LRTSSP 2011 - Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm (LRTSSP 2011)

IJCNLP2011 Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm

Call for Papers

Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm

November 12, 2011
At IJCNLP2011 (http://www.ijcnlp2011.org/)



The Context

Some of the current major initiatives in the area of language resources ? FLaReNet (http://www.flarenet.eu/), Language Grid (http://langrid.nict.go.jp/en/index.html) and META-SHARE (www.meta-share.org, www.meta-net.eu) ? have agreed to organise a joint workshop on infrastructural issues that are critical in the age of data sharing and open data, to discuss state of the art, international cooperation, future strategies and priorities, road-mapping.

It is an achievement, and an opportunity for our field, that recently a number of strategic-infrastructural initiatives have been started all over the world. This is also a sign that funding agencies recognise the strategic value of our field and the importance of helping a coherent growth also through a number of coordinated actions. Some of
these initiatives, two European and an Asian, have agreed to join forces to foster a debate that may lead to future coordinated actions all over the world.

FLaReNet aims at providing recommendations for future initiatives in the field of Language Resources and Technologies: we are aware that it is important to discuss future policy and priorities not only on the European scene, but also in a worldwide context. This is true both when we try to highlight future directions of research, and ? even more ? when we analyse which infrastructural initiatives are needed. The growth of the field should be complemented by common efforts that try to look for synergies and to overcome fragmentation.

The Language Grid aims at constructing a multilingual service infrastructure on the Internet that allows users to share language services such as online dictionaries, bilingual corpora, and machine translations, and create new language services by combining existing services to support intercultural collaboration. The Language Grid is
operated by Kyoto and Bangkok operation centers in a federated fashion. More than 110 language services are registered and shared by 140 groups in 18 countries.

META-SHARE aims to build an open, integrated, secure and interoperable exchange facility for language resources (data and tools) for the Human Language Technologies domain and other applicative domains (e.g., digital libraries, cognitive systems, robotics, etc) where language plays a critical role. It aims to act as an infrastructure that will enable language resources documentation, cataloguing, uploading and storage, downloading and exchange, aiming to support a resources economy at large.

Cooperation is an issue that needs to be prepared. This joint strategic Workshop plans to continue a discussion, started on several occasions in the last years, on the usefulness and the interest of promoting international cooperation among various initiatives and communities around the world, within and around the field of Language
Resources and Technologies.

Topic and Content

The three organising projects will contribute with reports on their activities aiming at boosting a constructive and fruitful debate. In particular,
FLaReNet will bring in its final recommendations and priorities deriving from the various events it organised, summarised in the FLaReNet Blueprint of actions and infrastructures (http://www.flarenet.eu/sites/default/files/D8.2b.p...).
The Language Grid proposes a service-oriented language infrastructure that shifts from language resources to language services, and institutional design for operating the infrastructure in a federated fashion (http://servicegrid.net/en/index.html).

META-SHARE will present the principles underlying its design and governance model, its proposed architecture for language resources sharing and collaborative building as well as the technical and legal instruments supporting its operation.

The Workshop aims at addressing (some of the) technological, market and policy challenges posed by the “sharing and openness paradigm”, the major role that language resources can play and the consequences of this paradigm on language resources themselves.
Examples of topics and issues to be addressed are:
Sharing Language Resources and Language Technologies
Need for global information on Language Resources and Language Technologies: relevant initiatives in the various regions/countries
Interoperability and Reusability
Linguistic web services and language applications development
Metadata and Cataloguing
Legal issues
Infrastructures, policies, gaps and critical areas
Common roadmap and strategies: local, regional, international frameworks
International cooperation, models for collaboration and agreements on joint initiatives
The proposed Workshop will be a place where colleagues interested on infrastructural initiatives get together to discuss and promote collaboration actions.
This should also lead to discussing the modalities of how to organise the cooperation among various initiatives.

We think that organising this workshop in Thailand we can attract participation of many Asian initiatives and can lead to fruitful collaboration between Asian and other international initiatives.

Important dates
Deadline for paper submissions: May 20, 2011
Notification of paper acceptance: July 1, 2011
Camera-ready copies due (firm): July 22, 2011

Workshop Chairs
Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy)
Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan)
Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, Athens, Greece)
Virach Sornlertlamvanich (NECTEC, Thailand)

Scientific Committee
Sophia Ananiadou
Nuria Bel
Emily Bender
Steven Bird
Nicoletta Calzolari
Thatsanee Charoenporn
Key-Sun Choi
Khalid Choukri
Chris Cieri
Yoshihiko Hayashi
Chu-Ren Huang
Nancy Ide
Hitoshi Isahara
Toru Ishida
Steven Krauwer
Joseph Mariani
Monica Monachini
Yohei Murakami
Jan Odijk
Stelios Piperidis
James Pustejovsky
Claudia Soria
Virach Sornlertlamvanich
Thepchai Supnithi
Take Tokunaga
Dan Tufis
Kiyotaka Uchimoto
Hans Uszkoreit
Peter Wittenburg