Second CALL for PAPERS

ADAPTATION OF LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND TOOLS FOR PROCESSING CULTURAL HERITAGE 
OBJECTS

26 May 2012, Istanbul, Turkey
(morning session)

Workshop associated with LREC 2012 (21-27 May, 2012)
http://www.c-phil.uni-hamburg.de/view/Main/LrecWorkshop2012

Recently, the collaboration between the NLP community and the specialists in 
various areas of the Humanities has become more efficient and fruitful due 
to the common aim of exploring and preserving cultural heritage data. It is 
worth mentioning the efforts made during the digitization campaigns in the 
last years and within a series of initiatives in the Digital Humanities, 
especially in making Old Manuscripts available through Digital Libraries.

Most parts of these libraries are made available not only to researchers in 
a certain Humanities domain (such as, classical philologists, historians, 
historical linguists), but also to common users. This fact has posited new 
requirements to the functionalities offered by the Digital Libraries, and 
thus imposed the usage of methods from Language Technology for content 
analysis and content presentation in a form understandable to the end user.

There are several challenges related to the above mentioned issues:

Lack of adequate training material for real-size applications: although the 
Digital Libraries usually cover a large number of documents, it is difficult 
to collect a statistically significant corpus for a period of time in which 
the language remained unchanged.
In most cases the language historical variants lack firmly established 
syntactic or morphological structures and that makes the definition of a 
robust set of rules extremely difficult. Historical texts often constitute a 
mixture of several languages including Latin, Ancient Greek, Slavonic, etc.
Historical texts contain a great number of abbreviations, which follow 
different models.
The conception of the world is somewhat different from ours (that is, 
different thinking about the Earth, different views in medicine, astronomy, 
etc.), which makes it more difficult to build the necessary knowledge bases.
Having in mind the number of contemporary languages and their historical 
variants, it is practically impossible to develop brand new language 
resources and tools for processing older texts. Whenever possible a 
solution, but at the same time a real challenge, is to investigate how to 
adapt existing language resources and tools, as well as to provide (where 
necessary) training material in the form of corpora or lexicons for a 
certain period of time in history.

We are looking for submission of original, unpublished work, related to the 
following topics:

Language tools and resources for analysis of old textual material or 
language variants
Adaptation of LT-tools, developed for modern languages, to the historical 
variants of the same languages
Transcription and transliteration problems and solutions
Named Entity recognition for historical texts
Development of dedicated historical corpora and lexica
(Semi-) automatic extraction of content related metadata
Semantic linkage of heterogeneous data within digital libraries
Word sense disambiguation in old texts
Multilingual issues in historical documents
Evaluation of tools for processing of historical texts

Submission details

Submissions have to be made through the START system of the main LREC 2012 
conference at:
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/CulturalHeritage2012/

Papers describing completed work should be no longer than eight pages. 
Papers describing work in progress should be between four and six pages. 
The demonstration of prototype systems is particularly encouraged. The 
authors of papers referring to an existing prototype will be offered the 
possibility to demonstrate the system in a special session.

Papers should follow the LREC formatting guidelines.  Papers will be 
reviewed by minimum 3 members of the Programme Committee.

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to 
provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also 
technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the 
work described in the paper or are a new result of their research.

For further information on this new initiative, please refer to:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012

Important dates

Deadline for paper submission:           25th February 2012
Notification of acceptance / rejection: 16th March 2012
Submission of final papers:                  25th March 2012
Workshop:                                               26 May 2012

Programme Committee

David Baumann (School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon, USA)
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Günther Görz (University Erlangen, Germany)
Walther v. Hahn (University of Hamburg, Germany)
Piroska Lendvai (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
Anke Lüdeling (Humboldt University , Berlin, Germany)
Gábor Prószéky (MorphoLogic, Hungary)
Laurent Romary (LORIA-INRIA, Nancy, France)
Éric Laporte (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France)
Kiril Simov (IICT, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Manfred Thaler (Cologne University, Germany, Germany)
Tamás Váradi (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
Martin Wynne (University of Oxford)
Kalliopi Zervanou (University of Tilburg, the Netherlands)

Organisation Committee

Petya Osenova(Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, Greece)
Milena Slavcheva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Cristina Vertan (University of Hamburg)

For any additional details concerning the workshop, please, contact Cristina 
Vertan (cristinaDOTvertanATuni-hamburgDOTde)