[Apologies for cross-postings]

Call for papers
RANLP-2009 Workshop on Natural Language Processing methods and corpora
in translation, lexicography, and language learning

We are pleased to announce the workshop on Natural Language Processing
methods and corpora in translation studies, lexicography, and language
learning, to be held in conjunction with the main RANLP-09 conference in
Borovets, Bulgaria, on 17-18 September 2009.

Extended deadline: 21 June 2009


Motivation

Corpora are now indispensable tools in research and everyday practice
for translators, lexicographers, second language learners. Specialists
in these areas share a general goal in using corpora in their work:
corpora provide the possibility to find and analyse linguistic patterns
characteristic of various kinds of language users, monitor language
change, and reveal important similarities and divergences across
different languages. For professional translators corpora present an
invaluable linguistic and cultural awareness tools. For language
learners, they serve as a means to gain insights into specifics of
competent language use as well as to analyse typical errors of fellow
learners. For lexicographers, corpora are key for monitoring the
development of the vocabularies of languages, making informed decisions
as to lexicographic relevance of the lexical material, and for general
verification of all varieties of lexicographic data.

While simple corpus analysis tools such as concordancers have been long
in use in these specialist areas, in the past decade there have been
important developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP)
technologies: it has become much easier to construct corpora and
powerful NLP methods have become available that can be used to analyse
corpora not only on the surface level, but also on the syntactic, and
even semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic levels.

This workshop aims to bring together the developers and the users of NLP
technologies for the purposes of translation, translation studies,
lexicography, terminology, and language learning in order to present
their research and discuss new possibilities and challenges in these fields.


Topics

Submissions are invited for the following topics of interest to the
workshop:

- NLP methodologies for processing parallel and comparable corpora
- Context-sensitive dictionary look-up
- Corpus-based study and identification of cognates and false friends
- Compilation and use of corpora in translation studies
- Corpus-based study of properties of translated text: translation
universals, phraseology, lexical and grammatical patterns
- Corpora in translator training
- Translation of terms and collocations using corpora
- Bilingual concordancing in translation applications
- NLP methods for Computer-Aided Translation
- Compilation of specialised terminologies
- Compilation of corpora for bilingual lexicography
- Detection of gaps in bilingual dictionaries
- Corpus-based estimation of lexicographic relevance
- Term and collocation extraction
- Discovery of illustrative examples and definitions of words and word
senses in corpora
- Reading and writing aid applications for language learners
- Automated text glossing in Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL)
- Corpus-based design of assessment materials in CALL
- Error detection and error analysis in CALL
- Detection of first-language interference in learner corpora

Important dates

Extended submission deadline: 21 June 2009
Acceptance notification: 20 July 2009
Final copies due: 24 August 2009

Submission instructions

Papers must be submitted in PDF format as e-mail attachments to Iustina
Ilisei at iustina.ilisei@gmail.com. The e-mail should use the subject
header “RANLP-2009 workshop”.

Format
Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work
in the topic area of this workshop. Papers (in PDF format conforming to
the RANLP 2009 stylefiles) should not exceed 8 pages. The RANLP 2009
stylefiles are available at:

http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2009/submissions.htm

As reviewing will be blind, the papers should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
authors' identities should be avoided. Papers that do not conform to
these requirements will be rejected without review.

Reviewing
Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the Program
Committee. Reviewers will be asked to provide detailed comments, and to
score submitted papers on the following factors:
- Relevance to the workshop
- Significance and originality
- Technical/methodological accuracy
- References to related work
- Presentation (clarity, organisation, English)

Accepted papers policy
Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. By
submitting a paper at the workshop the authors agree that, in case the
paper is accepted for publication, at least one of the authors will
attend the workshop; all workshop participants are expected to pay the
RANLP-2009 workshop registration fee.

Workshop webpage
http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~in0963/ranlp/


Programme Committee

Marco Baroni (University of Trento)
Jill Burstein (Educational Testing Service)
Michael Carl (Copenhagen Business School)
Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Malaga)
Le An Ha (University of Wolverhampton)
Patrick Hanks (Masaryk University)
Marie-Claude Homme (Université de Montréal)
Federico Gaspari (University of Bologna)
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing)
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton)
Roberto Navigli (University of Rome 'La Sapienza')
Miriam Seghiri (University of Malaga)
Pete Whitelock (Oxford University Press)
Richard Xiao (Edge Hill University)
Federico Zanettin (University of Perugia)

Organising Committee

Iustina Ilisei (University of Wolverhampton)
Viktor Pekar (Oxford University Press)
Silvia Bernardini (University of Bologna)