META-FORUM 2016: Beyond Multilingual Europe

4/5 July 2016 – Lisbon, Portugal – http://www.meta-forum.eu

Call for Contributions (2 to 8 pages) now open. Deadline: 20 May 2016.

Participation is free of charge: http://www.meta-forum.eu/registration

META-FORUM 2016 is an international conference on powerful and innovative language technologies for the multilingual information society, the data value chain and the European multilingual Digital Single Market. META-FORUM is a conference series organised by META-NET, a European network of excellence that consists of 60 research centres in 34 European countries. After Brussels (2010, 2012), Budapest, (2011), Berlin (2013) and Riga (2015), META-FORUM 2016 will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, on 4/5 July.

META-FORUM 2016 is the very first event in the conference series with an open call for contributions – ranging from visionary ideas via concrete applications and industry requirements to recent research results. The target audience of the call are the European Language Technology, Computational Linguistics, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Text Mining, Image and Multimedia Processing, Data and Knowledge communities and other relevant stakeholders. The event will consist of thematic sessions concentrating on high-level strategic topics, research results and technology areas that circle around the overarching goal of fully unleashing the power of language technologies for the benefit of our continent.

META-FORUM 2016 is a forum for all stakeholders around the topic of Multilingual Europe: researchers (from academia, research centres, industry); industry representatives who buy, integrate or design language technologies; European research and innovation projects; members and representatives of the language communities; associations and other organisations working on strategies or technologies for Multilingual Europe; national and international administrations and funding agencies; journalists; European citizens.

We want to discuss several key questions, among others: How can Language Technologies be designed, integrated, customised, in order to realise the Multilingual Digital Single Market? How can they be used to realise effective (multilingual) Data Value Chains? Where are the most severe technology, resource and data gaps? Which kind of problems need to be solved first and most urgently? What will multilingual Europe look like in 2030 or 2040? What kind of visionary applications does the language technology community foresee for 2025 and beyond? Where is the European Language Technology community and landscape headed? Are adjustments needed? Can we expect new paradigm shifts in any specific area or subarea of our field? Can we actively push for them? In which subareas? What is the current role of national or international funding agencies and the current mode of research support? Can we provide recommendations in terms of needed adjustments and increased collaboration? What directions should our community take and what can our community and the related stakeholders do to maximise the impact, visibility and dissemination of our research results? (As background material we would like to refer any interested colleagues to the META-NET Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020, published in early 2013.)

We invite the wider community to submit contributions specifically on these but also on other topics around Multilingual Europe and Language Technology. Contributions can be of a rather general, high-level, abstract nature or focus upon specific technical details. We especially invite contributions from young researchers who recently completed their PhD with excellent theses on topics that are highly relevant for a technology-enabled Multilingual Europe or that have the medium to long term potential to bring about smaller or bigger breakthroughs or paradigm shifts. At the same time we also invite contributions from all other members of the wider Language Technology community, including those who have decades of experience working in R&D, especially between research and industry, and who can provide valuable input, feedback and recommendations regarding META-NET’s highly ambitious goal of realising a technology-enabled Multilingual Europe.

At META-FORUM 2016 we will present, discuss and further shape the next version of the Strategic Agenda for the Multilingual Digital Single Market (SRIA), Version 0.5 of which was unveiled at META-FORUM 2015 under the umbrella of the Riga Summit 2015. The upcoming, new version of the SRIA will take into account the work carried out in other currently running European initiatives and provide complementary ideas with regard to the key question how to realise the Multilingual Digital Single Market.


TOPICS

We’re inviting the community to submit

Visionary concepts
Research, development or innovation results
Position papers
Novel ideas and new technological approaches
Medium to long term strategic approaches (including roadmaps)
Promising breakthroughs


on the overall topic of Multilingual Europe, especially in the context of the Multilingual Digital Single Market and effective crosslingual data value chains. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Machine Translation and multilingual as well as crosslingual technologies
Speech synthesis, speech generation, automatic speech recognition
Text analytics, information extraction, relation extraction, semantic analysis, parsing
Integrated image and multimedia processing in connection with text and speech
Data-, Big-Data-, Smart-Data-related technologies (including analytics and generation)
Knowledge technologies, semantic technologies, Semantic Web, Linked Data
Personal assistants, dialogue systems, and other interactive technologies
Platforms, infrastructures and services for Multilingual Europe
Language resources for Multilingual Europe (data sets, corpora, lexicons, ontologies, under-resourced languages etc.)
Interoperability and standardisation
Strategic aspects, roadmaps, visionary concepts, position papers, research and technology gaps
Language Technology startups, new business models
The relationship between Language Technology and IT topics with high visibility such as, among others, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet of Things (Industrie 4.0 etc.), robotics, mobile devices, apps, eHealth, Smart Cities etc.


We invite contributions on the topics mentioned above and any related topics of interest that are relevant for META-NET’s overall goal of establishing Multilingual Europe through sophisticated language technologies, especially with regard to realising the Multilingual Digital Single Market, designing and implementing effective crosslingual data value chains, and visionary Language Technology applications for the year 2025 and beyond.

WE INVITE CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ANY STAKEHOLDERS REGARDING MULTILINGUAL EUROPE

Researchers who work in academia, research centres or industrial research
Industry representatives who use, design, buy, integrate language technologies
European or national projects (basic research, applied research, transfer, innovation)
Language service providers and language experts
Language communities
Associations and other organisations working on Multilingual Europe
Representatives from national or international administrations and funding agencies


IMPORTANT DATES

Publication of the call for papers: 20 April 2016
Submissions due: 20 May 2016
Notification of acceptance: 04 June 2016
Conference: 04/05 July 2016
Final version of accepted papers: 31 July 2016
Publication of META-FORUM 2016 proceedings volume: autumn of 2016


SUBMISSION

We use easychair to handle the submission process for META-FORUM 2016. Please submit your papers at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=metaforum2016 before the deadline of 20 May 2016. All submissions will be peer-reviewed; the review process will not be anonymous.

Accepted contributions will be presented as shorter lightning talks, oral presentations, part of panel discussions, software demonstrations or as posters. Please indicate your preference.

Contributions should be formatted according to the Springer LNCS stylesheets. Contributions should be submitted in PDF format.

PROCEEDINGS BOOK

All accepted submissions will be published in a conference proceedings volume after the event; we expect the book to be available by autumn/winter 2016.

Submission types

Please indicate your submission type when submitting your contribution:

Papers – paper submissions have a length of between three and eight pages (including references and appendices).
Posters – poster submissions have a length of one or two pages (including references and appendices). Ideal topics for poster submissions are presentations of projects (e.g., EU projects or national projects) or self-contained topics that would be too specific for an oral presentation.


REGISTRATION

Registration for META-FORUM 2016 is already possible and, as usual, free of charge: http://www.meta-net.eu/events/meta-forum-2016/registration

ACCOMMODATION

A list of hotels in the vicinity of the venue is available on http://www.meta-forum.eu.

VENUE

META-FORUM 2016 will take place at Centro de Congressos de Lisboa (CRFIL). More information and a map are available on http://www.meta-forum.eu.

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

The PC consists of the META-NET Executive Board and partners of the CRACKER consortium.

Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester, UK
Núria Bel, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
António Branco, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Aljoscha Burchardt, DFKI, Germany
Khalid Choukri, ELRA/ELDA, France
Koenraad De Smedt, University of Bergen, Norway
Marcello Federico, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy
Josef van Genabith, DFKI, Germany
Marko Grobelnik, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Barry Haddow, University of Edinburgh, UK
Jan Hajic, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
Philipp Koehn, Johns Hopkins University, USA, and University of Edinburgh, UK
Monica Monachini, ILC, Italy
Stelios Piperidis, R.C. "Athena", Greece
Georg Rehm, DFKI, Germany
Mike Rosner, University of Malta, Malta
Lucia Specia, University of Sheffield, UK
Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI, Germany
Tamás Váradi, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
Andrejs Vasiljevs, Tilde, Latvia
François Yvon, LIMSI, France

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Antonio Branco, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Aljoscha Burchardt, DFKI, Germany
Thea Busch, DFKI, Germany
Georg Rehm, DFKI, Germany
Nieves Sande, DFKI, Germany
Ana Tavares, University of Lisbon, Portugal

CHAIR OF THE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE AND CONTACT

Georg Rehm, DFKI, Germany – georg.rehm@dfki.de

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The first funded phase of META-NET was successfully completed in 2013 through the EU-funded projects T4ME, CESAR, METANET4U and META-NORD. The second phase of the META-NET initiative started in 2015, initially funded through the EU-project CRACKER (2015-2017). META-FORUM 2016 has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 645357 (CRACKER). CRACKER is also the initiator and driver of the emerging Cracking the Language Barrier federation, consisting of organisations and projects that work on technologies for a Multilingual Europe.

http://www.meta-forum.eu • http://www.meta-net.eu
http://www.cracker-project.eu • http://www.cracking-the-language-barrier.eu

• apologies for cross-posting • please help circulate this call for contributions •