Call for Papers LREC 2002 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2002/ Workshop on Portability Issues in Human Language Technologies 1st June 2002, Las Palmas, Canary Islands - Spain IMPORTANT DATES - Deadline for workshop abstract submission: 12th February 2002 - Notification of acceptance: 26th February 2002 - Final version of the paper for the workshop proceedings: 2nd April 2002 - Workshop: 1st June 2002 MOTIVATION AND AIMS There are more than 6000 languages in the world, yet only a small number possess the resources required for implementation of Human Language Technologies (HLT). This imbalance in technical resources available to languages of the world is likely to result in a significant linguistic divide that further exacerbates global social and economic inequities unless decisive action is taken relatively soon. One potential means of ameliorating this imbalance in technology resources is through encouraging research in the portability of human language technology for multilingual application. Portability issues in HLT are important in the structuring and acquisition of local language resources. The primary objective of the workshop is to bring together participants from academia and industry to discuss and disseminate the current state of the art in multilingual research and development in the context of cross-language HLT transfer. Major challenges for HLT-portability research will also be discussed. The workshop will focus on the following topics and languages: - Linguistic corpora and portability (new models, language maps, novel systems for creating and managing multilingual data); - Automatic Speech Recognition (generic design in acoustic modelling, task portability, cross-language portability): - Acoustic modelling (monolingual and multilingual modelling, cross-language transfer, finite state automata, decision trees and data-driven methods); - Dictionary development (word-definition issues, automatic dictionary acquisition); - Language modelling (the Internet as a linguistic resource, language modelling in spoken language processing). - Natural Language Processing (cross-language transfer of HLT): - Parsing; - Translation. The proposed workshop is intended to continue the series of SALTMIL (ISCA SIG) http://isl.ntftex.uni-lj.si/SALTMIL/ LREC workshops related to the integration of local and global languages ("Language Resources for European Minority Languages" (LREC'98)) as well as the workshop on "Developing Language Resources for Minority Languages: Re-usability and Strategic Priorities" (LREC'00)). WORKSHOP AGENDA Oral Session: Portability Issues in HLT 14:30 Workshop Welcome and Introduction Bojan Petek 14:35 Multilingual Time Maps: Portable Phonotactic Models for Speech Technology Julie Carson-Berndsen 15:00 Automatic Phonetic and Prosodic Characterization of Spoken Language Steven Greenberg 15:25 Creating Re-usable Documentation for Little-studied Languages Steven Bird 15:50 Some Issues in Speech Recognizer Portability Lori Lamel 16:15 Break Oral Session: HLT and the Coverage of Languages 16:30 Challenges and Opportunities in Portability of Human Language Technologies Bojan Petek 16:55 Atlantis Project: Resources Available in the Internet to Serve Speakers and Learners of Minority Languages Salvador Climent 17:20 Towards the definition of a basic toolkit for HLT Kepa Sarasola 17:45 Panel Discussion - Invited speakers will be included as panelist members. 18:15 Poster Session 20:00 End WORKSHOP ORGANIZING AND PROGRAM COMMITTEE - Julie Carson-Berndsen, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland - Steven Greenberg, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA - Bojan Petek, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia - Kepa Sarasola, University of the Basque Country, Donostia, Basque Country SUBMISSION Papers are invited that describe research and development in the area of Human Language Technology portability. All contributed papers will be presented in poster format. Each submission should include: title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, postal address, telephone and fax numbers. Abstracts (maximum 500 words, plain-text format) should be sent via email to: Bojan Petek, bojan.petek@uni-lj.si All contributed papers will be printed in the workshop proceedings. WORKSHOP REGISTRATION FEES The registration fees for the workshop are: - If you are not attending LREC: 140 EURO - If you are attending LREC: 90 Euro These fees cover the following: a copy of the proceedings of the attended workshop, coffee-breaks and refreshments. Participation in the workshop is limited by the venue. Requests for participation will be processed on first come first served basis. Registration will be handled by the LREC Secretariat.