Call for Papers:

7th SaLTMiL Workshop on
"Creation and use of basic lexical resources for less-resourced languages"

A half-day workshop at LREC 2010
Sunday May 23, 2010, morning.
Mediterranean Conference Center, Valetta, Malta

SALTMIL:           http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
LREC 2010:         http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/
Call For Papers:    http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~mforcada/saltmil2010.html
Paper submission:   https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/SALTMIL2010/

Papers are invited for the above half-day workshop, in the format outlined below. Most submitted papers will be presented in poster form, though some authors may be invited to present in lecture format.

Context and focus

The 7th International Workshop of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages (SaLTMiL: see http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil), will be held in Malta, on a date between May 17 and May 23, 2010 to be announced, as part of the 2010 International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC). Entitled "Creation and use of basic lexical resources for less-resourced languages", the workshop is intended to continue the series of SALTMIL/LREC workshops on computational language resources for minority languages, held in Granada (1998), Athens (2000), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2002), Lisbon (2004), Genoa (2006) and Marrakech (2008). The Malta 2010 workshop aims to share information on tools and best practice, so that isolated researchers will not need to start from scratch. An important aspect will be the forming of personal contacts, which can minimize duplication of effort. There will be a balance between presentations of existing language resources, and more general presentations designed to give background information needed by all researchers.

The workshop will begin with presentations from invited speakers, including the following:

• Antton Gurrutxaga eta Igor Leturia. Elhuyar Foundation. "Exploiting Internet to build language resources for less resourced languages"

• Marc Kemps-Snijders. LAT team at the Max Planck Institute at Nijmegen. "ELAN and RELISH project"

Then two of the contributed papers will be presented.

After the break, talks will be followed by a poster session featuring the remaining contributed papers.

Topics

Papers are invited which include (but are not limited to) the following issues in the area of the creation and use of basic lexical resources for less-resourced languages:

• What problems emerge when faced with creating lexical resources for languages having different linguistic features from the major languages?

• When using corpus-based methods to create lexical resources, which techniques should be promoted in order to get the maximum yield from sparse training data?

• What standards will enable researchers to share and create tools and techniques for lexical resources across several different languages?

• Which tools are easily re-useable across several unrelated languages? What are the existing resources for such languages, and which software tools have been found useful?

• How can lexical resources be created when a language does not yet have a widely accepted standard written form, or when it has several competing standards?

Organisers

• Mikel L. Forcada: Machine Translation Group, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

• Kepa Sarasola: Dept. of Computer Languages, University of the Basque Country

• Francis M. Tyers, Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain

Programme committee

• Mikel L. Forcada: Dublin City University, Ireland

• Kepa Sarasola: University of the Basque Country

• Francis M. Tyers: Universitat d'Alacant, Spain

• Trond Trosterud, Universitetet i Tromsø, Norway

• Núria Bel, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

• Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis University, USA

• Hrafn Loftsson, University of Reykjavik

• Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Universitat d'Alacant

• Iñaki Alegria: University of the Basque Country

• Lars Borin, Göteborgs universitet

Submissions

We expect short papers of max 6,000 words (up to 6 pages) describing research addressing one of the above topics, to be submitted as PDF documents by using the LREC2010 START conference management system (URL: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/SALTMIL2010/).

Submissions should be anonymized. When submitting a paper, from the START page you will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that either have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. The Map will be disclosed at LREC, where some event(s) will be organised around this idea. For further information on this new iniative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources.

Important dates

28 February 2010 Deadline for submission
12 March 2010    Notification
21 March 2010    Final version
23 May 2010      Workshop

Registration

Registration details will be announced in due course