CALL FOR PAPERS: The 6th Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing

CALL FOR PAPERS

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The 6th Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing
http://bsnlp.cs.helsinki.fi/

In conjunction with EACL 2017, Valencia, Spain

Sponsored by SIGSLAV: Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language
Processing of the ACL


DATES

Submission deadline: 16 January 2017

Notification of acceptance: 11 February 2017

Camera-ready papers due: 21 February 2017

Workshop: 3 or 4 April 2017


THEME and MOTIVATION

Languages from the Balto-Slavic group play an important role due to their
diverse cultural heritage and widespread use -- with over 400 million
speakers worldwide.
The recent political and economic developments in Central and Eastern
Europe have brought Balto-Slavic societies and their languages into focus
in terms of rapid
technological advancement and rapidly expanding consumer markets.

This Workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the
Balto-Slavic languages. The NLP tasks in urgent need of attention include,
but are not limited to:

- morphological analysis and generation,

- morphosyntactic tagging,

- syntactic and semantic parsing,

- lexical semantics,

- named-entity recognition,

- text normalisation and processing non-standard language

- coreference resolution,

- information extraction,

- question answering,

- information retrieval,

- text summarization,

- machine translation,

- development of linguistic resources.

Research on theoretical and applied topics in the context of some of the
Balto-Slavic languages is still in its early stages. The linguistic
phenomena specific to
Balto-Slavic languages -- such as rich morphological inflection and free
word order -- make the construction of NLP tools for these languages a
challenging and
intriguing task.

The goal of this Workshop is to bring together researchers from academia
and industry working on NLP for Balto-Slavic languages. In particular, the
Workshop will
serve to stimulate the research on NLP techniques for Balto-Slavic
languages, and to foster the creation of tools and resources for these
languages. The Workshop
will provide a forum for exchanging ideas and experience, discussing
difficult-to-tackle problems, and making the resources that are available
more widely-known.
One fascinating aspect of this sub-family of languages is the striking
structural similarity, as well as an easily recognizable core vocabulary
and inflectional inventory
spanning the entire group of languages -- despite a lack of mutual
intelligibility -- which creates a special environment in which researchers
can fully appreciate the
shared problems and solutions and communicate naturally.

SUBMISSION:

There will be two types of submissions: long papers and short papers.

Long papers should describe original, unpublished and completed work. Short
papers should describe: (a) work in progress and/or small focused
contributions,
or (b) system demonstrations, new linguistic resources and experience of
using existing software and resources, or (c) ongoing projects and
activities that are
relevant to all stakeholders in the domain of Balto-Slavic NLP.

Overlap with previously published work should be clearly mentioned. The
authors should indicate along with their submission if the paper has been
submitted
elsewhere. In case the paper is rejected by the main conference, it should
be indicated in the submission.

All submissions will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength,
clarity of presentation, usability, and significance/relevance to the
Workshop.
Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program
Committee.

The reviewing of long papers will be blind. Therefore, long papers should
not include the authors' names and affiliations. Self-citations and other
references
that reveal the authors' identity must be avoided.

In particular, submissions describing systems, resources, or solutions that
are made available to the wider public would be strongly encouraged, as
this
would help to promote computational linguistics applications for
Balto-Slavic languages.

Long paper submissions should follow the two-column format of EACL 2017
proceedings not exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus two (2)
additional pages
for references. Short paper submissions should follow the same format, and
should not exceed four (4) pages for content plus two (2) additional pages
for references.
Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines of EACL 2017,
which are contained in the style files (
http://eacl2017.org/images/site/eacl-2017-template.zip),
and must be in PDF.

Camera-ready versions of accepted papers must be provided both in LaTeX and
PDF format.

SHARED TASK

For the first time at BSNLP, we are organiusing a shared task on
multilingual named entity recognition aims at recognizing mentions of named
entities in web documents
in Slavic languages, their normalization / lemmatization, and
cross-language matching. Further details can be found at:
http://bsnlp-2017.cs.helsinki.fi/shared_task.html

Named Entity Recognition and lemmatization in heterogeneous and
multilingual collections of Web documents in Slavic languages. The Joint
Research Centre of the
European Commission will provide a corpus consisting of sets of links to
web documents, where each such set covers Web documents that are related to
one specific
entity and contains information in several Slavic languages. The
participants will be tasked to test their multilingual techniques for named
entity recognition and named
entity lemmatization, the latter generasslly being particularly difficult
for Slavic languages due to rich inflection, free word order, derivation
and other phenomena. This
area is highly relevant for the development of Entity Linking, which in
turn enables multilingual and cross-lingual information access, semantic
processing based on
knowledge graphs, etc.

The participants of the shared task will be invited to submit the
description of their solutions and experience as short papers.


Programme Committee

Željko Agić (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Tomaž Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Katja Filippova (Google, Zurich, Switzerland)
Darja Fišer (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Radovan Garabik (Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia)
Goran Glavaš (University of Mannheim, Germany)
Maxim Gubin (Facebook Inc., Menlo Park CA, USA)
Miloš Jakubíček ( Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Tomas Krilavičius (Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania)
Vladislav Kubon (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic)
Nikola Ljubešić (Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Olga Mitrofanova (St. Petersburg State University, Russia)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Maciej Ogrodniczuk (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
Petya Osenova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Maciej Piasecki (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)
Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy/PAS, Warsaw, Poland)
Lidia Pivovarova (University of Helsinki/St.Petersburg State University,
Russia)
Alexandr Rosen (Charles University, Prague)
Tanja Samardžić (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Agata Savary (University of Tours, France)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Inguna Skadina (University of Latvia, Latvia)
Jan Šnajder (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Josef Steinberger (University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic)
Stan Szpakowicz (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Irina Temnikova (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Marcin Woliński (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)

Organizing Committee

Tomaž Erjavec, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Jakub Piskorski, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Ispra,
Italy
Lidia Pivovarova, University of Helsinki, Finland
Jan Šnajder, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Josef Steinberger, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
Roman Yangarber, University of Helsinki, Finland