CALL FOR PAPERS 

************************************************************* 
MERGING AND LAYERING LINGUISTIC INFORMATION 
************************************************************* 

To be held in conjunction with 
The 5th International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 
Magazzini del Cotone Conference Centre 
Genoa, Italy 
May 23, 2006 

http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide/events/MERGING-LREC2006/ 

ORGANIZERS 
Erhard Hinrichs, University of Tuebingen, Germany 
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA 
Martha Palmer, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA 
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA 

Treebanks and other theme-specific annotation schemes, together with 
stand-alone resources such as syntactic and semantic lexicons,
wordnets, 
and framenets, enable annotation of natural language at different 
structural levels. These resources have become crucially important for 
the development of data-driven approaches to NLP, human language 
technologies, grammar extraction, and linguistic research in general. 
However, most of these resources and schemes have been developed by 
different groups working at different sites around the world, and
their 
design is often driven by different linguistic theories and/or 
application requirements. Efforts to merge resources and annotations
in 
order to exploit the information in all of them have shown how
difficult 
the problem of mapping categories and features reflecting a particular 
conceptual design can be. 

This workshop is designed to bring together researchers involved in
the 
development and/or use of theme-specific annotation schemes and 
supporting language resources to share experiences and methodologies,
in 
order to provide a basis for addressing the obstacles to future
resource 
and annotation development efforts. Another goal of the workshop is to 
move towards agreement on linguistic annotation standards for
different 
levels of representation; that is, frameworks that will allow (a) 
individual annotations to cohabit with one another (providing 
consistency), (b) specification components from different annotation 
schemas to communicate with one another, in order to refer to merged 
information (creating integration), (c) underspecification of
annotation 
information at all levels (enabling incremental addition of
information 
over the processing history), (d) maintenance of individual
annotations 
as separate schemas for development, acquisition, and processing 
purposes; and (e) annotation of multi-lingual and multi-modal data. 
Finally, the workshop is intended to promote collaboration within the 
international research community on the harmonization of
representations 
for linguistic information for use in both language resources and 
annotations. 

We invite submission of papers on topics relevant to resource and 
annotation formalisms, including but not limited to: 

- design principles and annotation schemes for theme-specific
  annotations 
  and resources such as treebanks, lexicons, etc. 
- experiences with and methods for merging information in existing 
  resources, including both resources of the same type (e.g. lexical/
  semantic 
  resources) and those containing linguistic information of  different
  types 
  (e.g., syntax, co-reference, discourse, etc.) 
- experiences with and methods for merging annotations for different 
  linguistic phenomena; 
- the role of linguistic theories in annotation development; 
- representation frameworks for multi-layered linguistic annotations; 
- methods for and results of evaluation of annotation standards; 
- tools for creation and management of integrated annotation schemas; 
- applications of resources and theme-specific annotations in
  acquiring 
  linguistic knowledge for NLP. 

DATES 
Paper submission :  March 8, 2006 
Author notification : April 7, 2006 
Workshop date : May 23, 2006 

SUBMISSION INFORMATION 
Papers should be no more than 8 pages in length and follow the format 
for submissions to the main LREC conference. Submissions in pdf format 
should be sent to merging@cs.vassar.edu. 

CONTACT 
Please send inquiries to merging@cs.vassar.edu. 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE 
Eneko Agirre, Basque Country University  (Spain) 
Collin Baker, International Computer Science Institute (USA) 
Gosse Bouma (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) 
Monserrat Civit (Centre de Llenguatges i Computacis, University of
Barcelona) 
Hamish Cunningham, University of Sheffield (UK) 
Bonnie Dorr, University of Maryland (USA) 
Eva Ejerhed (U. of Umea, Umea, Sweden) 
Tomaz Erjavec, Institut Josef Stefan (Slovenia) 
David Farwell (CRL New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM) 
Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University (USA) 
Charles J. Fillmore (International Computer Science Institute,
Berkeley) 
Jan Hajic (Center for Computational Linguistics, Charles  University,
Prague) 
Eva Hajicova (Center for Computational Linguistics, Charles
University, Prague) 
Eduard Hovy, International Sciences Institute (USA) 
Sandra K|bler (U. of T|bingen, Germany) 
Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy) 
Lori Levin (LTI, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA) 
Inderjeet Mani (MITRE, Bedford, MA) 
Adam Meyer (NYU, New York, NY) 
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas (USA) 
Sergei Nirenburg (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) 
Joakim Nivre (Vdxjv University, Sweden) 
Boyan A. Onyshkevych (U.S. Dept. of Defense) 
Karel Pala, (Masaryk University, Brno) 
Gerald Penn (University of Toronto, Toronto) 
Wim Peters, University of Sheffield (UK) 
Manfred Pinkal (DFKI, Saarbruecken, Germany) 
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex (UK) 
Adam Przepiorkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland) 
Owen Rambow (Columbia University, NYC) 
Kiril Simov (CLPP, Sofia, Bulgaria) 
Beth Sundheim (SPAWAR Systems Center, San Diego) 
Piek Vossen (Irion technologies, The Netherlands) 
Fei Xia (IBM Watson, Hawthorne, NY) 
Bert Xue (UPENN, Philadelphia, PA) 
Dietmar Zaefferer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet, Muenchen, Germany) 
Annie Zaenen, (PARC, Palo Alto, CA)