Call for Papers

Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA)
2nd UIMA@GSCL Workshop

September 30, 2009
Potsdam, Germany

http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/acl-lab/gscl09/workshops.de.html



For many decades, NLP has suffered from low software engineering standards
causing a limited degree of re-usability of code and interoperability of
different modules within larger NLP systems. While this did not really
hamper success in limited task areas (such as implementing a parser), it
caused serious problems for the emerging field of language technology where
the focus is on building complex integrated software systems, e.g., for
information extraction or machine translation. This lack of integration has
led to duplicated software development, work-arounds for programs written in
different (versions of) programming languages, and ad-hoc tweaking of
interfaces between modules developed at different sites.

In recent years, the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA)
framework has been proposed as a middleware platform which offers
integration by design through common type systems and standardized
communication methods for components analysing streams of unstructured
information, such as natural language. The UIMA framework offers a solid
processing infrastructure that allows developers to concentrate on the
implementation of the actual analytics components. An increasing number of
members of the NLP community thus have adopted UIMA as a platform
facilitating the creation of reusable NLP components that can be assembled
to address different NLP tasks depending on their order, combination and
configuration.

This workshop aims at bringing together members of the NLP community that
are users, developers or providers of either UIMA components or UIMA-related
tools in order to explore and discuss the opportunities and challenges in
using UIMA as a platform for modern, well-engineered NLP. In the context of
an emerging NLP-oriented UIMA community, the challenge to create not only
reusable, but also interoperable components raises particular interest. From
a methodological perspective, interoperability relies largely on UIMA type
systems. Technically, it includes issues related to the packaging and
distribution of UIMA components. Also, tools are important, for example to
assemble complex processing work flows, to manage the bodies of data that
are to be analysed and to visualize, explore, and further deploy the
analysis results. Finally, interoperability is also affected by legal
issues, such as potentially incompatible licenses of components and tools.

The availability of ready-to-use components plays a major role in choosing
UIMA over other alternatives. To accentuate this, the workshop puts a focus
on UIMA-based components and tools that are freely available for research.


Topics
----------
Participants are invited to present applications realized using UIMA,
general experiences using UIMA as a platform for natural language
processing, as well as technical papers on particular aspects of the UIMA
framework. Alternatives to and comparisons of other frameworks with UIMA
are of interest, too. More specifically, workshop topics include, but are
not limited to:
* UIMA components with a special focus on genericity and type-system
independence
* repositories of ready-to-use UIMA-based components
* (generic) type systems for UIMA
* distribution of UIMA components: documentation, licensing and
packaging
* sophisticated tools to build and manage complex processing pipelines
* experience reports combining UIMA-based components from different
sources, as well as solutions to interoperability issues
* processing of very large data collections: scale-out,
parallelization, and performance optimization
* analysis of results: exploration, evaluation, visualization, and
statistical analysis
* developing for UIMA: simplified APIs, debugging, unit testing, and
limitations of UIMA


Submissions
-----------------
We invite submissions of full papers, limited to 8 pages of text, and
position papers or papers describing ongoing work as short papers, limited
to 4 pages. Both kinds of papers will be orally presented. Double
submissions (whether verbatim or in essence) should indicate this fact and
name the workshop or conference event also addressed. Reviewing will not be
anonymous but authors wishing to keep their anonymity may hide their
identity on demand.

All submissions must be in English and follow the Springer LNCS style [1]
and should be created using LaTeX. Submissions must be sent in PDF format to
uima.gscl2009@googlemail.com no later than July, 6th.

Accepted submissions will appear in the GSCL conference proceedings.

[1] http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0


Important Dates
---------------------
July, 6 : Submission deadline
July, 20: Notification of acceptance
July, 28: Camera-ready copies due
Sept, 30: Workshop held in Potsdam in conjunction with GSCL


Organizers and Contact
-------------------------------
* JULIE Lab, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
* Udo Hahn
* Katrin Tomanek
* UKP Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt
* Iryna Gurevych
* Richard Eckart de Castilho

Please address any inquiries regarding the workshop to:
uima.gscl2009@googlemail.com


Program Committee
---------------------------
* Anni R. Coden, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
* Branimir K. Boguraev, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
* Graham Wilcock, University of Helsinki, Finland
* Iryna Gurevych, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
* Katrin Tomanek, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany
* Leo Ferres, University of Concepcion, Chile
* Michael Tanenblatt, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
* Nicolas Hernandez, Université de Nantes, France
* Philipp Cimiano, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
* Richard Eckart de Castilho, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
* Sophia Ananiadou, University of Manchester, Great Britain
* Stefan Geißler, TEMIS GmbH, Germany
* Udo Hahn, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany


Links
---------
* http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/acl-lab/gscl09/
* http://incubator.apache.org/uima
* http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=uima
* http://www.julielab.de/
* http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/
* http://u-compare.org/