Announcement and First Call for Papers FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE on GLOBAL INTEROPERABILITY FOR LANGUAGE RESOURCES City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong 9-11 January 2008 http://icgl.ctl.cityu.edu.hk/ Language resources, including not only corpora but also lexicons, knowledge bases and ontologies, grammars, etc. support the development of language processing applications that are increasingly important to the global society. Substantial effort has been devoted to the creation of such resources for the world~s major languages over the past decades, and new projects are developing similar resources for less widely-used languages. Some standards and best practices have emerged for representing and linking language corpora and annotations, efforts such as ~Global WordNet~ and the development of framenets in multiple languages seek to create and link specific lexical and semantic resources across languages, and there are efforts to integrate such resources into general ontologies such as SUMO. As the need for cross-lingual studies and applications grows, it is increasingly important to develop resources in the world~s languages that can be compared and linked, used and analyzed with common software, and that contain linguistic information for the same or comparable phenomena. We envision the eventual development of a ~global web~ of language resources, wherein, for example, linguistically-annotated corpora in multiple languages are inter- linked via the use of common categories, or categories that are mapped to one another; resources such as wordnets and framenets are linked not only to versions in different languages, but also to each other; and common representations enable analysis and use of resources in different languages and of different types within available systems. The first international conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources will bring together designers, developers, and users of corpora and other language resources from across the globe, in order to: o assess the state of the art in methods and schemes for resource representation, annotation, interlinkage, and access; o consider the requirements for (and obstacles to) multi-lingual and multi-modal interoperability and standardization; o consider the requirements for achieving interoperability among multi-lingual resources of different types, including corpora, lexicons, knowledge bases, ontologies, etc., as well as the systems and frameworks that enable their creation and exploitation; o consider the ways in which web technologies are and may be used to enable resource interoperability and inter- linkage; o work toward the definition of best practice guidelines and standards for language resource representation, annotation, and use that will enable interoperability; o consider means to map or harmonize linguistic information in order to better enable cross-lingual studies; o provide direction for developers of resources for less widely used languages; o promote collaboration and cooperation among developers of language resources across the globe; o consider ways to provide central or distributed access to language resources developed throughout the world. TOPICS Paper submissions are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics: o multi-lingual and/or multi-modal language resources, with focus on the mechanisms enabling interoperability; o support for multi-linguality and multi-modality in systems/frameworks for resource creation, annotation, use, and access; o existing and proposed standards for language resources, including standards for linguistic annotations at any and all linguistics levels; o systems, frameworks, and architectures to support the development and exploitation of interoperable language resources; o evaluation of existing resources, systems and frameworks, and/or standards in terms of support for interoperability; o harmonization, integration, and/or linking of language resources, including corpora, wordnets, framenets, ontologies, etc.; o web-based technologies for resource interoperability, inter-linkage, and access; o ontologies for language resources, especially for support of multi-linguality, multi-culturality, and multi-modality. PROCEEDINGS Accepted papers will be included in conference proceedings, to be published by City University Press, Hong Kong. Beijing. A selection of outstanding conference presentations will be published in a special issue of the journal Language Resources and Evaluation. SUBMISSIONS Submissions should be no more than 8 pages in length, including bibliography and any appendices. Author instructions will be posted on the conference web site. IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission deadline: 31 August 2007 Notification of acceptance: 30 September 2007 Camera-ready papers due: 31 October 2007 Conference dates: 9-11 January 2008 INVITED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Nicoletta Calzolari Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy Christiane Fellbaum Princeton University, USA David Ferruci* IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA Charles Fillmore International Computer Science Institute, UC Berkeley, USA Nancy Ide Vassar College, USA D. Terrence Langendoen University of Arizona and the U. S. National Science Foundation * to be confirmed CONFERENCE ORGANISING COMMITTEE Conference Convener: Jonathan Webster, City University of Hong Kong Conference Co-Chairs: Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA Alex Chengyu Fang, City University of Hong Kong Conference Secretary: Ernest Lam, City University of Hong Kong Conference Webmaster: Kin Tat Ko, City University of Hong Kong Conference Website: http://icgl.ctl.cityu.edu.hk/ Conference Inquiry: icgl2008@cityu.edu.hk PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Eric Atwell, Leeds University, UK Harry Bunt, the University of Tilburg, Holland Bran Bogureav, IBM, USA Nicoletta Calzolari, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy Key-Sun Choi, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea Khalid Choukri, Evaluations and Language Resources Distribution Agency, France Chris Cieri, Linguistic Data Consortium, USA Arienne Dwyer, University of Kansas, USA Alex Chengyu Fang, City University, Hong Kong Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University, USA Charles Fillmore, International Computer Science Institute, UC Berkeley, USA Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Eva Hajicova, Charles University, Czech Republic Erhard Hinrichs, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany Mark Huckvale, University College London, UK Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA Hitoshi Isahara, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan Toru Ishida, Kyoto University, Japan Kiyong Lee, Korea University, South Korea Duo Li, Peking University, China Inderjeet Mani, Georgetown University, USA Srini Narayanan, International Computer Science Institute, UC Berkeley, USA Adam Pease, Articulate Software, USA Sameer Pradhan, BBN Technologies, USA James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA Laurent Romary, Max-Planck Digital Library, Germany Vasile Rus, the University of Memphis, USA Pavel Smrz, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic Maosong Sun, Tsinghua University, China Takenobu Tokunaga, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Piek Vossen, Vrije University, Holland Jonathan Webster, City University, Hong Kong Peter Wittenburg, Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Holland Yihua Zhang, Guangdong University of Forei