::: Call for Papers :::


EACL workshop 'LaTeCH - SHELT&R 2009':
Language Technology and Resources for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education


http://ilk.uvt.nl/latech09


Co-located with The 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
30 (31) March 2009
Athens, Greece


Scope and Topics


Recent years have seen a growing interest in the application of language technology tools and resources to text-based research in Social sciences, Humanities and Education (SHE). Likewise, large scale digitisation projects are currently underway to make collections of cultural heritage (CH) stored in museums, archives, and libraries around the world more accessible, where it is desirable to develop powerful tools that enable annotating, structuring, enriching, searching, linking, and mining the digitised data. Language technology has an important role to play in these processes, even for collections which are primarily non-textual, since text is the pervasive medium used for metadata.


At the same time, the CH and SHE domains pose special challenges for the NLP community, such as the use of historic or non-standard language (ellipsis, OCR or transcription errors, linguistic variation, and the mixed use of languages), the interplay between textual form and content, as well as the necessity to deal with data from various media. Textual data from CH and SHE are typically multifunctional, which allows for transdisciplinary research, promoting the development of automatic creation and extension of controlled vocabularies and information exchange standards. The CH and SHE domains therefore constitute an interesting and challenging testbed for the robustness of existing language technology.


The workshop, a continuation of LaTeCH-07 (Prague, Czech Republic) and LaTeCH-08 (Marrakech, Morocco) aims to foster interaction between researchers working on all aspects of language technology applied to CH and SHE domains, and experts from institutions who are testing deployed technologies and formulating improved use cases.


Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:


* Adapting existing NLP tools to the CH and SHE domains: machine learning and semantic web technologies
* Automatic error detection and cleaning
* Complex annotation tools and interfaces
* Dealing with linguistic variation and non-standard or non-contemporary use of language
* Knowledge discovery from CH and SHE data
* Knowledge representation in CH and SHE
* Linking and retrieving information from different sources, media, and domains
* Ontologies, data models, taxonomies: automatic induction and standardisation
* Representing CH and SHE data to different audiences: personalisation, text simplification, text summarisation, (hyper)text generation
* Transdisciplinary research on CH and SHE data
* User scenarios and use cases.




Authors are invited to submit papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of the workshop. Papers should present completed work, not exceeding 8 pages. All submissions are to be formatted using the EACL 2009 stylefiles.


Papers should be submitted electronically, no later than Friday 19 December, 2008. The submission website is soon to be announced. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF.


The reviewing process will be blind; thus papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations or any references to web sites, project names etc. revealing the authors' identity. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.




Important dates


19 December, 2008 - Deadline for paper submission
30 January, 2009 - Notification of acceptance
12 February, 2009 - Camera-ready copies due
30 or 31 March, 2009 - LaTeCH-SHELT&R 2009 workshop held at EACL-09 (exact date to be announced)






Programme Committee


Ion Androutsopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Timothy Baldwin, University of Melbourne, Australia
David Bamman, Perseus, USA
Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Andrea Bozzi, ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy
Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, Germany
Kate Byrne, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Claire Cardie, Cornell University, USA
Paul Clough, Sheffield University, UK
Milena P. Dobreva, HATII, University of Glasgow, Scotland
Mick O'Donnell, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
Matthew James Driscoll, Copenhagen University, Denmark
Franciska de Jong, University of Twente, Netherlands
Julio Gonzalo, UNED, Madrid, Spain
Claire Grover, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Ben Hachey, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Erhard Hinrichs, Tübingen University, Germany
Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
Christer Johansson, University of Bergen, Norway
Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Dimitrios Kokkinakis, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Piroska Lendvai, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Christina Lioma, University of Leuven, Belgium
Veronique Malaisé, Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Steven van der Mije, Trezorix, The Netherlands
John Nerbonne, Groningen University, The Netherlands
Marco Pennacchiotti, Saarland University/Yahoo! Research, Germany
Georg Rehm, Tübingen University, Germany
Martin Reynaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Michael Rosner, University of Malta, Malta
Maria Simi, University of Pisa, Italy
Caroline Sporleder, Saarland University, Germany
Tamás Váradi, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
Andreas Witt, Tübingen University, Germany
Peter Wittenburg, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Svitlana Zinger, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands




Organising Committee


Piroska Lendvai (Co-chair), Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Lars Borin (Co-chair), University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Martin Reynaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Caroline Sporleder, Saarland University, Germany






Contact


Piroska Lendvai
Dept. of Communication and Information Sciences
Tilburg University
The Netherlands
p.lendvai (at) uvt.nl




Lars Borin
Språkbanken • Språkdata
Department of Swedish Language
University of Gothenburg
Sweden
lars.borin (at) svenska.gu.se




Workshop website


http://ilk.uvt.nl/latech09