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ACL-IJCNLP Comparable Corpora 2009 : ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: from parallel to non-parallel corpora | |||||||||||||||
Link: http://comparable2009.ust.hk/ | |||||||||||||||
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Call For Papers | |||||||||||||||
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First call for papers 2nd Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: from parallel to non-parallel corpora ACL-IJCNLP 2009 ======================================================================= ================================================ August 6th, 2009 Suntec, Singapore http://comparable2009.ust.hk/ Deadline for submission: May 1st, 2009 ================================================ OBJECTIVE Following the success of the first Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (http://www.limsi.fr/~pz/lrec2008-comparable-corpora/) at LREC 2008, this workshop aims to bring together language engineers as well as linguists interested in the constitution and use of comparable corpora, ranging from parallel to non-parallel corpora. In the larger context of the joint ACL-IJCNLP, this workshop aims to solicit contributions from researchers in different geographical regions, in order to highlight in particular the issues with comparable corpora across languages that are very different from each other, such as across Asian and European languages. Research in minority languages is also of particular interest. MOTIVATION Research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons in the language engineering and the linguistics communities. In language engineering, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as statistical machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest themselves in providing intra-linguistic discoveries and comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that comparable corpora are documents in one to many languages, that are comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions. It was pointed out that parallel corpora are at one end of the spectrum of comparability whereas quasi-comparable corpora are at the other end. We believe that the linguistic definitions and observations in comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for applications to statistical NLP. As such, it is of great interest to bring together builders and users of such corpora. Parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons and terminologies. However, beyond a few language pairs such as English-French or English-Chinese and a few contexts such as parliamentary debates or legal texts, they remain a scarce resource, despite the creation of automated methods to collect parallel corpora from the Web. Interests in non-parallel forms of comparable corpora in language engineering primarily ensued from the scarcity of parallel corpora. This has motivated research into the use of comparable corpora: pairs of monolingual corpora selected according to the same set of criteria, but in different languages or language varieties. Non-parallel yet comparable corpora overcome the two limitations of parallel corpora, since sources for original, monolingual texts are much more abundant than translated texts. However, because of their nature, mining translations in comparable corpora is much more challenging than in parallel corpora. What constitutes a good comparable corpus, for a given task or per se, also requires specific attention: while the definition of a parallel corpus is fairly straightforward, building a non-parallel corpus requires control over the selection of source texts in both languages. With the advent of online data, the potential for building and exploring comparable corpora is growing exponentially. Comparable documents in languages that are very different from each other pose special challenges as very often, the non-parallel-ness in sentences can result from cultural and political differences. INVITED SPEAKER Kenneth Ward Church (Microsoft Research, Redmond) TOPICS We solicit contributions in but not limited to the following topics: * Building Comparable Corpora - Human translations - Automatic and semi-automatic methods - Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the Web - Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora - Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora - Rare and minority languages - Across language families - Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora * Applications of Comparable Corpora - Human translations - Language learning - Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization - Bilingual projections - Machine translation - Writing assistance * Mining from Comparable Corpora - Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from comparable corpora - Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of single words and multi-word expressions; proper names, named entities, etc. IMPORTANT DATES May 1, 2009 Paper submissions Jun 1, 2009 Notification of acceptance Jun 7, 2009 Camera-ready copies due Aug 6, 2009 Workshop date SUBMISSION FORMAT Please use the official style files for ACL/IJCNLP 2009 available at: http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/main/authors/stylefiles/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS Pascale Fung, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST) Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI-CNRS (France) Reinhard Rapp, University of Mainz (Germany) and University of Tarragona (Spain) PROGRAM COMMITTEE Hamdulla Askar(Xinjiang University, China) Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Labs, US) Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada) Éric Gaussier (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France) Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France) Hitoshi Isahara (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan) Min-Ye Kan (National University of Singapore) Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd) Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada) Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas, US) Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver, Inc., US) Grace Ngai (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong) Carole Peters (ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy) Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK) Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, US) Mandel Shi (Xiamen University, China) Yujie Zhang (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan) WORKSHOP TECHNICAL SUPPORT Ricky Chan Ho Yin, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology |
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