ELRA is glad to announce the 10^th edition of LREC, organised with the support of a wide range of international organisations.

CONFERENCE AIMS

LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, on-going and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from e-science and e-society, with respect both to policy issues and to scientific/technological and organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies (LT) and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, multimodality

• Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability
• Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
• Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge
• Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation
• LRs and Semantic Web
• LRs and Crowdsourcing
• Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up
• Best practices in the use of LR citations

Exploitation of LRs in systems and applications

• Multimedia information and multimodal communication , including Sign Languages
• LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval, audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, audio-visual transcriptions and annotations, computer aided language learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation, speech translation, summarisation, semantic search, text mining and analytics, inferencing, reasoning, sentiment analysis, etc.
• Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multi-sensory interactions, voice-activated services, etc.
• Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-commerce, e-government, e-culture, e-health, e-participation, mobile applications, digital humanities, Digital Service Infrastructures, etc.
• Industrial LRs requirements, user needs

Issues in LT evaluation

• LT evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
• Validation and quality assurance of LRs
• Benchmarking of systems and products
• Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems
• User satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation

• International and national activities, projects and collaboration
• Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs
• Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages
• Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures
• Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues.

LREC 2016 HOT TOPICS

LRE for Actionable Knowledge

Important information to support a range of applications is hidden in Big Data. Automated content analytics is needed for the interpretation of the data and their context, so that it is accurately understood and can be integrated and used in applications. Content analytics makes use of various technologies, like semantic search, keyword suggestions, clustering, classification, etc. What is the role of LRs in such correlation of digital content and context? Can for example relations between LRs and Knowledge Graphs for entity linking, disambiguation, reasoning, etc. support the generation of actionable knowledge in Big Data analytics?

More generally we would like to bring to discussion all issues related to LRs and evaluation means for semantic processing in the Big Data environment.

LRE for Interaction with Devices

There is a growing interest in adapting and improving Natural Language Processing for providing intelligent language interfaces to all kind of devices that are connected to the Internet (of Things), and also to robots, sensors and the like. We encourage investigating how to relate LRs in this communication set-up with data that are in principle of a non-linguistic nature. How to improve multilingual and multimodal generation of information from sensors, robots and in general from structured data in the Internet of Things? How can LRs optimally be designed and used in this (bi-directional) interaction? How to combine language and sensor streams in multilingual and multimodal virtual worlds?

Are there new or past approaches to Human-Machine dialogue offering easily adaptable solutions, so that we need “only” to upgrade them to the enormously increased quantity of data and number of interconnected devices?

LREC 2016 HIGHLIGHT

Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!

Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences).

To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2016 endorses the need to uniquely identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.

PROGRAMME

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels, in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio Zampolli Prize.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES

Submission of proposals for oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: 15 October 2015

• Abstracts should consist of about 1500-2000 words, will be submitted through START and will be peer-reviewed.

Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 15 October 2015

• Proposals should be submitted via an online form on the LREC website and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

PROCEEDINGS

The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format.

There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Nicoletta Calzolari – CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa - Italy (Conference chair)
Khalid Choukri – ELRA, Paris - France
Thierry Declerck – DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany
Marko Grobelnik - Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana - Slovenia
Bente Maegaard – CST, University of Copenhagen - Denmark
Joseph Mariani – LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, Orsay - France
Asuncion Moreno – Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona - Spain
Jan Odijk – UIL-OTS, Utrecht - The Netherlands
Stelios Piperidis – Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens – Greece

CONFERENCE EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

In addition to the Programme committee:

Sara Goggi, ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy
Hélène Mazo, ELDA/ELRA, Paris, France