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New: Deadline extended to February 26.

Final Call for Papers

New Challenges for NLP Frameworks, a workshop at LREC 2010

22 May 2010, La Valleta, Malta

1. Introduction

Natural language processing frameworks like GATE and UIMA have significantly changed the way NLP applications are designed, developed, and deployed. Features such as component-based design, test-driven development, and resource meta-descriptions now routinely provide higher robustness, better reusability, faster deployment, and improved scalability. They have become the staple of both NLP research and industrial application, fostering a new generation of NLP users and developers.

Nevertheless, after more than a decade of the current generation of NLP frameworks, the NLP research and application landscape is shifting. This brings new challenges to both the developers of NLP frameworks and their users. Driving forces include in particular:

• Social Media
• Interoperability needs between different NLP frameworks, components, and resources
• Terabyte-Scale Data Sets
• Cloud and Grid Computing
• Semantic Computing, Ontologies, and Reasoning
• Cross-Media Language Analysis (text, speech, images, video)
• Ambient Computing
• Addressing more complex genres of language

2. Themes and Topics

This workshop will provide a venue for reporting ongoing work in the context of NLP frameworks, such as UIMA, GATE, and other related systems. Principal themes include:

• issues and approaches in processing of very large data collections, e.g., parallelisation and distribution (particularly in relation to cloud computing)
• sophisticated tools to build and manage complex processing pipelines and to analyse results
• software engineering in relation to language computation
• solutions to interoperability issues combining components from different sources (e.g., GATE, UIMA, NLTK, OpenNLP, NooJ)
• integration with related areas (data mining, semantic repositories, big table databases)
• persisting experimental contexts (computation and data), e.g. via virtualisation
• distribution of self-developed components, repositories of ready-to-use UIMA/GATE-based components
• efficient embedding of NLP processing in diverse environments (including small memory devices)
• research on genericity of components and type-system independence
• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOAs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models of language computation
• automatic feedback processes of knowledge discovery and reuse from text

3. Intended Audience

The workshop aims to bring together developers and users of NLP frameworks from different perspectives, in order to elicit new requirements, feature successful solutions, and exchange successful patterns of NLP engineering. In particular, perspectives from the following user groups are welcome:

• Application Developers, from both research and industry, with application experience reports
• Framework Developers, with an NLP/software engineering background
• Researcher users of NLP architectures

4. Submission Formats

We solicit the following types of publications:

• Full research papers, describing novel, mature work, with an appropriate level of evaluation. Maximum of 8 pages in LREC format.
• Short research papers, describing novel, early work, with preliminary results; as well as position papers or application experience reports. Length of exactly 4 pages in LREC format.
• Open source tool/resource papers, between 4-8 pages in LREC format. To qualify for this category, the code or data must be accessible to the reviewers and, if accepted, published together with the workshop under an OSI-approved open source or open content license.

Note that the PC may suggest reassignment of a paper into a different category depending on its contribution.

Your submission must be formatted according to LREC's authoring guidelines.

Submission will be handled through the START system. 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 your research. For further information on this new initiative, please refer to the LREC 2010 Map of Language Resources.

5. Important Dates

February 19 26, 2010 (2nd extended) - Deadline for workshop paper
March 8 12, 2010 - Notification of acceptance
March 18, 2010 - Camera-ready papers due
May 22, 2010 - Workshop in Malta

6. Organising Committee

René Witte, Concordia University, Montréal
Hamish Cunningham, University of Sheffield
Jon Patrick, University of Sydney
Elena Beisswanger, University of Jena
Ekaterina Buyko, University of Jena
Udo Hahn, University of Jena
Karin Verspoor, University of Colorado Denver
Anni R. Coden, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

7. Program Committee

Aaron Kaplan (Xerox, France)
Adam Funk (Uni. Sheffield)
Angus Roberts (Uni. Sheffield)
Anni R. Coden (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
Claude Roux (Xerox Research Labs)
Diana Inkpen (Uni Ottawa)
Diana Maynard (Uni. Sheffield)
Dietmar Rösner (Uni. Magdeburg)
Dragan Gasevic (Uni. Athabasca)
Ekaterina Buyko (Uni. Jena)
Elena Beisswanger (Uni. Jena)
Epaminondas Kapetanios (Uni Westminster)
Eric W. Brown (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
Graham Wilcock (Uni. Helsinki)
Guergana K. Savova (Mayo Clinic)
Hamish Cunningham (Uni. Sheffield)
Horacio Saggion (Uni. Sheffield)
Iryna Gurevych (Uni. Darmstadt)
Jian Su (I2R, Singapore)
Jochen Leidner (Thomson Reuters)
Jon Patrick (Uni. Sydney)
Juergen Rilling (Concordia Uni, Montréal)
Kalina Bontcheva (Uni. Sheffield)
Karin Verspoor (Uni. Colorado)
Katrin Tomanek (Uni. Jena)
Kevin B. Cohen (U. Colorado School of Medicine/MITRE)
Leila Kosseim (Concordia Uni., Montréal)
Leo Ferres (Uni. of Concepcion)
Marc Light (Thomson Corp. R&D)
Michael Tanenblatt (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College)
Nicolas Hernandez (Uni. Nantes)
Philip V. Ogren (Uni. Colorado)
Ralf Krestel (L3S Research Center, Hannover)
René Witte (Concordia Uni., Montréal)
Richard Eckart de Castilho (Uni. Darmstadt)
Sameer Pradhan (BBN)
Stefan Geißler (TEMIS GmbH)
Steven Bethard (Stanford Uni.)
Thilo Götz (IBM Germany)
Udo Hahn (Uni. Jena)
Valentin Tablan (Uni. Sheffield)
Yoshinobu Kano (Uni. Tokyo, Tsujii Lab)
Yuntao Zhang (Shanghai Jiaotong Uni.)