LNCS 2011 - Advanced Language Technologies for Digital Libraries (ALT4DL)

We invite authors to submit papers for a volume on Advanced Language Technologies for Digital Libraries to be published in the Springer's Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS) Hot Topic subline.

The volume aims at presenting how state-of-the art Language Technologies are applied to the challenges faced by Digital Libraries together with providing a introductory grounding to the underlying fields. Hence, it will promote this emerging research area and disseminate its results whilst motivating the non-expert reader. It originates from two workshops, NLP4DL and AT4DL held in Viareggio and Trento, respectively, in 2009, but it is open also to contributions that were not presented at that time. We aim at gathering contributions both from the Library and the Computer Science community.

Background [top]

The fast growth of digital material is challenging for research in many disciplines, and in particular, for natural language technologies. Multilingual aspects pose particular difficulties regarding a wide spectrum of problems: from extracting text from images, to developing usable search engines for accessing this digital library content. The EU has funded many projects to bring forward research in this field and to facilitate end-user access to cultural and scientific heritage. Therefore, it is time to bring together recent research results and to give both researchers and practitioners a comprehensive view on this evolving area. We are interested in highlighting the role of Language Technologies in enhancing document image processing and in accessing and searching digital libraries in general. Today much of our Cultural Heritage have been digitised by scanning books and other kinds of documents, but their printed text needs to be extracted via document image processing techniques in order for the content to be accessible, searchable, and analysable. Language Technologies can also play a crucial role in accessing and searching digital libraries that do not contain the scanned table of contents, abstracts or books, but simply provide metadata records describing their physical collections. Despite mass-digitisation efforts, this 'legacy metadata' is still predominant in library catalogues. To this end, nowadays cutting edge Language Technologies need to be fine-tuned to work on such well structured but limited data. Libraries across the globe are keen to provide subject-based access to their digital library collections via the linked data cloud. With each library indexing their digital libraries in their local language, the true value of this data is yet to be achieved. Web 2.0 brings particular challenges for digital libraries as increasingly multilingual user generated content, such as annotations and tags, are created. Not forgetting that all this needs to be done on mobile devices, which need to be optimised for the multilingual society in which we live in. All the Cross Language tasks, such Named Entity Disambiguation, Cross-Language Image Retrieval, Word Sense Disambiguation, etc. need to be harnessed to help users navigate the multilingual digital library world.

In a nutshell, it is the aim of this volume to present the current issues related to the multilingual aspects encountered when searching and navigating through digital libraries, and more generally, through e-repositories.

Topics [top]

Against this background, we are particularly interested in the application of Language Technologies to the following topics:

Access and Search (in Digital Libraries)
Social Web (and Digital Libraries)
Innovative Applications (of Digital Libraries)
Cross Language Processing (in Digital Libraries)
Document Image Processing (in Digital Libraries)
Metadata processing (in Digital Libraries)
Mobile technologies and Digital Libraries

Deadlines: [top]

Abstract submission Deadline: 22nd July, 2010

Full paper submission Deadline: 15th September, 2010

Notification Deadline: 10th November, 2010

Camera Ready Deadlines: 10th December, 2010

Instructions to the authors [top]

Both Abstracts and Full Papers should be submitted electronically via the EasyChair System. The only accepted format both for submitted abstracts and full papers is Adobe PDF. The PDF file must be uploaded to the system by the submission deadlines.

Each abstracts may consist of up to one (1) page. Each full paper may consist of up to twenty (20) pages. Full paper submissions should be made following the Author's Instructions for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Editors [top]

Raffaella Bernardi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Sally Chambers, European Library, the Netherlands

Bjoern Gottfried, University of Bremen, Germany

Frederique Segond, Xerox, France

Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Italy

Publication [top]

Papers will be published in a volume of the LNCS Hot Topic subline which is expected to be available in February 2011.

Editorial Committee [top]

Galja Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria

Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Indian Institute of Technology, India

Nicola Ferro, University of Padova, Italy

Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy

Stefan Gradmann, Europeana, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Udo Kruschwitz, Essex University, UK

Andreas Lattner, University of Frankfurt, Germany

Mikolaj Leszczuk, AGH Krakow, Poland

Stefan Pletschacher, University of Salford, UK

Viliam Simko, CIANT, Prague, Czech Republic

Junichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan