2nd CfP: CCURL 2014: Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages in the Linked Open Data Era

https://www.ilc.cnr.it/ccurl2014/

26 May 2014, in conjunction with LREC 2014, Reykjavík, Iceland

Submission deadline: 6 February 2014 (all dates below)

The LREC Workshop “CCURL 2014: Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages in the Linked Open Data Era” will be held on 26 May 2014, at LREC 2014 (Reykjavík, Iceland).

Under-resourced languages suffer from a chronic lack of available resources (human-, financial-, time- and data-wise), and of the fragmentation of efforts in resource development. This often leads to small resources only usable for limited purposes or developed in isolation without much connection with other resources and initiatives. The benefits of reusability, accessibility and data sustainability are, more often than not, out of the reach of such languages.

Yet, these languages are those that could most profit from emergent collaborative approaches and technologies for language resource development. Given the high cost of language resource production, and given the fact that in many cases it is impossible to avoid the manual construction of resources (e.g. if accurate models are requested or if there is to be reliable evaluation) it is worth considering the power of social and collaborative media to build resources, especially for those languages where there are no or limited language resources built by experts yet.

Collaborative, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0/Semantic Web methods and methodologies for data collection, annotation and sharing seem particularly well-suited for collecting the data needed for the development of language technology applications for under-resourced languages. Indeed, the collaborative accumulation and creation of data appears to be the best and most practicable way to achieve better and faster language coverage and in purely economic terms could well deliver a higher return on investment than expected. Moreover, it is a good way to approach a small population of speakers who live in remote countries, or are scattered in diaspora all over the world.

The workshop aims at gathering together professionals involved with language resources for under-resourced languages. The expectation is that both academic researchers and industry practitioners will participate.

Some specific questions that the workshop will aim to answer include the following:

● How can collaborative approaches and technologies be fruitfully applied to the development and sharing of resources for under-resourced languages?
● How can small language resources be re-used efficiently and effectively, reach larger audiences and be integrated into applications?
● How can they be stored, exposed and accessed by end users and applications?
● How can research on such languages benefit from semantic and semantic web technologies, and specifically the Linked Data framework?

We invite papers reporting on collaborative methodologies for the development of language resources for under-resourced languages, the processes involved, as well as on issues relating to their usability, e.g. design guidelines, standards for building and sharing resources, storage and exchange formats, interoperability issues, etc.

We therefore specifically encourage submissions about:

● Experiences in the creation of Linked Open Data and/or Linguistic Linked Open Data for under-resourced languages
● Using existing Linked Open Data knowledge resources such as DBpedia, Freebase, YAGO, Lexvo, schema.org, etc. in semantics-driven approaches to resource development for under-resourced languages
● Scaling existing language resource infrastructures to thousands of languages
● Crowd-sourcing of linguistic data and annotations
● Collaborative bootstrapping of language resources and language technologies (LRTs) for under-resourced languages from existing LRTs for better-resourced languages
● Mining the web and social media for linguistic data
● Developing and/or using language-independent software frameworks for under-resourced languages and other collaborations across language groups
● Ethical, sociological and practical issues in collaborative approaches and technologies
● Usability of existing infrastructures for the development of collaboratively created resources.

SUBMISSIONS

● Papers must describe original unpublished work, either completed or in progress.

● Each submission will be reviewed by three programme committee members. The paper review will be blind, so papers should not include authors' names and affiliations.

● Accepted papers will be presented either as oral presentations or posters and will be published in the workshop proceedings.

● Papers should be formatted according to the stylesheet provided on the LREC 2014 website and should not exceed 8 pages for oral presentations, and 4 pages for posters, including references and appendices. Papers should be submitted in PDF unprotected format to the workshop START page: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2014/CCURL/

● 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. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.), to enable their reuse, replicability of experiments, including evaluation ones, etc. For further information, please refer to https://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/calls-for-papers/lrec-2014-special-highlight/

DATES

February 6, 2014 Paper submissions due
March 10, 2014 Notification of acceptance
March 26, 2014 Camera-ready papers due
May 26, 2014 Workshop

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Laurette Pretorius - University of South Africa, South Africa
Claudia Soria - CNR-ILC, Italy
Eveline Wandl-Vogt - Austrian Academy of Sciences, ICLTT, Austria
Thierry Declerck - DFKI GmbH, Language Technology Lab, Germany
Kevin Scannell - St. Louis University, USA
Joseph Mariani - LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, France

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Deborah W. Anderson - University of Berkeley, Linguistics, USA
Sabine Bartsch - Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Delphine Bernhard - LILPA, Strasbourg University, France
Bruce Birch - The Minjilang Endangered Languages Publications Project, Australia
Paul Buitelaar - DERI, Galway, Ireland
Peter Bouda - CIDLeS -
Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Portugal
Steve Cassidy - Macquarie University, Australia
Christian Chiarcos - University of Potsdam, Germany
Katrien Depuydt - Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie, The Netherlands
Vera Ferreira - CIDLeS -
Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Portugal
Claudia Garad - wikimedia.AT, Austria
Dafydd Gibbon - Bielefeld University, Germany
Oddrun Gronvik - Instituut for lingvistike og nordiske studier, University of Oslo, Norway
Yoshihiko Hayashi - University of Osaka, Japan
Dominic Jones - Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Daniel Kaufman - Endangered Language Alliance, USA
Andras Kornai - Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
Simon Krek - Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Tobias Kuhn - ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
Leonel Ruiz Miyares - Centro de Linguistica Aplicada (CLA), Cuba
Karlheinz Mörth - Austrian Academy of Sciences, ICLTT, Austria
Steven Moran - University of Washington, USA
Roberto Navigli - Universita Degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Italy
Kellen Parker - National Tsing Hua University, China
Patrick Paroubek - LIMSI-CNRS, France
Maria Pilar Perea i Sabater - Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Ulrich Schäfer - DFKI GmbH, Germany
Caroline Sporleder - Universität Trier, Germany
Nick Thieberger - University of Melbourne, Australia
Piek Vossen - VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Marianne Vergez-Couret - Toulouse University, France
Michael Zock - LIF-CNRS, France