LREC 2008 - 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference ------------- FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS Palais des Congrès Mansour Eddahbi, MARRAKECH - MOROCCO MAIN CONFERENCE: 28-29-30 MAY 2008 WORKSHOPS and TUTORIALS: 26-27 MAY and 31 MAY- 1 JUNE 2008 Conference web site: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/ The sixth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) will be organised in 2008 by ELRA in cooperation with a wide range of international associations and organisations. CONFERENCE AIMS -------------------------- In 10 years (the first LREC was held in Granada in 1998) LREC has become the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). The aim of LREC 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 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 support to investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards. CONFERENCE TOPICS ---------------------------- Issues in the design, construction and use of Language Resources (LRs): text, speech, multimodality - Guidelines, standards, specifications, models and best practices for LRs - Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation - Methodologies and tools for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge - Ontologies and knowledge representation - Terminology - Integration between (multilingual) LRs, ontologies and Semantic Web technologies - Metadata descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup Exploitation of LRs in different types of systems and applications - For: information extraction, information retrieval, speech dictation, mobile communication, machine translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, etc. - In different types of interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensorial interactions, voice activated services, etc. - Communication with neighbouring fields of applications, e.g. e-government, e-culture, e-health, e-participation, mobile applications, etc. - Industrial LRs requirements, user needs Issues in Human Language Technologies evaluation - HLT Evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures - Validation, quality assurance, evaluation of LRs - Benchmarking of systems and products - Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces, interactions and dialog systems - Usability and user satisfaction evaluation General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation - National and international activities and projects - Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs - Open architectures - Organisational, economical and legal issues Special Highlights -------------------- LREC targets the integration of different types of LRs (spoken, written, 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 language technologies. LRs are currently developed and deployed in a much wider range of applications and domains. LREC 2008 recognises the need to encompass all those data that interact with language resources in an attempt to model more complex human processes and develop more complex systems, and encourages submissions on topics such as: - Multimodal and multimedia systems, for Human-Machine interfaces, Human-Human interactions, and content processing - Resources for modelling language-related cognitive processes, including emotions - Interaction/Association of language and perception data, also for robotic systems PROGRAMME ------------------ The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels. There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered. SUBMISSIONS AND DATES ---------------------------------- Submitted abstracts of papers for oral and poster or demo presentations should consist of about 1500-2000 words. Submission of proposals for oral and poster/demo papers: 31 October 2007 Proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 31 October 2007 PROCEEDINGS ------------------- The Proceedings on CD will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format. In addition a Book of Abstracts will be printed. CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE ---------------------------------------------------- Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Pisa, Italy (Conference chair) Khalid Choukri, ELRA, Paris, France Bente Maegaard, CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France Jan Odijk, Nuance Communications International, Belgium and UIL-OTS, Utrecht, The Netherlands Stelios Piperidis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), Athens, Greece Daniel Tapias, Telefónica Móviles España, Madrid, Spain