Workshop in conjunction with LREC 2012

Istanbul, May 21 – 27 2012

Workshop date: Sunday May 27 (morning)

Workshop Programme and Abstracts

The Programme and the abstracts are now available on http://utrecht.elsnet.org/EEOP2012/EEOP2012-Abstracts.pdf

Workshop description

The EEOP workshop is dedicated to the exploitation and exploration of official publications in digital format, both at the international level (often multilingual) and at the national level (mostly monolingual, but in some cases multilingual as well). These publications could be in written, spoken or visual form or combinations thereof (e.g. written proceedings of parliaments, legislative documents, audio or video recordings of parliament sessions, simultaneous translations by interpreters or in sign language).

Well-known examples of freely accessible publications of this type include:

·         UN documents (in 7 languages)

·         The Canadian Hansard (English and French)

·         EU documents from the European Parliament (EuroParl) and the European Commission (JRC-Acquis, DGT Translation Memory), in all official EU languages

·         Swiss national documents (in 3 or 4 languages)

The workshop covers the whole lifecycle of these publications, ranging from acquisition, annotation, instrumentation, exploration of data and content, exploitation of data and content to support research and the development of tools and applications.

The main objectives of the workshop are

·         To create awareness of the importance of official publications by showing the research and development possibilities they offer

·         To share results, experiences and problems emerging from work on a variety of corpora, modalities and languages

·         To identify actions that could be undertaken to enhance the exploration and exploitation of official publications at the international, cross-national and national level

Motivation and topics

Official publications can be of tremendous importance for the research communities interested in human language technology (in the broadest possible sense) and for the communities interested in linguistics, psychology, history, social sciences and political sciences because they have a number of specific characteristics that make them different from other language resources:

·         If they exist in digital form they are normally public and free;

·         They grow continuously;

·         They are often multilingual and parallel;

·         They lend themselves for exploitation
(as training material for tools and sometimes possibly even for niche applications);

·         They lend themselves for exploration to support linguistic studies, studies about human behaviour, about changes in society, attitudes, and many other possible research topics in the humanities and social sciences;

·         Because of their comparability they lend themselves for porting technologies, methods and expertise between languages;

·         They lend themselves for educational purposes for technologists, linguists and other scholars.

Target audiences

Primary audience

·         Language and speech technology researchers from academia and industry

·         Humanities and social sciences scholars with an interest in digital methods

·         Educators in these fields

Additional beneficiaries

·         Professionals interested in analysing political behaviour or processes
(e.g. journalists, policy makers, policy watchers)

·         Parties interested in providing or exploiting such analysis tools on a commercial basis

·         Translation studies scholars

·         Comparative linguists

Scope

The workshop covers the full lifecycle of digital official publications, including but not limited to:

·         Permanent curation of official publications

·         Policies for making official publications available

·         Tools and applications for working with official publications

·         Experiments carried out on official publications and interesting research results;

·         Linking official publications to other data sources

·         Identification of possible actions to exploit opportunities and take away obstacles

·         Using the official publications and tools to work with these data for educational purposes

Submissions may address any of these topics, but priority will be given to papers that present novel ideas and results.

Presentation

The accepted papers will be presented as talks.

Schedule

date	action
19 Feb 2012:	Abstract submission deadline (extended)
05 March 2012:	Notifications
23 March 2012:	Final paper submission deadline
27 May 2012:	Workshop (in the morning)

Abstracts

Abstracts are 4-6 pages long, including pictures and references. The format is PDF.

Some questions and answers:

• Is the abstract due on February 19th a version of the paper or just a long abstract?
  We certainly recommend to submit a short version of the paper, as that tends to give a better chance to be accepted, especially when there is a lot of competition, and it will certainly give you more usable feed-back from the reviewers, not just on the content but also on the way you organise and present it.
• Are there any guidelines?
  For the abstract we have no strict guidelines, except that it has to be PDF and no longer than 4-6 pages, but if you want to shape it as a short version of your final paper I would suggest that you use the same guidelines as for papers, see http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?Authors-Kit
• How long should the final paper be?
  Length is 4-8 pages.

We use the START System for submission of abstracts and final versions:

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/EEOP2012/

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" .

Contact person

Steven Krauwer (s.krauwer@uu.nl )

Workshop homepage: http://utrecht.elsnet.org/EEOP2012

Organising committee

 

name	affiliation
Steven Krauwer	Utrecht University / CLARIN
Hans Uszkoreit	DFKI / META-Net
Nicoletta Calzolari	CNR-ILC / ELRA
Ralf Steinberger	European Commission – Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Arjan van Hessen	University of Twente / CLARIN.NL

 

The workshop is a joint initiative between

name	URL
CLARIN	http://www.clarin.eu/
META-Net	http://www.meta-net.eu/
JRC	http://langtech.jrc.ec.europa.eu
ELRA	http://www.elra.info

 

Supported by the European Commission – Joint Research Centre (JRC)