SLTC_ 2010 - Workshop on Readability and Multilingualism

Today, Sweden is a multilingual country with more than 150 spoken languages. In addition to that, a considerable proportion of the population is affected by more or less severe language disorders, preventing them from using ordinary Swedish as their primary mode of communication.

Information, news and literature must be made readable and comprehensible to these heterogeneous groups of people. The goal of this workshop is to present and discuss issues concerning readability and accessibility in Swedish multilingual settings. The practices of multilingualism will be viewed both from a national and a fuctional perspective. The intended audience of this workshop may be researchers, educators and other practitioners within the field of language technology directed towards education, assistive technologies, multilingual documentation and information retrieval.

Central questions to discuss are the following:

What issues do a society need to deal with in terms of communication and higher demands on access of information in daily life?
How do we deal with readability, easy-to-read texts and language support for people with a multilingual background and people with dyslexia and other kind of challenges are other very important tasks to deal with?
Which specific resources, and tools exist that could improve or aid communication in educational, societal or work situations? What needs are there for new resources?

Topics of interest:

For this workshop we invite submissions including, but not limited to:

creation and use of multilingual resources
multilingual text generation
multilingual natural language analysis
multilingual information retrieval
language technology solutions in multilingual and intercultural education
creation of accessible applications for language impaired users
text summarization and simplification
assistive technologies for text generation and comprehension

SUBMISSIONS

The submissions should be sent be email to sofie at svenska.gu.se in pdf-format.
Paper description is limited to 500 words (in English or a Nordic language) not including references. Please use the style files available on the conference website (www.ida.liu.se/conferences/sltc2010/)
Deadline for submissions is September 20, 2010.
Notification of accepted papers will be the latest September 27, 2010.