LaTeCH 2012 - EACL 2012 workshop on: Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities

The LaTeCH workshop series aims to provide a forum for researchers who are working on developing novel information technology for improved information access to data from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage.

Recent developments in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage draw an increasing interest from researchers in NLP in developing methods for data cleaning, semantic annotation, intelligent querying, linking, discovery and visualisation of interesting trends. Language technology has an important role to play in these processes, even for collections which are primarily non-textual, since text is the pervasive medium used for metadata. These fairly novel domains of application entail new challenges to NLP research, such as noisy text (e.g., due to OCR problems), non-standard, or archaic language varieties (e.g., historic language, dialects, mixed use of languages, ellipsis, transcription errors), the necessity to link data of diverse formats (e.g., text, database, video, speech) and languages, and the lack of available resources, such as dictionaries. Furthermore, often neither annotated domain data is available, nor the required funds to manually create it, thus forcing researchers to investigate (semi-) automatic resource development and domain adaptation approaches involving the least possible manual effort.

The workshop is a continuation of LaTeCH 2007 held at ACL, in Prague, Czech Republic, LaTeCH 2008 at LREC, in Marrakech, Morocco, LaTeCH 2009 at EACL, in Athens, Greece, LaTeCH 2010 at ECAI, in Lisbon, Portugal, and LaTeCH 2011 at ACL/HLT, in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Selected papers from the previous workshops were recently published by Springer in the "Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing" series.