Second Call for Papers LREC 2005

LREC 2006

5th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS




Magazzini del Cotone Conference Center,  Genova - Italy

MAIN CONFERENCE: 24-25-26 MAY 2006

WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 22-23 and 27-28 MAY 2006

Conference web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006


The fifth international conference on Language 
Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2006, is organised 
by ELRA in cooperation with other Associations 
and Consortia, national and international 
organisations.
The fifth international conference on Language 
Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2006, is organised 
by ELRA in cooperation with a wide range of 
international associations and 
organisationsconsortia, including AAMT, ACL, 
AFNLP, ALLC, ALTA, COCOSDA and Oriental COCOSDA, 
EACL, EAMT, ELSNET, ENABLER, EURALEX, Forum TAL, 
GWA, IAMT, ISCA, KnowledgeWeb, LDC, NEMLAR 
Network, SENSEVAL, SIGLEX, TEI, Techno-lLangue 
French Program, WRITE and with major national and 
international organisations including the 
European Commission - Information Society and 
Media Directorate General, Unit "Interfaces".
.


CONFERENCE AIMS

In the Information Society, the pervasive 
character of Human Language Technologies (HLT) 
and their relevance to practically all fields of 
Information Society Technologies (IST) has been 
widely recognised. Two issues are considered 
particularly relevant: the availability of 
Language Resources (LRs) and the methods for the 
evaluation of resources, technologies, products 
and applications. Substantial mutual benefits are 
achieved by addressing these issues through 
international cooperation.

The term language resources refers to sets of 
language data and descriptions in machine 
readable form, such as written or spoken corpora 
and lexica, annotated or not, multimodal 
resources, grammars, terminology or domain 
specific databases and dictionaries, ontologies, 
multimedia databases, etc. LRs also cover basic 
software tools for their acquisition, 
preparation, collection, management, 
customisation and use. LRs are used in many types 
of components/systems/applications, such as 
software localisation and language services, 
language enabled information and communication 
services, knowledge management, e-commerce, 
e-publishing, e-learning, e-government, cultural 
heritage, linguistic studies, etc.. This large 
range of usages makes the LRs infrastructure a 
strategic part of the e-society, where the 
creation of a basic set of LRs for all languages 
must be ensured in order to bring all languages 
to the same level of usability and availability.

The relevance of the evaluation for language 
technologies development is increasingly 
recognised. This involves assessing the 
state-of-the-art for a given technology, 
measuring the progress achieved within a 
programme, comparing different approaches to a 
given problem, assessing the availability of 
technologies for a given application, product 
benchmarking, and assessing system usability and 
user satisfaction.

The aim of the LREC conference is to provide an 
overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D 
directions and emerging trends, exchange 
information regarding LRs and their applications, 
evaluation methodologies and tools, ongoing and 
planned activities, industrial uses and needs, 
requirements coming from the new e-society, both 
with respect to policy issues and to 
technological and organisational ones. LREC 
provides a unique forum for researchers, 
industrials and funding agencies from across a 
wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and 
opportunities, find new synergies and promote 
initiatives for international cooperation in the 
areas mentioned above, in support to 
investigations in language sciences, progress in 
language technologies and development of 
corresponding products, services and applications.



CONFERENCE TOPICS

Examples of the topics which may be addressed by 
papers submitted to the conference are given 
below.

Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs)
Methodologies and tools:
Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs.
Methods, tools, procedures for the acquisition, 
creation, annotation, management, access, 
distribution, use of monolingual and multilingual 
LRs.
Methods for the extraction and acquisition of 
knowledge (e.g. terms, ontologies, lexical 
information, language modelling) from LRs, and 
knowledge transfer among languages.
Definition and requirements for a Basic and 
Extended LAnguage Resource Kit (BLARK, ELARK) for 
all languages.
Documentation and archiving of languages, 
including minority and endangered languages.
LRs for linguistic research in human-machine communication.

LRs construction & annotation:
Metadata descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup.
Ontologies and knowledge representation, especially with respect to HLT.
Terminology and NLP tools and methodologies for 
terminology and ontology building or mapping, 
term extraction, domain-specific dictionaries.
LRs for machine translation.
LRs for ubiquitous processing.
Availability and use of generic vs. task/domain specific LRs.
Multimedia and Multimodal LRs - Integration of 
various media and modalities in LRs (speech, 
vision, language).

LRs exploitation:
Industrial production of LRs.
Industrial LRs requirements, user needs and community's response.
Exploitation of LRs in different types of 
applications (information extraction, information 
retrieval, speech dictation, translation, 
summarisation, web services, semantic web, 
semantic search, text mining, inferencing, etc.).
Exploitation of LRs in different types of 
interfaces (dialogue systems, natural language 
and multimodal/multisensorial interactions, etc.).

Issues in Human Language Technologies (HLT) evaluation
Methodologies, tools and standardisation:
Evaluation, validation, quality assurance of LRs.
Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures.
Benchmarking of systems and products, resources 
for benchmarking and evaluation, blackbox, 
glassbox and diagnostic evaluation of systems.
From evaluation to standardisation.
User centered design tools and methods.
Evaluation of ontologies and knowledge bases by means of LR-related techniques.
Evaluation in written language processing: 
(document production and management, text 
retrieval, terminology extraction, message 
understanding, text alignment, machine 
translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, 
semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation, text 
understanding, summarization, question answering, 
localization, etc.).
Evaluation in spoken language processing: (speech 
recognition and understanding, voice dictation, 
oral dialogue, speech synthesis, speech coding, 
speaker and language recognition, spoken 
translation, etc.).
Evaluation of multimedia document retrieval and 
search systems (including detection, indexing, 
filtering, alert, question answering, etc.).
Evaluation of multimodal systems.


Usability evaluation of HLT based user Interfaces:
Usability and user satisfaction evaluation.
Psychophysical and cognitive evaluation. (human 
basic processes in HLT). I am not sure I 
understand what is 'human basic processes in HLT'
User experience assessment.
Heuristic evaluation.
Multimodal interaction evaluation.
Evaluation of usability in mobile services/applications, etc.

Evaluation in written language processing: 
(document production and management, text 
retrieval, terminology extraction, message 
understanding, text alignment, machine 
translation, morphosyntactic tagging, parsing, 
semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation, text 
understanding, summarization, question answering, 
localization, etc.). why is this different from 
the other evaluation point above? - to be 
repeated for the next 3 paras.

Evaluation in spoken language processing: (speech 
recognition and understanding, voice dictation, 
oral dialogue, speech synthesis, speech coding, 
speaker and language recognition, spoken 
translation, etc.).

Evaluation of multimedia document retrieval and 
search systems (including detection, indexing, 
filtering, alert, question answering, etc.).

Evaluation of multimodal systems.


General issues
National and international activities and projects.
Open architectures for LRs.
LRs and the needs/opportunities of the emerging industries.
LRs and contributions to societal needs (e.g. e-society).
Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national 
and international policies for LRs.
Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for 
international cooperation, and their 
organisational and technological implications.
Organisational, economical and legal issues in 
the construction, distribution, access and use of 
LRs.

Special Highlights

LREC targets the integration of different types 
of LRs (Sspoken, Wwritten, and other modalities), 
and of the respective communities. To this end, 
LREC encourages submissions covering issues which 
are common to different types of LRs and 
lLanguage tTechnologies, such as dialogue 
strategy, written and spoken translation, 
domain-specific data, multimodal communication or 
multimedia document processing, and will 
organise, in addition to the usual tracks, common 
sessions encompassing the different areas of LRs.

The 2006 Conference emphasises in particular the importance of promoting:
-	synergies and integration between 
(multilingual) LRs and Semantic Web technologies,
-	new paradigms for sharing and integrating 
LRs and LT coming from different sources,
-	communication with neighbouring fields 
for applications in e-government and 
administration,
-	common evaluation campaigns for the 
objective evaluation of the performances of 
different systems,
-	systems and products (also industrial 
ones) based on large-size and high quality LRs.
LREC therefore encourages submissions of papers, 
panels, workshops, tutorials on the use of LRs in 
these areas.
dedicated to these themes.



PROGRAMME

The Scientific Programme will include invited 
talks, oral presentations, poster presentations , 
peer-reviewed demonstrations and panels.
There is no difference in quality between oral 
presentations and poster presentations. Only the 
appropriateness of the type of communication 
(more or less interactive) to the content of the 
paper will be considered.


ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and 
posters or demo presentations should consist of 
about 1000 words.

Demonstrations I think we always had a problem of 
distinguishing demos and posters, I believe we 
should have one single poster category where you 
can ask for demo facilities of LRs and related 
tools will be reviewed as well. You should send 
an outline of about 400 1000 words. If a demo is 
connected to a paper, please attach the outline 
to the paper abstract. this should not be 
possible, it always creates problems

A limited number of panels, workshops and 
tutorials is foreseen: proposals will be reviewed 
by the Programme Committee.

For For pPanels, please send a brief description, 
including an outline of the intended structure 
(topic, organiser, panel moderator, tentative 
list of panelists).

For workshops and tutorials, see the dedicated section below.

Only electronic submissions will be considered. 
Further details about submission will be 
circulated in the 2nd Call for Papers to be 
issued at the end of July and posted on the LREC 
web site (www.lrec-conf.org).
On-line submission form for abstracts is now available.
You should go to the "Abstract submission" 
section on the LREC2006 web site 
(http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/) and follow 
the procedure instructions.


WORKSHOPS, TUTORIALS and PANELS

Submission of workshop, tutorial and panel 
proposals should be made by e-mail to both the 
following e-mail addresses:
	lrec@ilc.cnr.it
	lrec@elda.org

Proposals for workshops and tutorials should be 
no longer than three pages, and include:

…	For workshops:
o	The title
o	A brief technical description of the 
specific technical issues that the workshop will 
address
o	The reasons why the workshop is of interest
o	The names and affiliations, postal 
addresses, phone and fax numbers, email and web 
site addresses of the organising committee, which 
should consist of at least three people 
knowledgeable in the field, coming from different 
institutions
o	The name and the e-mail address of the 
member of the workshop organising committee 
designated as the contact person
o	The desirable duration of the workshop (half day or full day)
o	A summary of the intended call for participation
o	An estimate of the approximate audience size
o	A list of audio-visual or technical 
requirements and any special room requirements

The workshop proposers will be responsible for 
the organisational aspects (e.g. workshop call 
preparation and distribution, review of papers, 
notification of acceptance, assembling of the 
workshop proceedings using the ELRA 
specifications, etc.).

…	For tutorials:
o	The title
o	A brief technical description of the tutorial content
o	The reasons why the tutorial is of interest
o	The names and affiliations, postal 
addresses, phone and fax numbers, email and web 
site addresses of the tutorial speakers, with 
brief descriptions of their technical background
o	The name and e-mail address of one 
tutorial speaker designated as the contact person
o	The duration of the tutorial (half day is the expected usual length)
o	An estimate of the approximate audience size
o	A list of audio-visual or technical 
requirements and any special room requirements

The tutorial proposers will be responsible for 
the organisational aspects (e.g. assembling of 
the tutorial material, etc.).


Proposals for panels should contain the following information:

…	The title
…	A brief technical description of the 
specific technical issues that the panel will 
address
…	The reasons why the panel is of interest
…	Name of the panel organiser/s; 
affiliation and postal address; phone and fax 
numbers; e-mail address; web site address
…	The name and the e-mail address of the designated contact person


PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings of the conference will will 
coverinclude both oral and poster papers.
The Conference package that will be provided to 
all will include Proceedings on CD-ROM and a 
printed book of Abstracts and Conference 
Programme. HardcopyPrinted Proceedings will be 
printed ublished only on demand only. Proceedings 
on CD will be provided to all. In addition a book 
of Abstracts will be printed.


IMPORTANT DATES:

…	Submission of proposals for panels, 
workshops and tutorials: 14 October 2005
…	Submission of proposals for oral and 
poster papers, referenced demos: 14 October 2005
…	Notification of acceptance of panels, 
workshops and tutorials proposals: 7 November 2005
…	Notification of acceptance of oral 
papers, posters, referenced demos:  16 January 
2006
…	Final versions for the proceedings:  20 February 2006
…	Conference:  24-26 May 2006
…	Pre-conference workshops and tutorials: 22 and 23 May 2006
…	Post-conference workshops and tutorials: 27 and 28 May 2006

Internet connections and various computer 
platforms and facilities will be available at the 
conference site. In addition to referenced demos 
concerning LRs and related tools, iIt will be 
possible to run unreferenced non-reviewed 
unreferenced demos of language engineering 
products, systems and tools. Those interested 
should contact the organiser of the 
demonstrations (details will be posted on 
www.lrec-conf.org 
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/).


WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS:

Pre-conference workshops and tutorials will be 
organised on 22 and 23 May 2006, and 
post-conference workshops and tutorials on 27 and 
28 May 2006. A workshop/tutorial can be either 
half day or full day.
Proposals for workshops and tutorials should be 
no longer than three pages, and include:
…	A brief technical description of the 
specific technical issues that the 
workshop/tutorial will address.
…	The reasons why the workshop/tutorial is of interest this time.
…	The names, postal addresses, phone and 
fax numbers and email addresses of the 
workshop/tutorial organising committee, which 
should consist of at least three people 
knowledgeable in the field, coming from different 
institutions.
…	The name of  the member of the 
workshop/tutorial organising committee designated 
as the contact person.
…	A time schedule of the workshop/tutorial 
and a preliminary agenda/ programme?.
…	A summary of the intended workshop/tutorial call for participation.
…	A list of audio-visual or technical 
requirements and any special room requirements.

The workshop/tutorial proposers will be 
responsible for the organisational aspects (e.g. 
workshop/tutorial call preparation and 
distribution, review of papers, notification of 
acceptance, assembling of the workshop/tutorial 
proceedings, etc.). Further details about 
submission will be circulated in the 2nd Call for 
Papers and posted on the LREC web site 
(www.lrec-conf.org).

Proceedings will be produced for each workshop/tutorial.


CONSORTIA AND PROJECT MEETINGS

Consortia or projects wishing to take this 
opportunity for organising meetings should 
contact the ELDA office at, at lrec@elda.forg.r 
(further details are given at the end of the 
document).


CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica 
Computazionale del CNR, Pisa, Italy (Conference 
chairChair)
Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France
Aldo Gangemi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie 
della Cognizione del CNR, Roma, Italy
Bente Maegaard, CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
Jan Odijk, ScanSoft, Merelbeke, Belgium and UIL-OTS, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Daniel Tapias, Telefonica Moviles, Madrid, Spain


The composition of the committees as well as 
instructions and addresses for registration and 
accommodation will be detailed on the LREC web 
site at www.lrec-conf.org 
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/ and will be 
announced in the 2nd Call for Papers..



ELRA

For more information about ELRA (European 
Language Resources Association), please contact:

Khalid Choukri, ELRA CEO
55-57 Rue Brillat-Savarin,
75013 Paris - France
Tel: + 33 1 43 13 33 33
Fax: + 33 1 43 13 33 30
Email: choukri@elda.orgfr
Web: http://www.elra.info or http://www.elda.frorg/



Some facts and figures about previous LRECs

The first LREC was organised in Granada (Spain) 
in 1998: 197 papers and posters were presented, 
with about 510 registered participants from 38 
different countries from all continents. Among 
these, the largest group came from Spain (81 
participants), followed by France (75), USA (73), 
Germany (47), UK (43) and Italy (41). Registered 
participants belonged to over 325 different 
organisations.

LREC 2000, in Athens, had 129 oral papers and 152 
posters presented, with around 600 participants 
from 51 different countries from all continents. 
Among these, the largest group came from Greece 
(117), followed by USA (70), France (59), Germany 
(45), UK (43), Japan (35) and Italy (29). 
Registered participants belonged to 319 different 
organisations.

LREC 2002, which took place in Las Palmas de Gran 
Canaria (Spain), attracted over 700 
representatives, coming from 38 countries around 
the world. The following figures illustrate how 
successful it proved to be: for the main 
conference, 460 papers had been submitted and 
reviewed, of which 365 were presented at the 
conference. Most of the areas in HLT were covered 
(about 280 papers dealt with written resources, 
about 100 with spoken resources, 25 with 
multimodal and multimedia resources, around 50 
dealt with evaluation of HLT, and 16 with 
terminology).

The 4th edition of the Language Resources and 
Evaluation Conference was held in memory of two 
dear friends and colleagues we lost in 2003, 
Angel Martin Municio and Antonio Zampolli.
LREC 2004, which took place in Lisbon (Portugal), 
attracted almost 1000 participants, coming from 
50 countries from all the continents. Close to 
800 submissions for poster and oral presentations 
were reviewed by the Scientific Committee: 519 
were actually presented, a majority dedicated to 
written resources (260), 116 dealt with spoken 
resources, 40 with terminological issues, 57 with 
evaluation, 17 were on general issues, and 29 on 
multimodal-multimedia ones. In addition, a total 
of 18 satellite workshops covering various fields 
were organised before and after the main 
conference.
A new award in HLT was launched on that occasion: 
the ELRA Board created a prize for "Outstanding 
Contributions to the Advancement of Language 
Resources and Language Technology Evaluation", to 
honour the memory of its co-founder and 1st 
president, Antonio Zampolli. The Antonio Zampolli 
Prize was awarded for the first time at LREC 2004 
to Fredrick Jelinek, from John Hopkins 
University, Baltimore, USA.

A similar number of participants is expected at LREC 2006.

If you want to know the state-of-the-art in LT 
and LRs and their application in all aspects of 
e-society , this is the Conference to come/go to!