middle East Technical University
Cem Bozşahin, Middle East Technical University
Cemil Demir, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Cenk Demiroğlu, Özyeğin University
Coşkun Mermer, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Deniz Yüret, Koç University
Deniz Zeyrek, Middle East Technical University
Ebru Arısoy, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Engin Erzin, Koç University
Erdem Ünal, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Fatma Canan Pembe, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Gülşen Cebiroğlu Eryiğit, İstanbul Technical University
Levent Arslan, Boğaziçi University
Mehmet Fatih Amasyalı, Yıldız Technical University
Murat Can Ganiz, Doğuş University
Murat Saraçlar, Google - Boğaziçi University
Oğuzhan Külekçi, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM
Özlem Çetinoğlu, University of Stuttgart
Ruken Cakici, Middle East Technical University
Selçuk Köprü, Teknoloji Yazılımevi
Şükriye Ruhi, Middle East Technical University
Tunga Güngör, Boğaziçi University
Ümit Güz, Işık University
Yeşim Aksan, Mersin University
Yusuf Ziya Işık, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM


Sponsor

The workshop is being supported by the European Commission FP7-REGPOT-2008-1 project (#229861) MULTISAUND (MULTilingualism Integrated to Speech and Audio UNDerstanding) - 'Improvement of interactive and secure language and speech processing potential of TUBITAK-UEKAE for an increased multilingual capability in ERA'.

Contact Information
Please contact Mehmet Uğur Doğan (mugur@uekae.tubitak.gov.tr) or İlknur Durgar El-Kahlout (idurgar@uekae.tubitak.gov.tr) for any further inquiries.

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 “Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages”
8th SALTMIL Workshop on Minority Languages and the 4th workshop on African Language Technology (AfLaT2012).

A full-day workshop at LREC 2012

Tuesday, 22 May 2012.

Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre, Istanbul, Turkey
SALTMIL: http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
AfLaT: http://AfLaT.org/
LREC 2012: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/

Paper submission: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/Less-
RessourcedLang2012/

Papers are invited for the above full-day workshop, in the format outlined below. Most submitted papers will be presented in poster form, though some authors may be invited to present in lecture format. Context and focus The 8th International Workshop of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages (SALTMIL, http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil) and the 4th Workshop on African Language Technology (AfLaT2012) will be held as a joint effort in Istanbul, in May 2012, as part of the 2012 International Language Resources and
Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012). Entitled 'Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages', the workshop is intended to continue the series of SALTMIL/LREC workshops on computational language resources for minority languages, held in Granada (1998), Athens (2000), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2002) and Lisbon (2004), Genoa (2006), Marrakech (2008) and Malta (2010) and the series of AfLaT workshops, held in Athens (EACL2009), Malta (LREC2010) and Addis Ababa (AGIS11). The Istanbul 2012 workshop aims to share information on tools and best practices, so that isolated researchers will not need to start from scratch. An important aspect will be the forming of personal contacts, which can minimize duplication of effort. There will be a balance between presentations of existing language resources, and more general presentations designed to give background information needed by all researchers.
While less-resourced languages and minority languages often struggle to find their place in a digital world dominated by only a handful of commercially interesting languages, a growing number of researchers are working on alleviating this linguistic digital divide, through localisation efforts, the development of BLARKs (basic language resource kits) and practical applications of human language technologies. The joint SALTMIL/AfLaT workshop on 'Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages' provides a unique opportunity to connect these researchers and set up a common forum to meet and share the latest developments in the field.

Topics

The workshop takes an inclusive approach to the word “normalisation”, considering it to include both technologies that help make languages more “normal” in society and everyday life, as well as technologies that normalise languages, i.e. help create or maintain a written standard or support diversity in standards. We particularly focus on the challenges less-resourced and minority languages face in the digital world. Papers are invited that describe research and development in the following areas in the area of technologies for language normalisation, including (but not limited to) topics such as:

* Keyboard layouts and entry methods
* Standardisation in machine readable lexicons/dictionaries
* Computer-aided language learning (CALL)
* Dealing with language variants in NLP
* Automatic identification of varieties, dialects
* Corpus construction and annotation
* Terminology development and management
* MT between varieties of the same language
* Spelling correction/normalisation
* Machine translation (MT)
* Morphological analysers
* Part-of-speech taggers and parsers
* Speech recognition and synthesis
* Information extraction/retrieval
* Localisation efforts
* Mobile phones as a platform for HLT

Schedule
09.00 Registration/Opening
09.30 Invited talk 1
11.00 Oral Papers (3x 25+5mins)
12.30 Lunch
14:00 Oral Papers (3x 25+5mins)
16:00 Poster Session
17:00 Panel Discussion
17:30 SALTMIL Assembly
18:30 Closing

Organisers (SALTMIL and AfLaT)
* Mikel L. Forcada (SALTMIL): Machine Translation Group, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
* Guy De Pauw (AfLaT): CLiPS - Computational Linguistics Group, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
* Gilles-Maurice de Schryver(AfLaT): African Languages and Cultures, TshwaneDJe HLT, South Africa & Ghent University, Belgium
* Kepa Sarasola(SALTMIL): Dept. of Computer Languages, University of the Basque Country
* Francis M. Tyers(SALTMIL), Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
* Peter Waiganjo Wagacha(AfLaT): School of Computing & Informatics, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya

Programme committee
* Iñaki Alegria: University of the Basque Country
* Núria Bel, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
* Lars Borin, Göteborgs universitet, Sweden
* Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa, South Africa
* Mikel L. Forcada, Universitat d’Alacant
* Dafydd Gibbon, University of Bielefeld, Germany
* Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
* Hrafn Loftsson, University of Reykjavik
* Guy De Pauw, CLiPS, Universiteit Antwerpen
* Laurette Pretorius, University of South Africa, South Africa
* Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Odetunji Odejobi, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria
* Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Universitat d'Alacant
* Kepa Sarasola, University of the Basque Country
* Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis University, USA
* Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Universiteit Gent
* Francis M. Tyers, Universitat d'Alacant
* Peter Waiganjo Wagacha, University of Nairobi

Submissions
We expect short papers of max 6,000 words (up to 6 pages) describing research addressing one of the above topics, to be submitted as PDF
documents by using the LREC2012 START conference management system (URL: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/Less-RessourcedLang2012//).
Submissions should be anonymized. 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 initiative, please refer to http://www.lrecconf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012. Authors will also be asked to
contribute to the Language Library, the new initiative of LREC2012.
Submissions of papers should follow the same style as the papers for the main LREC conference (an Author's Kit made of specific guidelines and
downloadable templates will be published on the conference web site in due time). All contributions (including invited papers) will be included in
the workshop proceedings (CD). They will also be published on the SALTMIL website.

Important dates
* 27 February 2012: Deadline for submission
* 14 March 2012: Notification
* 28 March 2012: Final version
* 22 May 2012: Workshop

Registration
Registration details will be announced in due course

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Challenges in the management of large corpora

We live in an age where the well-known maxim that “the only thing better than data is more data” is something that no longer sets unattainable goals. Creating extremely large corpora is no longer a challenge, given the proven methods that lie behind e.g. applying the Web-as-Corpus approach or utilizing Google's n-gram collection. Indeed, the challenge is now shifted towards dealing with the large amounts of primary data and much larger amounts of annotation data. On the one hand, this challenge concerns finding new (corpus-) linguistic methodologies that can make use of such extremely large corpora e.g. in order to investigate rare phenomena involving multiple lexical items or to find and represent fine-grained sub-regularities; on the other hand, some fundamental technical methods and strategies are being called into question. These include e.g. successful curation of the data, management of collections that span multiple volumes or that are distributed across several centres, methods to clean the data from non-linguistic intrusions or duplicates, as well as automatic annotation methods or innovative corpus architectures that maximise the usefulness of data or allow to search and to analyze it efficiently. Among the new tasks are also collaborative manual annotation and methods to manage it as well as new challenges to the statistical analysis of such data and metadata.

 The half-day workshop on “Challenges in the management of large corpora” aims at gathering the leading researchers in the field of Language Resource creation and Corpus Linguistics, in order to provide for an intensive exchange of expertise, results and ideas.

We invite submissions dealing with:

1. building tools for all aspects of management of very large corpora,
2. dealing with large data sets (file system architecture, database architecture),         
3. dealing with heavily annotated corpora,
4. managing multiple and concurrent annotation layers,
5. use of annotation standards for large data sets,
6. issues of interoperability and tool-chaining,
7. crowd sourcing for large data sets,
8. quality control of annotations in large data sets,
9. analytic tools used in research infrastructure initiatives, such as, e.g., the Common Language Resource and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN),
10. dealing with corpora physically distributed over different locations,
11. managing metadata for extremely large corpus collections,
12. efficient user interfaces,
13. effective querying of large corpora with multiple annotation layers,
14. “bringing the code to the data” as the strategy for dealing with IPR restrictions,
15. open-source software and open-data corpora strategies,
16. other issues that arise in the context of management of large datasets.

Current information is available at: http://corpora.ids-mannheim.de/cmlc.html 

Abstract submission

We invite extended abstracts (1500 to 2000 words) for 20+10 minute presentations, as well as posters and demos. All abstracts have to be submitted via the START Conference Manager, available from https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/LargeCorpora2012/ .

Please note: when submitting a contribution to the START, 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 contribution or are a new result of their research. For further information on this new initiative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012

Important dates

Workshop: 22 May 2012, afternoon session.

Deadline for submission of extended abstracts: February 15.

Notification of acceptance: February 29.

Submission of full, camera-ready papers: March 23.

Venue

The workshop will take place at the Conference venue, the Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre. Further details will be available in due time from conference homepage.

Organizing Committee

The workshop is co-organized by the following three institutions:

Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim

Piotr Bański, Marc Kupietz, Andreas Witt

Institute for Language Information and Technology, Eastern Michigan University

Helen Aristar-Dry, Anthony Aristar, Damir Ćavar

ICAR Laboratory, Lyon University

Serge Heiden

Programme committee:

Núria Bel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Mark Davies (Brigham Young University)

Stefanie Dipper (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

Tomaž Erjavec (Jožef Stefan Institute)

Stefan Evert (Technische Universität Darmstadt)

Alexander Geyken (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)

Andrew Hardie (University of Lancaster)

Nancy Ide (Vassar College)

Sandra Kübler (Indiana University)

Martin Mueller (Northwestern University)

Mark Olsen (University of Chicago)

Adam Przepiórkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, University of Warsaw)

Reinhard Rapp (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, University of Leeds)

Laurent Romary (INRIA, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds)

Pavel Straňák (Charles University in Prague)

Amir Zeldes (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Workshop homepage: http://corpora.ids-mannheim.de/cmlc.html 

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ColabTKR 2012 - Terminology and Knowledge Representation

Linguistics and ontology studies have a long record of fruitful cooperation. Cross-research in areas such as computational linguistics, natural language processing, information retrieval and ontology development, maintenance and integration have produced a wealth of multidisciplinary theories, methods, models and tools (Roche, 2008) (Staab, 2008) (Pereira et al. 2009) (Costa, 2006). More specifically, the relationship between the lexicon (lexical approaches and resources) and ontology development methods and tools, have been recently well explored in research (Huang et al, 2010). On the contrary, the relationship between terminology and ontology studies, in particular in what concerns to the initial phases of ontology development, has not received so much attention from the scientific communities involved.

On the other side, in diverse professional areas, new challenges are appearing related with information and knowledge management in highly specialised technical domains, under tightly constrained time requirements, unfolding in collaborative networking contexts. Short-term collaborative networking between individuals, groups and organisations, is recognised by researchers and practitioners as possible solution to cope with an increasingly complex social and economic business environment. Moreover, the current demand for continuous innovation leads to an higher heterogeneity in the technical and scientific domains simultaneously involved in collaborative projects and activities (e.g involving SMEs and research centres) (Camarinha-Matos, 2006). Managing information and knowledge in this context places new and interesting challenges to terminology and knowledge representation, particularly when these challenges are seen from an integrated terminology/knowledge representation perspective.

Terminological or ontological approaches alone are not likely to be enough in answering to the needs of precision and detail of the specialised technical domains, as much as the research efforts of articulated  terminology/ontology approaches are likely to be inadequate in terms of the required resources (time and persons). Thus, these challenges call for more than the setup and configuration of common terminological or ontological resources, particularly when considering the usually accepted time-frames for developing semantic and terminological artifacts. Effective ways to collaboratively construct shared conceptualisations by the means of negotiation and representational artifacts, such as semi-formal ontologies, are then required.

Topics of interest

This workshop intends to join, under a multi-disciplinary tent, specialists in terminology, information/knowledge management, ontology development, and collaboration processes, to debate the interplay between terminology and knowledge representation methods and techniques in contexts of collaborative work. Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• •    The interplay between terminology and conceptualization processes

• •    Interfaces between terminology work and ontology development/maintenance

• •    Collaborative processes in terminology work

• •    Collaborative conceptualization processes and representations of knowledge

• •    Conceptualization processes and semi-formal ontologies

• •    Cognitive semantics and semi-formal ontologies

• •    Knowledge organisation systems and collaboration

• •    Modelling networks of actors and semantic networks (socio-semantic networks)

• •    Theory, methods and tools for conceptual negotiation

• •    Using multimodal corpora for semi-formal ontology development

• •    Design and management of semi-formal ontology libraries

• •    Using terminological resources for semi-formal ontology development

• •    Term extraction and validation in domain-dependent, time-constrained applications

• •    Terminological approaches to support the identification of conceptual relations

• •    The role of conceptual relations in the development of semi-formal ontologies

Type of submission

Extended abstract (1500-2000 words)

Extended abstracts must be submitted in https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/TermKnowledge2012/

LRE map

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 initiative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012. Authors will also be asked to contribute to the Language Library, the new initiative of LREC2012.

Important dates

• •    Submission deadline: 1FEB12

• •    Acceptance notification: 1MAR12

• •    Camera ready full paper: 30MAR12

• •    Workshop date: 22MAY12, afternoon session

Organizing Committee

António Lucas Soares (als@fe.up.pt) - University of Porto and INESC Porto, Portugal

Rute Costa (rute.costa@fcsh.unl.pt) - New University of Lisbon, Portugal

Carla Pereira (cpereira@estgf.ipp.pt) - IPP/ESTGF and INESC Porto, Portugal

Alessandro Oltramari (oltramale@gmail.com) - Carnegie-Mellon University, USA

Christophe Roche (christophe.roche@univ-savoie.fr) - University of Savoie, France

Anita Nuopponen (atn@UWasa.fi) - University of Vaasa, Finland

Programme Committee

Gerhard Budin - University of Vienna

Chiara Ghidini - Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) - Trento, Italy

Guadalupe Aguado de Cea - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Hanne ErdmanThomsen - Copenhagen Business School

Mustafa Jarrar - University of Birzeit, Palestine

António Lucas Soares - University of Porto and INESC Porto, Portugal

Rute Costa - Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Carla Sofia Pereira - Polytechnic Institute of Porto and INESC Porto, Portugal)

Alessandro Oltramari - Carnegie-Mellon University, USA

Christophe Roche - University of Savoie, France

Anita Nuopponen - University fo Vaasa, Finland

Piek Vossen - VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands

References                                                            

Chu-Ren Huang, Nicoletta Calzolari, Aldo Gangemi, Alessandro Lenci, Alessandro Oltramari, and Laurent Prévot (eds.). 2010. Ontology and the Lexicon: A Natural Language Processing Perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Roche, C. 2008. Terminologie & Ontologie: Théories et Applications. Actes de la deuxième conférence TOTh – Annecy-5 et 6 juin.

Staab, S. 2008. On understanding the collaborative construction of conceptualisations. International and Interdisciplinary Conference 'Processing Text -Technological Resources' at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld University, 13-15 March.

Pereira, C.; Sousa, C.; Soares, A. 2009. A socio-semantic approach to collaborative domain conceptualization. On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2009 Workshops, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

Costa, R. 2006. Terminology, Corpus Linguistics and Ontology, Constrastive Studies and Valency. Studies in Honor of Hans Ulrich Boas. Petra C. Steiner, Hans C. Boas. Stefan Scheirholz [eds.]. Berlin – Bern: Peter Lang Verlag.

Camarinha-Matos, L. 2006. Collaborative networks in industry – Trends and foundations. InProc. of DET’06 - 3rd International CIRP Conference in Digital Enterprise Technology.

Nuopponen, A. 2011. Methods of concept analysis - tools for systematic concept analysis (part 3 of 3). In: LSP, professional communication, knowledge management and cognition. http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/lspcog/index

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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

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META-RESEARCH Workshop on Advanced Treebanking (LREC 2012) - Call for papers



The Workshop
Many EU and world-wide projects and research groups are creating, standardizing, converting and/or using treebanks, thereby often tackling the same issues and reinventing methods and tools. The workshop has been conceived by four projects, namely T4ME, META-NORD, CESAR and META4U, which under the META-NET umbrella project strive to make many treebanks and other LRT available for R&D. However, the workshop is not limited to participants of META-NET, but it is widely open: papers of authors of any origin will be welcome to share their experiences among those working in this area. Also, papers on using treebanks in innovative ways and/or analyzing issues with current treebanks (both in content and format) will be welcome, to provide feedback to treebank developers. The emphasis is not on linguistic theory or grammar, but on treebanks as language resources.

The Call
As part of the LREC’2012 Language Resources Conference, to be held in Istanbul, Turkey, the META-RESEARCH Workshop on Advanced Treebanking (http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-research/events/lrec2012-treebanking-workshop) invites papers on all aspects of treebanking, especially but not limited to

- Treebank annotation (manual, semi-automatic, automatic) and related issues such as quality control, searching large collections of treebanks, parallel treebanks

- Treebank conversion between different linguistic representations (e.g. dependency vs. phrase-based) and between different formats

- Treebank standardization and format unification across languages and styles

- Combinations of treebanks and other annotations – including but not limited to semantic role labeling, named entity annotation, discourse annotation, information structure

- Tools and online web services for the management of treebanks, visualization, search, processing, upload and download, etc.

- Innovative use of treebanks in all areas of natural language research and applications

- Reuse of treebank annotation for non-traditional purposes and in related disciplines (cognitive science, psycholinguistics, etc.)

- Improving the use of current treebanks in linguistic and computational R&D.


Oral presentations will have around 20 minutes each; demonstrations and poster presentations will be encouraged (but optional) in addition to the oral presentations, during the entire workshop in the meeting room to stimulate discussions.


Submissions cannot be more than 8 pages long and will be reviewed using the START system in the usual double-blind fashion, with at least three reviews for each submission by the members of the Programme Committee. Authors will be asked to provide details about the resources used when preparing material for the paper (see  http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012) and to the Language Library, the new initiative of LREC 2012.

Organizers
Jan Hajic, hajic@ufal.mff.cuni.cz, Charles Univ., Prague, Czech Rep.
Koenraad De Smedt, desmedt@uib.no, Univ. of Bergen, Norway
Marko Tadic, marko.tadic@ffzg.hr, Univ. of Zagreb, Croatia
Antonio Branco, Antonio.branco@di.fc.ul.pt, University of Lisbon, Portugal


Deadlines
Submission: Monday, February 20, 2012
Decision: Monday, March 19, 2012
Camera Ready in START: Wednesday, March, 28, 2012
Workshop date: Tuesday, May 22, 2012


Programme Committee (to be extended)
Antonio Branco, Portugal
Silvie Cinkova, Czech Rep.
Dan Cristea, Romania
Koenraad De Smedt, Norway
Rebecca Dridan, Australia
Jan Hajic, Czech Rep.
Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Germany
Nancy Ide, USA
Daisuke Kawahara, Japan
Valia Kordoni, Germany
Sandra Kuebler, USA
Krister Linden, Finland
Adam Meyers, USA
Joakim Nivre, Sweden
Stephan Oepen, Norway
Marco Passarotti, Italy
Adam Przepiorkowski, Poland
Eirikur Rognvaldsson, Iceland
Victoria Rosen, Norway
Marko Tadic, Croatia
Barbora Vidova Hladka, Czech Rep.
Juergen Wedekind, Denmark
Fei Xia, USA
Daniel Zeman, Czech Rep.

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**1st Call for Papers**
LREC 2012 Workshop on: Language Resource Merging

22 May 2012 – Afternoon Session

CONTEXT
The availability of adequate language resources has been a well-known bottleneck for most
high-level language technology applications, e.g. Machine Translation, parsing, and
Information Extraction, for at least 15 years , and the impact of the bottleneck is becoming all
the more apparent with the availability of higher computational power and massive storage,
since modern language technologies are capable of using far more resources than the
community produces. The present landscape is characterized by the existence of numerous
scattered resources, many of which have differing levels of coverage, types of information and
granularity. Taken singularly, existing resources do not have sufficient coverage, quality or
richness for robust large-scale applications, and yet they contain valuable information
(Monachini et al. 2004 and 2006; Soria et al. 2006; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009;
Necsulescu et al. 2011). Differing technology or application requirements, ignorance of the
existence of certain resources, and difficulties in accessing and using them, has led to the
proliferation of multiple, unconnected resources that, if merged, could constitute a much
richer repository of information augmenting either coverage or granularity, or both, and
consequently multiplying the number of potential language technology applications. Merging,
combining and/or compiling larger resources from existing ones thus appears to be a
promising direction to take.
The re-use and merging of existing resources is not altogether unknown. For example,
WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) has been successfully reused in a variety of applications. But this is
the exception rather than the rule; in fact, merging, and enhancing existing resources is
uncommon, probably because it is by no means a trivial task given the profound differences in
formats, formalisms, metadata, and linguistic assumptions.
The language resource landscape is on the brink of a large change, however. With the
proliferation of accessible metadata catalogues, and resource repositories (such as the new
META-SHARE (http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share) infrastructure), a potentially large
number of existing resources will be more easily located, accessed and downloaded. Also, with
the advent of distributed platforms for the automatic production of language resources, such
as PANACEA (http://www.panacea-lr.eu/), new language resources and linguistic information
capable of being integrated into those resources will be produced more easily and at a lower
cost. Thus, it is likely that researchers and application developers will seek out resources
already available before developing new, costly ones, and will require methods for
merging/combining various resources and adapting them to their specific needs.
Up to the present day, most resource merging has been done manually, with only a small
number of attempts reported in the literature towards (semi-)automatic merging of resources
(Crouch & King 2005; Pustejovsky et al. 2005; Molinero, Sagot and Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu et
al. 2011). In order to take a further step towards the scenario depicted above, in which
resource merging and enhancing is a reliable and accessible first step for researchers and
application developers, experience and best practices must be shared and discussed, as this
will help the whole community avoid any waste of time and resources.

AIMS OF THE WORKSHOP
This half-day workshop is meant to be part of a series of meetings constituting an ongoing
forum for sharing and evaluating the results of different methods and systems for the
automatic production of language resources (the first one was the LREC 2010 Workshop on
Methods for the Automatic Production of Language Resources and their Evaluation Methods).
The main focus of this workshop is on (semi-)automatic means of merging language resources,
such as lexicons, corpora and grammars. Merging makes it possible to re-use, adapt, and
enhance existing resources, alongside new, automatically created ones, with the goal of
reducing the manual intervention required in language resource production, and thus
ultimately production costs.

WORKSHOP TOPICS
The topics of the workshop are related to best practices, methods, techniques and
experimental results regarding the merging of various types of language resources, such as
lexicons and corpora, especially in support of language technology applications. In particular,
new methods for automatic merging with a view towards reducing human intervention will be
most welcome.
Topics for submission include, but are not limited to:
- Experiments on (semi-)automatic merging of automatically produced resources
- Experiments on the merging of two or more existing resources containing the same or
different levels of linguistic information
- Studies or experiments on merging resources at different levels of granularity (corpora,
lexicons, grammars)
- Studies or experiments on unifying, mapping or converting encoding formats
- Comparison between different resources and mapping algorithms to provide desired
merging
- Use of linguistic information from different sources in high-level language applications
- Use of new, merged language resources in language technology applications

SUBMISSIONS
Interested participants must submit a preliminary paper of about 4-6 pages including
references (between 2000-2500 words). For the submission please use the online form on
START LREC Conference Manager at: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/MergingLR2012/
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.lrecconf.
org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012
Papers will be peer-reviewed by the workshop Program Committee.

IMPORTANT DATES
· Deadline for paper submission: 15 February 2012
· Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2012
· Submission of camera-ready version of papers: 31 March 2012
· Workshop date: 22 May 2012 – Afternoon Session

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Núria Bel, UPF, Barcelona, Spain
Maria Gavrilidou, ILSP-“Athena”, Athens, Greece,
Monica Monachini, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Valeria Quochi, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Laura Rimell, University of Cambridge, UK
Contacts
lrec12_workshop_merging@ilc.cnr.it

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
Victoria Arranz, ELDA, Paris, France
Paul Buitelaaar, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Nicoletta Calzolari, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Olivier Hamon, ELDA, Paris, France
Aleš Horák, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, Mass. USA
Bernardo Magnini, FBK, Trento, Italy
Paola Monachesi, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Jan Odijk, , Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Muntsa Padró, IULA, Barcellona, Spain
Karel Pala, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Thierry Poibeau University of Cambridge, UK and CNRS, Paris, France
Benoît Sagot, INRIA, Paris, France
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Maurizio Tesconi, CNR-IIT, Pisa

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Multimodal Corpora: How should multimodal corpora deal with the situation?

1st Call for Papers
22 May 2012, Istanbul, Turkey

http://www.multimodal-corpora.org/

Currently, the creation of a multimodal corpus involves the recording, annotation and analysis of a selection of many possible communication modalities such as speech, hand gesture, facial expression, and body posture. Simultaneously, an increasing number of research areas are transgressing from focused single modality research to full-fledged multimodality research. Multimodal corpora are becoming a core research asset and they provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, concepts and data. The increasing interest in multimodal communication and multimodal corpora evidenced by European Networks of Excellence and integrated projects such as HUMAINE, SIMILAR, CHIL, AMI, CALLAS and SSPNet; the success of recent conferences and workshops dedicated to multimodal communication (ICMI-MLMI, IVA, Gesture, PIT, Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication, Embodied Language Processing); and the creation of the Journal of Multimodal User Interfaces also testifies to the growing interest in this area, and the general need for data on multimodal behaviours.
In 2012, the 8th Workshop on Multimodal Corpora will again be collocated with LREC. This year, LREC has selected Speech and Multimodal Resources as its special topic. This points to the significance of the workshop’s general scope, and the fact that the main conference special topic largely covers the broad scope of the workshop provides us with a unique opportunity to step outside the boundaries and look further into the future.
The workshop follows similar events held at LREC 00, 02, 04, 06, 08, 10, and ICMI 11. All workshops are documented under www.multimodal-corpora.org and complemented by a special issue of the Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation which came out in 2008 and a state-of-the-art book published by Springer in 2009.

Aims
As always, we aim for a wide cross-section of the field, with contributions ranging from collection efforts, coding, validation and analysis methods, to tools and applications of multimodal corpora. This year, however, we also want to look ahead and emphasize the fact that a growing segment of research takes a view of spoken language as situated action, where linguistic and non-linguistic actions are intertwined with the dynamic conditions given by the situation and the place in which the actions occur. In spite of this, most corpora capture little more than the linguistic and meta-linguistic actions per se, and contain little or no information about the situation in which they take place. For this reason, we encourage contributions that raise the question of what the additions to future multimodal corpora will be – with possibilities ranging from simple dynamic information such as background noise, room temperature, light conditions and room dimensions to more complex models of room contents, external events, scents, or cognitive load modelling including physiological data such as breathing or pulse. We hope that with your help, the workshop will serve to examine the way language is conceived in corpus creation and to spark a discussion of its boundaries and how these should be accounted for in annotations and in interpretation.

Time schedule
The workshop will consist of a morning session and an afternoon session. There will be time for collective discussions.

Topics
The LREC'2012 workshop on multimodal corpora will feature a special session on the collection, annotation and analysis of corpora of situated interaction.

Other topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to:

• Multimodal corpus collection activities (e.g. direction-giving dialogues, emotional behaviour, human-avatar interaction, human-robot interaction, etc.) and descriptions of existing multimodal resources
• Relations between modalities in natural (human) interaction and in human-computer interaction
• Multimodal interaction in specific scenarios, e.g. group interaction in meetings
• Coding schemes for the annotation of multimodal corpora
• Evaluation and validation of multimodal annotations
• Methods, tools, and best practices for the acquisition, creation, management, access, distribution, and use of multimedia and multimodal corpora
• Interoperability between multimodal annotation tools (exchange formats, conversion tools, standardization)
• Collaborative coding
• Metadata descriptions of multimodal corpora
• Automatic annotation, based e.g. on motion capture or image processing, and the integration with manual annotations
• Corpus-based design of multimodal and multimedia systems, in particular systems that involve human-like modalities either in input (Virtual Reality, motion capture, etc.) and output (virtual characters)
• Automated multimodal fusion and/or generation (e.g., coordinated speech, gaze, gesture, facial expressions)
• Machine learning applied to multimodal data
• Multimodal dialogue modelling

Important dates

• Deadline for paper submission (complete paper): 12 February 2012
• Notification of acceptance: 10 March
• Final version of accepted paper: 26 March
• Final program and proceedings: 20 April
• Workshop: 22 May

Submissions
The workshop will consist primarily of paper presentations and discussion/working sessions. Submissions should be 4 pages long, must be in English, and follow the submission guidelines at
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/
Submission should be made at: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/MMCorpora2012/
Demonstrations of multimodal corpora and related tools are encouraged as well (a demonstration outline of 2 pages can be submitted).

LREC Map of Language Resources, Technologies and Evaluation
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 either have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research (contribution to building the LREC2012 Map).

Organizing committee
Jens Edlund, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Patrizia Paggio, University of Copenhagen, Denmark/University of Malta, Malta

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Language Engineering for Online Reputation Management

=== Call for Papers ===

** deadline: 15 February 2012 **

Online Reputation Management deals with the image that online media project about individuals and organizations.  The growing relevance of social media and the speed at which facts and opinions travel in microblogging networks make online reputation an essential part of a company's public relations.

While traditional reputation analysis was based mostly on manual analysis (clipping from media, surveys, etc.), the key value from online media comes from the ability to process, understand and aggregate potentially very large streams of facts and opinions about a company or individual. Information to be mined includes answers to questions such as: What is the general state of opinion about a company/individual in online media?  What are its perceived strengths and weaknesses, as compared to its peers/competitors?  How is the company positioned with respect to its strategic market?  Can incoming threats to its reputation be detected early enough to be neutralized before they effectively affect reputation?

In this context, Natural Language Processing plays a key enabling role, and we are already witnessing an unprecedented demand for text mining software in this area.  While the area of opinion mining has made significant advances in the recent years, most tangible progress has been focused on products.  However, mining and understanding opinions about companies and individuals is, in general, a much harder and less understood problem.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together the Language Engineering community (including researchers and developers) with representatives from the Online Reputation Management industry, with the ultimate goal of establishing a five-year roadmap on the topic, and a description of the language technologies required to get there in terms of resources, algorithms and applications.

With this purpose in mind, the workshop will welcome both research papers and position statements from industry and academia.  The agenda for the event will include both presentations (from accepted submissions and selected invited speakers) and a collaborative discussion to determine a roadmap for Language Engineering in Online Reputation Management.  The EU project LiMoSINe (starting November 2011) will be used as a funding instrument to ensure that participation is representative and key players are engaged in the workshop.

We welcome position statements and short papers on any topic relevant to the workshop topic, including (but not limited to):

- Topic detection and tracking
- Trend detection and prediction
- Opinion mining and sentiment analysis; negation and modality detection.
- Entity-oriented search and mining: entity ranking, entity profiling, name
  disambiguation, etc.
- Language processing for user-generated content, micro-text understanding,
  and social media analysis.
- Real time language processing

Position statements should include contact details and a short (one page) description of the author's take on the (primarily technical) challenges to be faced in the Online Reputation Management field in the next five years.

Short papers should have a maximum length of four pages, identify the authors (reviewing will not be blind) and may describe work in progress. Papers that include a comparative assessment of current commercial applications and/or research prototypes are particularly welcome.

Submissions should be uploaded here:

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/Reputation2012/

Important dates:

15 February: Deadline for position statements and short papers

15 March: Acceptance notifications

1 April: Camera-ready versions

26 May: Workshop at LREC 2012

Workshop Organizers:

Adolfo Corujo (Llorente & Cuenca, Spain)
http://llorenteycuenca.com

Julio Gonzalo (UNED, Spain)
http://nlp.uned.es/~julio

Edgar Meij (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
http://edgar.meij.pro

Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~mdr/

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5th WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA 

    Language Resources for Machine Translation
    in Less-Resourced Languages and Domains

    Co-located with LREC 2012
    Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre
    Saturday, 26 May 2012

    DEADLINE FOR PAPERS: 15 February 2012

http://hnk.ffzg.hr/5bucc2012

    Endorsed by
     * ACL SIGWAC (Special Interest Group on Web as Corpus)
     * FLaReNet (Fostering Language Resources Network)

============================================================

MOTIVATION

In the language engineering and the linguistics communities,
research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main
reasons. In language engineering, it is chiefly motivated by the
need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical
NLP applications such as statistical machine translation or
cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand,
comparable corpora are of interest in themselves by making
possible inter-linguistic discoveries and comparisons. It is
generally accepted in both communities that comparable corpora
are documents in one or several languages that are comparable in
content and form in various degrees and dimensions. We believe
that the linguistic definitions and observations related to
comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for
applications of statistical NLP. As such, it is of great interest
to bring together builders and users of such corpora.

The scarcity of parallel corpora has motivated research concerning
the use of comparable corpora: pairs of monolingual corpora selected
according to the same set of criteria, but in different languages
or language varieties. Non-parallel yet comparable corpora overcome
the two limitations of parallel corpora, since sources for original,
monolingual texts are much more abundant than translated texts.
However, because of their nature, mining translations in comparable
corpora is much more challenging than in parallel corpora. What
constitutes a good comparable corpus, for a given task or per se,
also requires specific attention: while the definition of a parallel
corpus is fairly straightforward, building a non-parallel corpus
requires control over the selection of source texts in both languages.

Parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical
machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons
and terminologies. However, beyond a few language pairs such as English-
French or English-Chinese and a few contexts such as parliamentary debates
or legal texts, they remain a scarce resource, despite the creation of
automated methods to collect parallel corpora from the Web. To exemplify
such issues in a practical setting, this year's special focus will be on

   Language Resources for Machine Translation
   in Less-Resourced Languages and Domains

with the aim of overcoming the shortage of parallel resources
when building MT systems for less-resourced languages and domains,
particularly by usage of comparable corpora for finding parallel data
within and by reaching out for 'hidden' parallel data. Lack of sufficient
language resources for many language pairs and domains is currently one
of the major obstacles in further advancement of machine translation.


TOPICS

We solicit contributions including but not limited to the following topics:

Topics related to the special theme:

* comparable corpora use in MT
* comparable corpora processing tools/kits for MT
* parallel corpora usage
* parallel corpora processing tools/platforms
* MT for less-resourced languages
* MT for less-resourced domains
* open source SMT systems (Moses, etc.)
* publicly available SMT

Building Comparable Corpora:

 * Human translations
 * Automatic and semi-automatic methods
 * Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the Web
 * Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
 * Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora
 * Rare and minority languages
 * Across language families
 * Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora

Applications of comparable corpora:

 * Human translations
 * Language learning
 * Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization
 * Bilingual projections
 * Machine translation
 * Writing assistance

Mining from Comparable Corpora:

 * Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from comparable
   corpora
 * Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of single
   words and multi-word expressions; proper names, named entities,
   etc.


IMPORTANT DATES (TENTATIVE)

  15 February 2012    Deadline for submission of full papers
     10 March 2012    Notification of acceptance
     20 March 2012    Camera-ready papers due
       26 May 2012    Workshop date


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

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 as a PDF-file of no more than ten pages via the
START workshop manager: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/BUCC2012/
Reviewing will be double blind, so the papers should not reveal the
authors' identity. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings.

Double submission policy: Parallel submission to other meetings or
publications are possible but must be immediately notified to the
workshop organizers.

When submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be asked
to provide information about the resources that have been used for the work
described in their paper or are an outcome of their research. For details on
this initiative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012.
Authors will also be asked to contribute to the Language Library, the new
initiative of LREC 2012.

For further information, please contact
   Reinhard Rapp reinhardrapp (at) gmx (dot) de
   or Marko Tadic marko.tadic (at) ffzg (dot) hr


ORGANISERS

  Reinhard Rapp, Universities of Mainz (Germany)and Leeds (UK)
  Marko Tadic,  University of Zagreb (Croatia)
  Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds (UK)
  Andrejs Vasiljevs, Tilde SIA, Riga, Latvia
  Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI, CNRS, Orsay, and ERTIM, INALCO, Paris (France)


SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

* Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Labs, USA)
* Caroline Barrière (National Research Council Canada)
* Chris Biemann (Microsoft / Powerset, San Francisco, USA)
* Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
* Hervé Déjean (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Andreas Eisele (DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany)
* Rob Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield, UK)
* Éric Gaussier (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France)
* Nikos Glaros (ILSP, Athens, Greece)
* Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead/Dassault Systemes, Paris, France)
* Silvia Hansen-Schirra (University of Mainz, Germany)
* Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
* Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd, UK)
* Natalie Kübler (Université Paris Diderot, France)
* Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
* Tony McEnery (Lancaster University, UK)
* Emmanuel Morin (Université de Nantes, France)
* Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver Inc., USA)
* Lene Offersgaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
* Reinhard Rapp (Universities of Mainz, Germany, and Leeds, UK)
* Sujith Ravi (Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, CA, USA)
* Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
* Michel Simard (National Research Council Canada)
* Inguna Skadina (Tilde, Riga, Latvia)
* Monique Slodzian (INALCO, Paris, France)
* Benjamin Tsou (The Hong Kong Institute of Education, China)
* Dan Tufis (Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania)
* Justin Washtell (University of Leeds, UK)
* Oliver Wilson (University of Edinburgh, UK)
* Michael Zock (LIF, CNRS Marseille, France)
* Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France)

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 Computational Models of Narrative
May 26‐27, 2012
Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre Istanbul, Turkey to be co‐located with the LREC’2012, the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Second CALL FOR PAPERS

Paper submission deadline: February 24, 2012

Workshop Aims
Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in our psychology and serve an important cognitive function. It is becoming increasingly clear that, to truly understand and explain human intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand why narrative is universal and explain (or explain away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop (and its predecessors) is to address key, fundamental questions about narrative that advance our fundamental understanding of narrative and our ability model it computationally.
Special Focus: Shared Resources
In addition to fundamental questions, the field has yet to address key needs with regard to shared resources and corpora that could smooth and hasten the way forward. The vast majority of work on narrative uses fewer than four stories to perform their experiments, and rarely re‐use narratives from previous studies. Because NLP technology cannot yet take us all the way to the
highly‐accurate formal representations of language semantics, this implies significant amounts of repeated work in annotation. The way forward could be catalyzed by a carefully constructed set of shared resources. This meeting will be an appropriate venue for papers addressing fundamental topics and questions regarding narrative. Moreover, the meeting will have a special focus on the identification, collection, and construction of shared resources and corpora that facilitate the computational modeling of narrative. Papers should focus on issues fundamental to computational modeling and scientific understanding, or issues related to building shared resources to advance the field. Discussing technological applications or motivations is not discouraged, but is not required.

Illustrative Topics and Questions

• What kinds of shared resources are required for the computational study of narrative?
• What content and modalities should be put in a “Story Bank”? What formal representations should be used?
• What shared resources are available, or how can already‐extant resources be adapted to common needs?
• What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts? What is special that makes something a narrative?
• What are the details of the relationship between narrative and common sense?
• How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a 'universal' scheme for encoding episodes?
• What impact do the purpose, function, and genre of a narrative have on its form and content?
• What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a set? How many possible story lines are there?
• Are there systematic differences in the formal properties of narratives from different cultures?
• What are appropriate representations for narrative? What representations underlie the extraction of narrative schemas?
• How should we evaluate computational models of narrative?

Organizing Committee
Mark A. Finlayson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Deniz Yuret, Koc University, Turkey
Floris Bex, University of Dundee, Scotland

Sponsors
There will be a number of travel grants available to workshop authors via our sponsors:

• ONR Global
• Office of Naval Research
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Contact
narrative‐ws12@csail.mit.edu
http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/ws12

Note: Workshop dates have changed slightly since the first call

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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

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Background and Motivation

The Web 2.0 has transferred the authorship of contents from institutions to the people; the web has become a channel where users exchange, explain or write about their lives and interests, give opinions and rate others’ opinions. The so-called User Generated Content (UGC) in text form is a valuable resource that can be exploited for many purposes, such as cross-lingual information retrieval, opinion mining, enhanced web search,  social science analysis, intelligent advertising, and so on.

In order to mine the data from the Web 2.0 we first need to understand its contents. Analysis of UG content is challenging because of its casual language, with plenty of abbreviations, slang, domain specific terms and, compared to published edited text, with a higher rate of spelling and grammar errors. Standard NLP techniques, which are used to analyze text and provide formal representations of surface data, have been typically developed to deal with standard language and may not yield the expected results on UGC. For example, shortened or misspelled words, which are very frequent in the Web 2.0 informal style, increase the variability in the forms for expressing a single concept.

This workshop aims at providing a meeting point for researchers working in the processing of UGC in textual form in one way or another, as well as developers of UGC-based applications and technologies, both from industry and academia.

Topics of Interest

We are mainly interested in, but not restricted to, the following research questions:

● What characterises UGC? Linguistic and textual phenomena that distinguish UGC from standard written text, and may pose a challenge for NLP.

● Definition of norm, concept of error, deviation and variation in UGC.

● Criteria and standards for the annotation of evaluation corpora in UGC at various levels of linguistic analysis (form, part of speech, constituents, dependencies, speech acts, deviation types, etc.).

● How quality of text affects processing tasks (tokenization, POS tagging, chunking, parsing, named-entity detection, etc.)

● Architecture and software design for flexible adaptation of NLP processing pipelines to new domains (topic domains and text-genre domains)

● Text normalisation vs adaptation of processing tools:

○ Pros and cons

○ Task dependent?

○ Costs and benefits

○ Hybrid solutions

● Approaches to normalisation (text checking, ASR, MT techniques, etc.)

● Evaluation issues related to processing and normalising UGC

Intended Audience

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers and developers from academia and industry. In particular, perspectives from the following user groups are welcome:

- UGC-based application developers, from both research and industry

- Researchers from the NLP, IR and IE communities

- Ph.D students interested or working in the processing of UGC

Submissions

● Oral papers and posters should follow the main conference formatting requirements (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/).

● To submit contributions, please follow the instructions at https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/UGC2012/

● The contributions will undergo a double review by members of the programme committee. 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

Important Dates

February 15: Paper submission deadline

March 15: Acceptance notifications

March 30: Camera-ready papers

May 26: Afternoon Workshop at LREC

Organising Committee

Laura Alonso i Alemany, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina)

Jordi Atserias, Yahoo! Research (Spain)

Toni Badia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)

Maite Melero, Barcelona Media Innovation Center (Spain)

Martí Quixal, Barcelona Media Innovation Center (Spain)

Programme Committee

Rafael Banchs, Institute for Infocomm Research - A*Star (Singapore)

Steven Bedrick, Oregon Health & Science University

Joan Codina, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)

Louise-Amélie Cougnon, Université Catholique de Louvain, ILC, Cental, (Belgium)

Jennifer Foster, Dublin City University (Ireland)

Michael Gamon, Microsoft Research (USA)

Fei Liu, Bosch Research (USA)

Ulrike Pado, VICO Research&Consulting GmbH

Lluís Padró, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain)

Alan Ritter, CSE, University of Washington  (USA)

Roser Saurí, Barcelona Media Innovation Center (Spain)

Paul Schmidt, Institut der Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Angewandten

Informationsforschung (Germany)

L Venkata Subramaniam, IBM Research (India)

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CALL FOR PAPER
Workshop on Language Technology for Patent Data: Language Resources and Evaluation
To be held in conjunction with the 8th International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012)

27 May 2012 (afternoon)

Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre, Istanbul, Turkey

http://workshops.elda.org/ltpd2012/

Workshop Description
In the last few years, the use of patents in automatic processing has shown a growing interest in the
NLP community. This has been particularly the case in the context of Machine Translation (MT) or
Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR). Nowadays this has become a major topic and besides
the development of the technology itself, some key points remain regarding the resources available
and the way of evaluating the quality of the technology.
A large number of language resources is already available for the community, but the development
of systems, in particular the statistical ones, always requires more and more data. As there is a
growing interest for patents and their processing, a workshop on the topic which gathers all those
involved in the different aspects concerned is a good opportunity to move forward.
The domain of patents itself is increasing and the amount of potential material does not cease to
increase. It is this potential material that gives hope to the community for improving the systems.
For instance, in China, the number of patents have been multiplied by 3 in 5 years and they exceed
1 million published documents per year by now. EPO (the European Patent Office) uses more than
150 translation pairs per day. Every patent office receives more and more patents every day, needs a
daily use of automatic tools to translate the documents, looks for existing patents and their
translation, manages complex content, etc. As we can see, this is a domain in considerable demand
and since the content of the patents is technical and needs high skills in a specific domain, providing
documents that are sufficiently understandable to the end users is very complex. This is a real
challenge for all NLP developers.
Above all, this challenge is about corpora and their management. The main topic concerns their
acquisition and how to collect useful data. For most of the researchers, this consists in harvesting
web pages, cleaning them, getting the useful content according to a specific task, aligning the
sentences, etc. The acquisition task may also be done using OCR tools on PDF. Monolingual
corpora are easier to retrieve (e.g. from databases) compared to parallel corpora. However, parallel
translations exist and aligned corpora as well, or corpora that could be easily aligned. Following the
question of the acquisition of such documents, there is that of database management. One could say
that all these questions are not only related to patent data, however this workshop would like focus
on this particular domain and make some effort to improve things.
Currently, the corpora are mainly used for MT. For a technical end-user in a patent office, the end
goal is to manage to understand the content of a document. This may not require a very high quality
translation since this person only needs to grasp the relevance of the document. However, in MT,
we still need to measure quantitatively the performance of the systems. This is basically made using
automatic and/or human measures, while most of the system developers are using typical automatic
metrics such as BLEU to get their results. Even if the drawbacks of such metrics are well-known, it
could be still relevant, for instance, to compare different versions of a system. However, even when
using BLEU, the content of patent documents is very particular, which implies that different kinds
of linguistic specificity need to be tackled: these include the already expected terminological level,
but also a syntactic level, a semantic one, and even the structure of the documents may be different
from that of other documents (for instance, patents typically comprise of a title, an abstract, a
technical description of the invention, and a list of novel claims). Human measures may be also
difficult to apply as patent documents are written in a way which makes them difficult to read for
the layman. Furthermore, both automatic and human evaluations should have the chance to realise a
deep analysis of the results, which is not trivial working with patents. However, given the often
formulaic nature of the text found in patents – which is enforced on the author due to legal
constraints – there may be opportunities to exploit this for evaluation. For instance, claims are
constructed as a single sentence with an introductory phrase and a body linked by frequently
occurring terms such as “in a certain embodiment”, “consisting essentially of”, and clauses and lists
introduced using colons, e.g. “comprising: …”
The use of patents in CLIR suffers from the same kind of issues, either for the evaluation of systems
or for the collection of corpora. Sentence alignment may also have specific issues related to the
content of the documents, and many other types of tools may have their own thoughts using patents.
Through all those technologies, one can see their usage implies several challenges, such as the
integration of tools into patent information applications. The different tools should help end-users to
search, examine or classify patent documents, most of the time from translations and not available
in English. Web services should also be an extension of the tools and web services should be
connected through workflows, helping end-users in their daily work.
Among all the topics previously mentioned, we would like to contribute to the improvement of the
challenging patent field, by sharing the knowledge from the whole community.

The different topics addressed during the workshop will be (but are not limited to):
- Corpora aspects: collecting data, cleaning, alignment, parallel corpora, etc.;
- Evaluation of technologies: definition of metrics, patent specificity;
- Integration of patent applications: web services, end-user applications;
- IPR issues and licensing.

Organising committee
Heidi Depraetere (Crosslang, Belgium)
Olivier Hamon (ELDA – Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency, France)
John Tinsley (PLUTO – Patent Language Translations Online, Ireland)

Programme committee
Victoria Arranz (ELDA – Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency, France)
Alexandru Ceasusu (PLUTO - Patent Language Translations Online, Ireland)
Khalid Choukri (ELDA, France)
Terumasa Ehara (Yamanashi Eiwa College, Japan)
Cristina España-Bonet (UPC, Spain)
Mihai Lupu (IRF and ESTeam, Austria)
Bertrand Le Chapelain (EPO, Netherlands)
Bente Maegaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Bruno Pouliquen (World Intellectual Property Organization, Switzerland)
Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield, United Kingdom)
Gregor Thurmair (Linguatec, Germany)
Dan Wang (China Patent Information Center, China)
Shoichi Yokoyama (Yamagata University, Japan)
More to follow...

Important dates
Deadline for submission: Friday 24 February 2010
Notification of acceptance: Friday 23 March 2010
Final version due: Friday 30 March 2010
Workshop : 27 May 2010 (afternoon)

Submission Format
Full papers up to 8 pages should be formatted according to LREC 2012 guidelines and be submitted
through the online submission form (https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/PATENT2012/) on
START. For further queries, please contact Olivier Hamon at hamon_at_elda_dot_org.
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/?LREMap-
2012.

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5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus and Lexicon at LREC 2012, Istanbul, May
27th, 2012

Abstracts are invited for a full day workshop on the interplay between sign language corpora and lexicons, to take place preceding/following the 2012 LREC conference.
Recent technological developments allow sign language researchers to create relatively large video corpora of sign language use that were unimaginable ten years ago. Several national projects are currently underway, and more are planned. This workshop aims to share experiences from current and past efforts. What are the problems that were encountered and the solutions created, what are the linguistic decisions taken? The special focus of this workshop is on the relation of corpus and lexicon work. For some sign languages, a corpus was built after a dictionary had been compiled, while in other cases lexicographic work and corpus annotation are done hand in hand. In some current projects, a corpus is collected without a dictionary being available, and the creation of such is only planned once the corpus is fully annotated. What are the implications of the different approaches, and what tool support is necessary for the different situations and phases? We invite abstracts for 20-minute oral/signed presentations or posters (with or without demonstrations) on the following topics:

• Experiences in building sign language corpora and lexical resources
• Proposals for standards for linguistic annotation
• Experiences from linguistic research using corpora in combination with lexical resources
• Use of (parallel) corpora and lexicons in translation studies
• Tool development
• Lexicon construction from corpora
• Linking corpora and lexicons
• Integrated presentation of corpus and dictionary contents

Papers of both oral/signed presentations and posters (4-8 pages) of this workshop will be published as workshop proceedings that are included in the conference package.
Please submit your abstract (max. 1000 words) through the LREC START system at https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/SignLanguage2012/ not later than Feb 6th.
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.

Organising Committee
Onno Crasborn, Radboud U Nijmegen, NL
Eleni Efthimiou, ILSP Athens, GR
Evita Fotinea, ILSP Athens, GR
Thomas Hanke, Hamburg U, DE
Jette Kristoffersen, UCC Copenhagen, DK
Johanna Mesch, Stockholm U, SE
Programme Committee (tbc)
Richard Bowden, Guildford GB
Penny Boyes Braem, Zürich CH
Annelies Braffort, Orsay FR
Christophe Collet, Toulouse FR
Kearsy Cormier, London GB
John Glauert, Norwich GB
Alexis Heloir, Saarbrücken DE
Jens Heßmann, Magdeburg DE
Trevor Johnston, Sydney AU
Reiner Konrad, Hamburg DE
Lorraine Leeson, Dublin IE
Petros Maragos, Athens GR
Carol Neidle, Boston US
Christian Rathmann, Hamburg DE
Adam Schembri, Melbourne AU
Meike Vaupel, Zwickau DE
Rosalee Wolfe, Chicago US

Interpreting
With financial support from the LREC conference and other institutions, the oral/signed presentations will be interpreted into International Sign. The International Sign interpreters will also be around for the poster sessions to help out where necessary. Deaf participants wanting to bring interpreters for their national sign languages are kindly asked to contact us so that we can plan accordingly.

Important Dates
Deadline for abstracts: February 6th, 2012
Notification of acceptance: February 29th, 2012
Submission of paper (for both oral/signed presentations and posters): March 19th, 2012
Submission of slides for interpreters’ preparation (oral/signed presentations only): May 22nd, 2012
Workshop: May 27th, 2012
LREC conference: May 23rd-May 25th (main conference)
May 21st & May 22nd (pre-conf workshops)
May 26th & May 27th (post-conf workshops)

More details
In due time, we will update the workshop website at http://www.sign-lang.unihamburg.de/lrec2012/ with travel advise etc.
For further information, please contact the organising committee by email to lrec2012 (at) sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de

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Collaborative Resource Development and Delivery
Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre
Istanbul, Turkey
May 27, 2012
http://www.anc.org/Collaborative_Resource_Development

A confluence of needs and activities points to a new emphasis in computational linguistics to address lexical, propositional, and discourse semantics through corpora. A few examples are: - the demand for high quality linguistic annotations of corpora representing a wide range of phenomena, especially at the semantic level, to support machine learning and computational linguistics
research in general; - the demand for high quality annotated corpora representing a broad range of genres that are flexible and extensible as need demands; - the demand for high quality lexical and semantic resources to incorporate into the annotation process, and for the annotation process to produce; - the need for easy-to-use, open access to all of these resources for
everyone.

Such resources can be very costly to produce, due to the need for manual creation or validation to ensure quality. Therefore, to answer the growing need and lower the costs of resource creation and enhancement, there is a movement within the community toward collaborative resource development, including collaborative corpus annotation and collective reation/enhancement of lexical resources and knowledge bases. Collaborative development encompasses both engaging the community in annotation and development of common resources, as well as crowd-sourcing and similar solutions.

Technological advances now enable development of web-based environments for collaborative annotation and enhancement of language resources, including annotated corpora, lexicons, and others; and platforms to support web services that deliver data, annotations, and other resources as well as high-quality automated linguistic annotations of language data. At the same time,
crowdsourcing is being explored as a viable means of producing high quality resources. Given the recent advancements in technology plus novel methods to collect manually annotated data, it is important to develop new methods of quality control, hopefully ones that permit rapid acquisition and sharing of resources.

This workshop seeks contributions in all dimensions of collaborative resource development and delivery, with a specific focus on case studies and lessons learned. We invite submissions that address but are not limited to the following topics:
- Web services and platforms for collaborative resource development and distribution;
- Crowd sourcing for resource development, including studies of efficacy;
- Strategies and issues for open resource distribution;
- Evaluation of collaboratively developed resources;
- Position papers outlining issues and proposing solutions for community-based collaborative resource development and/or delivery.

Special session
---------------
The workshop will include a special session devoted to means and considerations for community-based linguistic annotation, with a special emphasis on the
Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC) (http://www.anc.org/MASC). We invite submissions to this session on the following topics:
- position papers concerning any aspect of collaborative resource development, including means to get the community fully invested in such efforts;
- case studies describing collaborative development efforts, including assessment of what works and what doesn't;
- results obtained using collaboratively developed resources;
- the role of standards and best practices in collaboratively developed resources and contributed annotations.

Special consideration will be given to contributions that have used MASC data in a way that highlights the benefits of community-based annotation.

Submission information
----------------------
Submissions may be long papers or short papers, following the formatting guidelines for submissions to the main conference given at
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/. All submissions should be made using the START system at https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/CollaborativeDev2012/.

Important Dates
---------------
Submissions due: February 15, 2012
Acceptance notification to authors: March 15, 2012

Camera ready due: April 1, 2012

Workshop: May 27, 2012

Workshop organizers
-------------------
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
Collin Baker, ICSI/UC Berkeley, USA
Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University, USA
Rebecca Passonneau, Columbia University, USA

Contact: collaboration-workshop@anc.org

Program Committee Members (tentative)
-------------------------------------
Collin Baker, ICSI/UC Berkeley, USA
Jason Baldridge, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Jordan Boyd-Graber, University of Maryland, USA
Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC/CNR, Italy
Bob Carpenter, Alias I,Inc., USA
Chris Cieri, LDC, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Mona Diab, Columbia University, USA
Bill Dolan, Microsoft Corp., USA
Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University, USA
Dan Flickinger, Stanford University, USA
Terry Langendoen, University of Arizona, USA
Eric Nyberg, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
Rebecca Passonneau, Columbia University, USA
Massimo Poesio, University of Trento, Italy
Sameer Pradhan, BBN Technologies, USA
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA
Owen Rambow, Columbia University, USA
Manfred Stede, Universitat Potsdam, Germany

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CREATING CROSS-LANGUAGE RESOURCES FOR DISCONNECTED LANGUAGES AND STYLES

Co-located with LREC 2012 (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/)
Istanbul, Turkey
May 27, 2012 (afternoon session)

Deadline for paper submissions: February 26, 2012

http://www-lium.univ-lemans.fr/credislas2012

======================================================================================

This half-day workshop aims at developing strategies and sharing experiences on creating resources for reducing the linguistic gap between those language pairs for which cross-language resources are scarce. Although this specific situation has been most commonly addressed for the case of minority languages that have scarce resources by themselves, it also happens to be an important issue in some other situations such as: majority languages that, because of their cultural, historical and/or geographical disconnection, do not count with a significant amount of cross-language resources between them (as Chinese and Spanish, just to mention an excellent example in this category); or, single languages for which new communication trends and styles do not have available cross-language resources between the main formal language and it (as chat speak style communications and formal languages).

Current computational and data storage capabilities have favoured the proliferation of data-driven and statistical approaches in natural language processing and computational linguistics. Empirical evidence has demonstrated in a large number of cases and applications how the availability of appropriate datasets can boost the performance of processing methods and analysis techniques. In this scenario, the availability of data has become to play a fundamental role. On the other hand, both the diversity of languages and the emergence of new communication media and stylistic trends are responsible for the scarcity of resources in the case of some specific tasks and applications. In this sense, this workshop attempts to focus its attention on those specific applications or cases for which data scarcity poses a restrictive problem for data-driven approaches. This includes the following three specific situations:

Minority Languages, for which scarcity of resources is a consequence of the minority nature of the language itself. In this case, attention is focused on the development of both monolingual and cross-lingual resources. Some examples in this category include: Basque, Pashto and Haitian Creole, just to mention a few.

Disconnected Languages, for which a large amount of monolingual resources are available, but due to cultural, historical and/or geographical reasons cross-language resources are actually scarce. Some examples in this category include language pairs such as Chinese and Spanish, Russian and Portuguese, and Arabic and Japanese, just to mention a few.

New Language Styles, which represent different communication forms or emerging stylistic trends in languages for which the available resources are practically useless. This case includes the typical examples of tweets and chat speak communications, as well as other informal form of communications, in many languages.

The main topics of interest for this workshop include, but are not limited to, the following ones:

 * Construction and collection of monolingual resources
 * Construction and collection of cross-language resources
 * Annotation guidelines and evaluation
 * Automatic extraction of linguistic resources
 * Automatic annotation of linguistic resources
 * Use of crowdsourcing for generating and annotating resources
 * Use of pivot languages for bridging unconnected languages
 * Methods  to adapt existing resources to new domains and styles
 * Generation of resources for informal communication styles
 * Evaluation of monolingual resources: tasks and protocols
 * Evaluation of cross-language resources: tasks and protocols

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit papers on original and previously unpublished work. Formatting should
be according to LREC 2012 specifications using LaTeX or MS-Word style files (available soon at the
conference website, see http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/).

Submission is electronic in PDF format using the START submission system at

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/CREDISLAS2012/

Double submission policy: Parallel submission to other meetings or publications are possible but
must be immediately notified to the workshop contact person (see below).

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their research at the workshop.
The workshop papers will be part of the LREC proceedings and published on the web site of LREC 2012 before the conference.

IMPORTANT DATES

February 26, 2012: Paper submissions due
March 16, 2012: Notification of acceptance
March 30, 2012: Camera ready papers due
May 27, 2012:  Workshop in Istanbul (afternoon session)

ORGANIZERS

Contact person: Patrik Lambert (e-mail: patrik.lambert@lium.univ-lemans.fr )

Patrik Lambert (University of Le Mans),
Marta R. Costa-jussà (Barcelona Media Innovation Center),
Rafael E. Banchs (Institute for Infocomm Research)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Marianna Apidianaki, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Jordi Atserias, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
Victoria Arranz, ELDA, Paris, France
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore
Philipp Koehn, University of Edinburgh, UK
Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex, UK
Yanjun Ma, Baidu Inc. Beijing, China
Sara Morrissey, Dublin City University, Ireland
Maja Popovic, DFKI, Berlin, Germany
Paolo Rosso, Universidad de Valencia, Spain
Marta Recasens, Stanford University, USA
Wade Shen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
Haifeng Wang, Baidu Inc. Beijing, China

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Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility  (NLP4ITA) 

                           May 27, 2012 (Morning Session)

                            Istanbul, Turkey


http://www.taln.upf.edu/nlp4ita


********************************************************************


=== Introduction ===

This workshop aims to bring together researchers focused on tools and  resources  for making textual information more accessible to people with special needs including diverse ranges of hearing and sight disabilities, cognitive disabilities, elderly people, low-literacy readers and adults being alphabetized, among others.

=== Motivation and Topics of Interest ===
In recent years there has been an increasing interest in accessibility and usability issues. This interest is mainly due to the greater importance of the Web and the need to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with diverse disabilities. The role of assistive technologies based on language processing has gained importance as it can be observed from the growing number of efforts (United Nations declarations on universal access to information or WAI guidelines related to content) and research in conferences and workshops (W4A, ICCHP, ASSETS, SPLAT, etc.).

However, language resources and tools to develop assistive technologies are still scarce.

This workshop will give an opportunity for individuals from different communities to present research findings, discover future challenges, and discuss potential collaboration.

We welcome papers describing tools, resources, models, techniques and evaluation from all areas of natural language processing tailored to accessibility and assistive technologies. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

-    Resources: corpora of inaccessible documents, aligned corpora, gold-standards and annotation schemes.
-    Evaluation, complexity and readability methodologies and metrics.
-    Novel modeling and machine learning techniques for improving accessibility.
-    Natural language generation for improving accessibility.
-    NLP for Web accessibility.
-    Text adaptation, elaboration, simplification and summarization.
-    User studies on systems and components.
-    NLP tools for accessibility

=== Submission Information ===

We encourage contributions in the form of full papers (6 to 8 pages long).

Papers should follow the LREC format which is available at the LREC 2012 Web Site.

The submission process will be online using the START conference system at

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/NLP4ITA

All accepted papers will be presented orally and published in the workshop proceedings.

=== Important dates ===

Feb 24, 2012              Paper submission deadline

March 23, 2012          Notification of acceptance

March 30, 2012             Camera-ready version

May  27, 2012           LREC 2012 Workshops

=== LRE Map 2012 ===

The LRE Map 2012, an initiative promoted for monitoring the production, use and evaluation of language resources and tools.

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.


=== Organizers ===

Ricardo Baeza-Yates         (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Yahoo!)

Paloma Moreda             (Universidad de Alicante)

Luz Rello             (Universidad Pompeu Fabra)

Horacio Saggion         (Universidad Pompeu Fabra)

Lucia Specia              (University of Wolverhampton)


=== Program Committee ===

Sandra Aluisio             (University of Sao Paulo)

Ricardo Baeza-Yates         (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Yahoo!)

Delphine Bernhard         (University of Strassbourg)

Nadjet Bouayad-Agha         (Universidad Pompeu Fabra)

Richard Evans             (University of Wolverhampton)

Caroline Gasperin         (TouchType Ltd)

Pablo Gervás             (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Simon Harper             (University of Manchester)

David Kauchak             (Middlebury College)

Guy Lapalme             (University of Montreal)

Paloma Martínez         (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

Aurelien Max             (Paris 11)

Kathleen F. McCoy         (University of Delaware)

Ornella Mich             (Foundazione Bruno Kessler)

Ruslan Mitkov             (University of Wolverhampton)

Paloma Moreda             (Universidad de Alicante)

Constantin Orasan         (University of Wolverhampton)

Luz Rello             (Universidad Pompeu Fabra)

Horacio Saggion         (Universidad Pompeu Fabra )

Advaith Siddharthan         (University of Aberdeen)

Lucia Specia              (University of Wolverhampton)

Juan Manuel Torres Moreno       (University of Avignon)

Markel Vigo             (University of Manchester)

Leo Wanner             (Universidad Pompeu Fabra)

Yeliz Yesilada             (Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus)


=== Contact Address ===

For further information please contact us at: luz.rello@upf.edu or horacio.saggion@upf.edu

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 Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012)
CALL FOR PAPERS
27 May 2012, Istanbul

Workshop description
The legal domain represents a primary candidate for web-based information distribution, exchange and management, as testified by the numerous e-government, e-justice and e-democracy initiatives worldwide. The last few years have seen a growing body of research and practice in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law which addresses a range of topics: automated legal reasoning and argumentation, semantic and cross-language legal information retrieval, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge discovery and extraction, as well as the construction of legal ontologies and their application to the law domain. In this context, it is of paramount importance to use Natural Language Processing techniques and tools that automate and facilitate the process of knowledge extraction from legal texts.
Since 2008, the SPLeT workshops have been a venue where researchers from the Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence and Law communities meet, exchange information, compare perspectives, and share experiences and concerns on the topic of legal knowledge extraction and management, with particular emphasis on the semantic processing of legal texts. Within the Artificial Intelligence and Law community, there have also been a number of dedicated workshops and tutorials specifically focussing on different aspects of semantic processing of legal texts at conferences such as JURIX-2008, ICAIL-2009, ICAIL-2011, as well as in the International Summer School “Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web” (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011). To continue this momentum and to advance research, a 4th Workshop on “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” is being organized at the LREC-2012 conference to bring to the attention of the broader LR/HLT (Language Resources/Human Language Technology) community the specific technical challenges posed by the semantic processing of legal texts and also share with the
community the motivations and objectives which make it of interest to researchers in legal informatics. The outcome of these interactions are expected to advance research and applications
and foster interdisciplinary collaboration within the legal domain. New to this edition of the workshop are two sub-events to provide common and consistent task definitions, datasets, and evaluation for legal-IE systems along with a forum for the presentation of varying but focused efforts on their development. The first sub-event will be a shared task specifically focusing on dependency parsing of legal texts: although this is not a domain-specific task, it is a task which creates the prerequisites for advanced IE applications operating on legal texts, which can benefit from reliable preprocessing tools. For this year our aim is to create the prerequisites for more advanced domain-specific tasks (e.g. event extraction) to be organized in future SPLeT editions. We strongly believe that this could be a way to attract the attention of the LR/HLT community to the specific challenges posed by the analysis of this type of texts and to have a clearer idea of the current state of the art. The languages dealt with will be Italian and English. A specific Call for Participation for the shared task is available in a dedicated page.
The second sub-event will be an online, manual, collaborative, semantic annotation exercise, the results of which will be presented and discussed at the workshop. The goals of the exercise are:  (1) to gain insight on and work towards the creation of a gold standard corpus of legal documents in a cohesive domain; and (2) to test the feasibility of the exercise and to get feedback on its annotation structure and workflow. The corpus to be annotated will be a selection of documents drawn from EU and US legislation, regulation, and case law in a particular domain (e.g. consumer or environmental protection). For this exercise, the language will be English. A specific Call for Participation for this annotation exercise is available in a dedicated page.
The main goals of the workshop and associated events are to provide an overview of the state-ofthe-art in legal knowledge extraction and management, to explore new research and development directions and emerging trends, and to exchange information regarding legal language resources and human language technologies and their applications.

Areas of Interest
The workshop will focus on the topics of the automatic extraction of information from legal texts and the structural organisation of the extracted knowledge. Particular emphasis will be given to the crucial role of language resources and human language technologies.
Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language resources: terminologies, ontologies
- Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
- Semantic annotation of legal textual corpora
- Legal text processing
- Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing
- Legal thesauri mapping
- Automatic Classification of legal documents
- Logical analysis of legal language
- Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism
- Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments
- Dialogue protocols for argumentation
- Legal argument ontology
- Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language
- Controlled language systems for law.

Submissions
Submissions are solicited from researchers working on all aspects of semantic processing of legal texts. Authors are invited to submit papers describing original completed work, work in progress, interesting problems, case studies or research trends related to one or more of the topics of interest listed above. The final version of the accepted papers will be published in the Workshop Proceedings. Short or full papers can be submitted. Short papers are expected to present new ideas or new visions that may influence the direction of future research, yet they may be less mature than full papers. While an exhaustive evaluation of the proposed ideas is not necessary, insight and in-depth understanding of the issues is expected. Full papers should be more well developed and evaluated. Short papers will be reviewed the same way as full papers by the Program Committee and will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.
Full paper submissions should not exceed 10 pages, short papers 6 pages; both should be typeset using a font size of 11 points. Style files will be made available by LREC for the camera-ready
versions of accepted papers. Papers should be submitted electronically, no later than February 10, 2012. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. Submission will be electronic using START paper submission software available at https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/SPLeT2012/.
Note that when submitting a paper through 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.

Selected contributions to a Special Issue of AI&Law Journal
After the Workshop a number of selected, revised, peer-reviewed articles will be published in a Special Issue on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts of the AI and Law Journal (Springer).

Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: 10 February 2012
Acceptance notification sent: 5 March 2012
Final version deadline: 23 March 2012
Workshop date: 27 May 2012

Workshop Chairs
- Enrico Francesconi (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)
- Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR, Pisa, Italy)
- Wim Peters (Natural Language Processing Research Group, University of Sheffield, UK)
- Adam Wyner (Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, UK)
Address any queries regarding the workshop to: lrec_legalWS@ilc.cnr.it

Program Committee (tbc)
Kevin Ashley (Univ of Pittsburgh)
Johan Bos (University of Rome, Italy)
Danièle Bourcier (Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany)
Thomas R. Bruce (Cornell Law School, Ithaca, NY, USA)
Pompeu Casanovas (Institut de Dret i Tecnologia, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Jack Conrad (Thomson-Reuters)
Matthias Grabmair (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Carole Hafner (Northeaster Univ.)
Antonio Lazari (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa, Italy)
Leonardo Lesmo (Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Torino, Italy)
Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org)
Marie-Francine Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Thorne McCarty (Reutgers Univ.)
Raquel Mochales Palau (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)
Robert Richards (Legal Informatics blog)
Tony Russell-Rose (Endeca)
Erich Schweighofer (Universität Wien, Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Wien, Austria)
Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie Univ)
Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Daniela Tiscornia (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)
Tom van Engers (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Giulia Venturi (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa, Italy)
Vern R. Walker (Hofstra University School of Law, Hofstra University, USA)
Radboud Winkels (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

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CALL FOR PAPER
Workshop on Language Technology for Patent Data: Language Resources and Evaluation
To be held in conjunction with the 8th International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012)

27 May 2012 (afternoon)

Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre, Istanbul, Turkey

http://workshops.elda.org/ltpd2012/

Workshop Description
In the last few years, the use of patents in automatic processing has shown a growing interest in the
NLP community. This has been particularly the case in the context of Machine Translation (MT) or
Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR). Nowadays this has become a major topic and besides
the development of the technology itself, some key points remain regarding the resources available
and the way of evaluating the quality of the technology.
A large number of language resources is already available for the community, but the development
of systems, in particular the statistical ones, always requires more and more data. As there is a
growing interest for patents and their processing, a workshop on the topic which gathers all those
involved in the different aspects concerned is a good opportunity to move forward.
The domain of patents itself is increasing and the amount of potential material does not cease to
increase. It is this potential material that gives hope to the community for improving the systems.
For instance, in China, the number of patents have been multiplied by 3 in 5 years and they exceed
1 million published documents per year by now. EPO (the European Patent Office) uses more than
150 translation pairs per day. Every patent office receives more and more patents every day, needs a
daily use of automatic tools to translate the documents, looks for existing patents and their
translation, manages complex content, etc. As we can see, this is a domain in considerable demand
and since the content of the patents is technical and needs high skills in a specific domain, providing
documents that are sufficiently understandable to the end users is very complex. This is a real
challenge for all NLP developers.
Above all, this challenge is about corpora and their management. The main topic concerns their
acquisition and how to collect useful data. For most of the researchers, this consists in harvesting
web pages, cleaning them, getting the useful content according to a specific task, aligning the
sentences, etc. The acquisition task may also be done using OCR tools on PDF. Monolingual
corpora are easier to retrieve (e.g. from databases) compared to parallel corpora. However, parallel
translations exist and aligned corpora as well, or corpora that could be easily aligned. Following the
question of the acquisition of such documents, there is that of database management. One could say
that all these questions are not only related to patent data, however this workshop would like focus
on this particular domain and make some effort to improve things.
Currently, the corpora are mainly used for MT. For a technical end-user in a patent office, the end
goal is to manage to understand the content of a document. This may not require a very high quality
translation since this person only needs to grasp the relevance of the document. However, in MT,
we still need to measure quantitatively the performance of the systems. This is basically made using
automatic and/or human measures, while most of the system developers are using typical automatic
metrics such as BLEU to get their results. Even if the drawbacks of such metrics are well-known, it
could be still relevant, for instance, to compare different versions of a system. However, even when
using BLEU, the content of patent documents is very particular, which implies that different kinds
of linguistic specificity need to be tackled: these include the already expected terminological level,
but also a syntactic level, a semantic one, and even the structure of the documents may be different
from that of other documents (for instance, patents typically comprise of a title, an abstract, a
technical description of the invention, and a list of novel claims). Human measures may be also
difficult to apply as patent documents are written in a way which makes them difficult to read for
the layman. Furthermore, both automatic and human evaluations should have the chance to realise a
deep analysis of the results, which is not trivial working with patents. However, given the often
formulaic nature of the text found in patents – which is enforced on the author due to legal
constraints – there may be opportunities to exploit this for evaluation. For instance, claims are
constructed as a single sentence with an introductory phrase and a body linked by frequently
occurring terms such as “in a certain embodiment”, “consisting essentially of”, and clauses and lists
introduced using colons, e.g. “comprising: …”
The use of patents in CLIR suffers from the same kind of issues, either for the evaluation of systems
or for the collection of corpora. Sentence alignment may also have specific issues related to the
content of the documents, and many other types of tools may have their own thoughts using patents.
Through all those technologies, one can see their usage implies several challenges, such as the
integration of tools into patent information applications. The different tools should help end-users to
search, examine or classify patent documents, most of the time from translations and not available
in English. Web services should also be an extension of the tools and web services should be
connected through workflows, helping end-users in their daily work.
Among all the topics previously mentioned, we would like to contribute to the improvement of the
challenging patent field, by sharing the knowledge from the whole community.

The different topics addressed during the workshop will be (but are not limited to):
- Corpora aspects: collecting data, cleaning, alignment, parallel corpora, etc.;
- Evaluation of technologies: definition of metrics, patent specificity;
- Integration of patent applications: web services, end-user applications;
- IPR issues and licensing.

Organising committee
Heidi Depraetere (Crosslang, Belgium)
Olivier Hamon (ELDA – Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency, France)
John Tinsley (PLUTO – Patent Language Translations Online, Ireland)

Programme committee
Victoria Arranz (ELDA – Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency, France)
Alexandru Ceasusu (PLUTO - Patent Language Translations Online, Ireland)
Khalid Choukri (ELDA, France)
Terumasa Ehara (Yamanashi Eiwa College, Japan)
Cristina España-Bonet (UPC, Spain)
Mihai Lupu (IRF and ESTeam, Austria)
Bertrand Le Chapelain (EPO, Netherlands)
Bente Maegaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Bruno Pouliquen (World Intellectual Property Organization, Switzerland)
Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield, United Kingdom)
Gregor Thurmair (Linguatec, Germany)
Dan Wang (China Patent Information Center, China)
Shoichi Yokoyama (Yamagata University, Japan)
More to follow...

Important dates
Deadline for submission: Friday 24 February 2010
Notification of acceptance: Friday 23 March 2010
Final version due: Friday 30 March 2010
Workshop : 27 May 2010 (afternoon)

Submission Format
Full papers up to 8 pages should be formatted according to LREC 2012 guidelines and be submitted
through the online submission form (https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/PATENT2012/) on
START. For further queries, please contact Olivier Hamon at hamon_at_elda_dot_org.
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/?LREMap-
2012.

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APPEL À COMMUNICATIONS JEP'2012

http://www.jeptaln2012.org/ 29e Journées d'Études sur la Parole Grenoble du 4 au 8 juin 2012

le site de soumission des JEP est désormais ouvert.
Vous trouverez les consignes aux auteurs sur : http://www.jeptaln2012.org/?page_id=65
et les liens pour soumettre sont sur http://www.jeptaln2012.org/?page_id=69

Attention, cette année , les styles présentent des modifications importantes par rapport aux versions des conférences précédentes car ils ont été optimisés pour une lecture à l’écran. Nous souhaitons ainsi réduire l’impact écologique de l’utilisation de nos articles en évitant des impressions dues à un format inadapté.

Par ailleurs, les orateurs invités suivant ont confirmé leur venue à JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2012 (titres à venir)

Ian MADDIESON, University of California, Berkeley
Jacqueline LEON, CNRS, Paris
Yoshinori SAGISAKA, University of Waseda, Tokyo
Hans USZKOREIT, DFKI, Saarbrucken

CALENDRIER

Date limite de soumission : 31 janvier 2012 Notification aux auteurs : 20 mars 2012 Date limite de soumission des versions définitives : 15 avril 2012 Conférence : 4-8 juin 2012

PRÉSENTATION

 Organisée par l’équipe GETALP du LIG (Laboratoire Informatique de Grenoble), le LIDILEM (Laboratoire de linguistique et didactique des langues étrangères et maternelles) et le Gipsa-lab, les JEP’2012 se tiendront du 4 au 8 juin 2012 à Grenoble à l’occasion de la conférence jointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL’2012. JEP-TALN-RECITAL’2012 regroupe la 29ème édition des Journées d’Étude sur la Parole (JEP’2012), la 19ème édition de la conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN’2012) et la 14ème édition des Rencontres des Étudiants Chercheurs en Informatique pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues (RECITAL’2012). Pour la quatrième fois, après Nancy en 2002, Fès en 2004, et Avignon en 2008, l’AFCP (Association Francophone pour la Communication Parlée) et l’ATALA (Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues) organisent conjointement leur principale conférence afin de réunir en un seul lieu les deux communautés du traitement de la langue orale et écrite. Les JEP’2012 comprendront des communications orales et affichées et des conférences invitées.

 Thématiques Les communications porteront sur la parole dans ses différents aspects. Les thèmes de la conférence incluent, de façon non limitative : •Acoustique de la parole •Acquisition de la parole et du langage •Analyse, codage et compression de la parole •Applications à composantes orales (dialogue, indexation, interaction, etc) •Apprentissage d’une langue seconde •Communication multimodale •Dialectologie •Évaluation, corpus et ressources •Langues en danger •Modèles de langage •Pathologies de la parole •Perception de parole •Phonétique et phonologie •Phonétique clinique •Prises de position présentant un point de vue sur les sciences et technologies de la parole •Production de parole •Prosodie •Psycholinguistique •Reconnaissance et compréhension de la parole •Reconnaissance de la langue •Reconnaissance du locuteur •Signaux sociaux, sociophonétique •Synthèse de la parole

Critères de Sélection

Les auteurs sont invités à soumettre des travaux de recherche originaux, n’ayant pas fait l’objet de publications antérieures. Les contributions proposées seront examinées par au moins deux spécialistes du domaine. Seront considérées en particulier : •l’importance et l’originalité de la contribution ; •la discussion critique des résultats, en particulier par rapport aux autres travaux du domaine ; •la situation des travaux présentés dans le contexte de la recherche internationale ; •l’organisation et la clarté de la présentation ; •l’adéquation aux thèmes de la conférence. Les articles sélectionnés seront publiés dans les actes de la conférence. Modalités de Soumission Les articles soumis ne devront pas dépasser 4 pages en Times 10, sur deux colonnes, format A4. Les différents modèles (Word, Word 2007, OpenOffice Writer et LaTeX) seront disponibles sur le site internet de la conférence (à venir cet automne). Contact : laurent.besacier@imag.fr

Bourses L’AFCP offre un certain nombre de bourses pour les doctorants et jeunes chercheurs désireux de prendre part à la conférence, voir le site de l’AFCP L’ISCA apporte également un soutien financier aux jeunes chercheurs participant à des manifestations scientifiques sur la parole et le langage, voir le site de l’ISCA

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http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/iscapad/iscapad.php?module=article&id=2022

Invitation to and call for papers for the

International Symposium on Audiovisual Detection of Errors in
Pronunciation Training (IS ADEPT)

KTH, Stockholm, Sweden
6-8 June 2012
www.speech.kth.se/isadept

This symposium is a one-time event endorsed by SLaTE (the ISCA Special
Interest Group on Speech and Language Technologies in Education) and
organized to bring together academia and industry within the field of
Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT). Its aim is to reach a
common understanding of the current state-of-the-art in methods for
pronunciation error analysis and their use in CAPT software in order
to identify the needs and paths for future research.

Keynote speakers
Lewis Johnson, Chief scientist at Alelo Inc.
Gary Pelton, Vice President, Speech Development at Rosetta Stone
Horacio Franco, Speech Technology & Research Laboratory SRI International
Gary Pelton, Vice President Carnegie Speech
Helmer Strik, Radboud University Nijmegen
Silke Witt-Ehsani, Vice President, TuVox Design Center
Florian Hoenig, University of Erlangen

The invited speakers will give presentations focusing on overviews of
automatic pronunciation detection methods in commercial applications
and research projects, ongoing development of pronunciation analysis
algorithms, and the pedagogical or pragmatic needs in future
development.
The symposium program will also include regular scientific
presentations, a demo session, panel discussion plus a social program
(included common lunches, symposium dinner and guided visit to the
Stockholm City Hall).

Paper submissions
Prospective participants should submit a full 4 or 6 page paper, or a
1 page demo proposal.

Important Dates
Paper Submission: 15 February 2012
Notification of Acceptance: 13 April 2012
Demo description Submission: 13 April 2012
Camera-Ready Paper: 4 May 2012
Early registration Deadline: 4 May 2012

www.speech.kth.se/isadept
isadept2012@speech.kth.se

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Appel pour ateliers et tutoriels

OBJECTIFS

Un atelier porte sur une thématique particulière de TALN afin de
rassembler quelques exposés plus ciblés. Il a son propre président et
son propre comité de programme. Le responsable d'un atelier est chargé
de l'appel à candidatures et de la coordination de son comité de
programme. Les organisateurs de TALN ne s'occuperont que de la partie
matérielle (gestion des salles, pauses café, déjeuner et diffusion des
actes). Les ateliers et tutoriels auront lieu en parallèle sur une
journée ou une demi-journée (2 à 4 sessions de 1h30).

MODALITÉS DE PROPOSITION

Les propositions d'ateliers et tutoriels seront envoyées sous forme
électronique à claude.ponton@u-grenoble3.fr ou à
virginie.zampa@u-grenoble3.fr au plus tard le 24 janvier 2012.

Les propositions d'ateliers comprendront une description synthétique (1
page) de la thématique de la conférence ainsi que son comité de
programme et la durée souhaitée.

Les propositions de tutoriel comprendront une description synthétique (1
page) de la thématique, les noms des intervenants ainsi que la durée
souhaitée (1 à 2 sessions de 1h30).

Le comité de programme de TALN choisira parmi toutes les propositions et
donnera sa réponse au plus tard le 6 février 2012.

CALENDRIER

  * Date limite de soumission : 24 janvier 2012
  * Réponse du comité de programme : 6 février 2012
  * Version finale pour actes: 15 avril 2012
  * Date des ateliers et tutoriels: 8 juin 2012

FORMAT

Les conférences auront lieu en français (ou en anglais pour les
non-francophones). Les articles devront suivre le format de TALN et ne
pas dépasser 10 pages en Times 12, espacement simple, figures, exemples
et références compris.
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the submission date for CBMI'2012 has been extended to February 20th, 2012

********10th International Workshop On Content –Based Multimedia Indexing******
*******************************************************************************
Call for papers

Following the nine successful previous events of CBMI (Toulouse 1999, Brescia 2001, Rennes
2003, Riga 2005, Bordeaux 2007, London 2008, Chania 2009, Grenoble 2010 and Madrid
2011), LISTIC University of Savoy/CNRS will organize the next Context Based Multimedia
Indexing event on June 27-29 2012 10th. www.polytech.univ-savoie.fr/cbmi2012

 International Workshop CBMI 2012 aims at bringing together the various communities
involved in the different aspects of content-based multimedia indexing, retrieval, browsing
and presentation. The scientific program of CBMI 2011 will include invited keynote talks and
regular and special sessions with contributed research papers. Best papers will be published
in a special issue of ACM Multimedia tools and Applications, Springer. The Workshop is supported by IEEE,
French national Research network GDR-CNRS ISIS, Rhône-Alpes Region. ACM SIGMM and Eurasip supports are pending.

Technical Program:
Topics of interest, grouped in technical tracks, include, but are not limited to:   
      * Visual Indexing (image, video, graphics)
      * Visual content extraction Identification and tracking of semantic regions
      * Identification of semantic events   
      * Audio and Multi-modal Indexing
      * Audio indexing (audio, speech, music)
      * Audio content extraction
      * Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing
      * Metadata generation, coding and transformation   
      * Multimedia Information Retrieval (image, audio, video, …)
      * Matching and similarity search
      * Content-based search
      * Multimedia data mining
      * Multimedia recommendation
      * Large scale multimedia database management
      * Multimedia Browsing and Presentation
      * Summarisation, browsing and organization of multimedia content
      * Personalization and content adaptation
      * User interaction and relevance feedback
      * Multimedia interfaces, presentation and visualization tools

All accepted and registered papers will be published in the workshop proceedings which will
be indexed and distributed by the IEEExplore. Selected papers will appear, after extension
and peer-review, in a special issue of Multimedia Tools and Applications journal.

Paper submission:
Prospective authors are invited to submit full papers of not more than six (6) pages including
results, figures and references. Papers will be accepted only by electronic submission
through conference management system. Style files (Latex and Word) will be provided for
the convenience of the authors at www.polytech.univ-savoie.fr/cbmi2012

Important dates:
      * Submission of full paper (to be received by): January 13, 2012
      * Notification of acceptance: February 27, 2011
      * Submission of camera-ready papers: March 12, 2011

Chairs: 
General chair: Patrick Lambert, LISTIC, Polytech de Savoie Technical
Technical Program chair: Stéphane Marchand-Maillet, University of Geneva
Technical Program co-chair: Shin’ichi Satoh, NII, Japan
Special Session chair: Philippe Joly, IRIT, France
Publicity chair: Jenny Benois-Pineau, LABRI, University of Bordeaux, France
Publication chair: Alexandre Benoit, University of Savoie, France
Demo chair: Sid-Ahmed Berrani, Orange Labs, France
ACM SIGMM liaison officer: Suzanne Boll, University of Oldenburg, Germany

Steering committee:
Régine André-Obrecht, IRIT, France
Jenny Benois-Pineau, LABRI, University of Bordeaux, France
Chabane Djeraba, LIFL, France Moncef Gabbouj, University of Tampere, Finland
Patrick Gros, INRIA, France
Ebroul Izquierdo, QMUL, UK
Philippe Joly, IRIT, France
Riccardo Leonardi, University of Brescia, Italy
Bernard Merialdo, EURECOM, France
Georges Quénot, LIG, France
Thomas Sikora, TUB, Germany

Special issue:
Extended communications will be published in a special issue of an open call of ACM
Multimedia Tools and Applications journal, Springer after peer-review.

Cultural program:
The cultural program will be devoted to the history of media production and will comprise a
visit to the French museum of cartoons and a cruise at a historical lake of Annecy with finest
testing of traditional French cuisine.

CALL FOR PAPERS www.polytech.univ-savoie.fr/cbmi2012
contact: patrick.lambert@univ-savoie.fr

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Areas of Interest

• Audio and electroacoustics
• Design and implementation of signal processing systems
• Multimedia signal processing
• Spoken language technology
• Image and video processing
• Signal estimation and detection
• Sensor array and multi-channel processing
• Signal processing for communications
• Machine learning
• Nonlinear signal processing
• Signal processing applications
• Bio-medical signal processing
• Information forensics and security

Schedule