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CALL FOR PAPERS

Towards Enhanced Interoperability for Large HLT Systems:
UIMA for NLP

Full-day workshop held in conjunction with LREC 2008,
May 31, 2008, Marrakech, Morocco

Submission deadline: 29 February 2008
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The development and incremental modification of large and complex HLT
systems has long been an art rather than a workflow guided by software
engineering practices and principles. The interoperability of system
components was hard to achieve, exchange of different modules a
pain-staking task due to the low level of abstraction of specifications
which described interfaces to connect with each other, and data and
control flow interdependencies between various modules.

UIMA, the Unstructured Information Management Architecture, is an
open-platform middleware structure for dealing with unstructured
information (text, speech, audio, video data), originally launched by
IBM. In the meantime, the Apache Software Foundation has established an
incubator project for developing UIMA-based software
(http://incubator.apache.org/uima/). The Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) has established
a Technical Committee to standardize the UIMA specification.
Accordingly, an increasing number of NLP research institutes as well as
HLT companies all over the world are basing their system development
efforts on UIMA specifications to adhere to emerging standards.

As far as NLP proper is concerned, Carnegie Mellon University's Language
Technology Institute is hosting an UIMA Component Repository web site
(http://uima.lti.cs.cmu.edu), where developers can post information
about their analytics components and anyone can find out more about free
and commercially available UIMA-compliant analytics. Additionally, free
analytic tools that can work with UIMA include those from the General
Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE - http://gate.ac.uk/) and
OpenNLP (http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/) communities, as well as Jena
Universityâ??s Language & Information Engineering (JULIE)
(http://www.julielab.de) Lab. Commercial analytics are available from
IBM, as well as from other software vendors such as Attensity,
ClearForest, Temis and Nstein.

In this workshop we want to bring representatives from various NLP
research sites together who have gained experience in working with UIMA
specifications in the framework of complex NLP systems. As there are
already several large HLT systems that have been integrated with UIMA,
we also encourage papers at the workshop which are in the form of case
studies on those systems. We also aim at joining the results of their
work to discuss and possibly elaborate on emerging UIMA standards for
NLP systems.

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Paper Submissions
===================

We seek high-quality papers which report on experience using UIMA for
the design and implementation of complex NLP systems. However, papers
reporting on experience using other middleware frameworks and software
engineering practices in this context are also welcome. Both papers from
academia as well as industry are solicited. The size of long paper
should not exceed 8 pages, the size of short papers and demo
descriptions should not exceed 4 pages (using the LREC formatting
style). For details, please consult the submission section on the
workshop website.


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Important Dates
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February 29, 2008 - Deadline for workshop papers
March 26, 2008 - Notification of acceptance
April 4, 2008 - Camera-ready papers due
May 31, 2008 - Workshop in Marrakech

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please contact Udo Hahn
(udo.hahn@uni-jena.de).


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Organising Committee
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Udo Hahn (Jena University, Germany)
Thilo Götz (IBM Germany, Germany)
Eric W. Brown (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)
Hamish Cunningham (University of Sheffield, UK)
Eric Nyberg (Carnegie-Mellon University, USA)

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Program Committee
====================

Sophia Ananiadou (University of Manchester, NACTEM, UK)
Branimir Boguraev (IBM Watson Research Center, USA)
Eric W. Brown (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)
Ekaterina Buyko (Jena University, Germany)
Hamish Cunningham (University of Sheffield, UK)
Dave Ferrucci (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)
Stefan Geissler (TEMIS Deutschland, Germany)
Thilo Götz (IBM Germany, Germany)
Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Udo Hahn (Jena University, Germany)
Marti Hearst (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Larry Hunter (University of Colorado, USA)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College, USA)
Eric Nyberg (Carnegie-Mellon University, USA)
Sameer Pradhan (BBN, USA)
Dietmar Roesner (University of Magdeburg, Germany)
John Tait (University of Sunderland, UK)
Graham Wilcock (University of Helsinki, Finland)