BSNLP 2013 - Fourth Biennial International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing

The languages from the Balto-Slavic group play an important role due to their diverse cultural heritage and widespread use ? with over 400 million speakers. The recent political and economic developments in Central and Eastern Europe have brought Balto-Slavic societies and their languages into focus in terms of rapid technological advancement and rapidly expanding consumer markets.
This Workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Balto-Slavic languages. The NLP tasks in urgent need of attention include, but are not limited to:
morphological analysis and generation,
syntactic and semantic tagging,
named-entity recognition,
information extraction,
co-reference resolution,
question-answering,
information retrieval,
text summarization,
machine translation.
Research on theoretical and applied topics in the context of many Balto-Slavic languages is still in its early stages. The linguistic phenomena specific to Balto-Slavic languages ? such as rich morphological inflection and free word order ? make the construction of NLP tools for these languages a challenging and intriguing task.
The goal of this Workshop is to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on NLP for Balto-Slavic languages. In particular, the Workshop will serve as an instrument to further stimulate the research on NLP techniques for Balto-Slavic languages, and to foster the creation of tools for these languages. The Workshop will provide an forum for exchanging ideas and experience, discussing difficult-to-tackle problems in this field of research, and making the available resources more widely-known. One fascinating aspect of this sub-family of languages is the striking structural similarity, as well as an easily recognizable core vocabulary and inflectional inventory spanning the entire group of languages ? despite a lack of mutual intelligibility ? which creates a special environment in which researchers can fully appreciate the shared problems and solutions and communicate naturally.
This Workshop continues the proud tradition established by the previous BSNLP Workshops:
the First BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with ACL 2007 Conference in Prague;
the Second BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with IIS 2009: Intelligent Information Systems, in Cracow, Poland; and
the Third BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with TSD 2011, 14th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue in Plzen, Czech Republic.
SUBMISSION
BSNLP 2013 welcomes two types of submissions: (a) full papers, and (b) short papers.
Long papers should describe original unpublished work and should indicate the state of completion of the reported results. In particular, overlap with previously published work should be clearly mentioned. The authors should indicate along with their submission if the paper has been submitted elsewhere.
Short papers should describe work in progress and/or interactive software demos.
All submissions, both long and short papers, will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, usability, and significance/relevance to the Workshop. Submissions will be reviewed by at least 3 members of the Program Committee.
The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Self-citations and other references that reveal the authors' identity should be avoided.
In particular, submissions describing systems, resources or solutions that are made available to the wider public would be strongly encouraged, as this would help to promote computational linguistics applications for these languages.
Further details related to the submission format and electronic submission system will be announced in January 2013.
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
The official language of the workshop is English.
PUBLICATION
The papers accepted for BSNLP 2013 will be published in ACL Workshop Proceedings.
After the Workshop, we intend to make a selection of the best papers based on this year's and previous years' Workshops, and to publish expanded versions of these papers in a volume on Balto-Slavic NLP as a book with a reputable publisher or in a special journal issue. No such unified reference work for Balto-Slavic NLP exists to date.
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submissions due: 26 April 2013
Notification of acceptance: 24 May 2013
Camera-ready versions due: 7 June 2014
Workshop: 8 - 9 August 2013