SIXTH WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
BUCC
Location: 
Co-Located with ACL 2013
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Country: 
Bulgaria
City: 
Sofia
Submission Deadline: 
Friday, 7 June 2013

BUCC, SIXTH WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA

When: 8 August 2013
Where: Sofia, Bulgaria, co-located with ACL2013
Deadline for papers: 26 April 2013
Notification of acceptance: 24 May 2013
Camera-ready deadline: 7 June 2013
Website: http://comparable.limsi.fr/bucc2013/
Website for submissions: https://www.softconf.com/acl2013/BUCC2013/

*Invited speaker:* Hinrich Schütze, University of Munich

Motivation

In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research in
comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In language
engineering, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable
corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as
statistical machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In
linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest in
themselves by making possible intra-linguistic discoveries and
comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that
comparable corpora are documents in one or several languages that are
comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions. We
believe that the linguistic definitions and observations related to
comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for
applications of statistical NLP. As such, it is of great interest to
bring together builders and users of such corpora.

Parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical
machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons
and terminologies. However, beyond a few language pairs such as
English-French or English-Chinese and a few contexts such as
parliamentary debates or legal texts, they remain a scarce resource,
despite the creation of automated methods to collect parallel corpora
from the Web. Interest in non-parallel forms of comparable corpora in
language engineering primarily ensued from the scarcity of parallel
corpora. This has motivated research concerning the use of comparable
corpora: pairs of monolingual corpora selected according to the same set
of criteria, but in different languages or language varieties.
Non-parallel yet comparable corpora overcome the two limitations of
parallel corpora, since sources for original, monolingual texts are much
more abundant than translated texts. However, because of their nature,
mining translations in comparable corpora is much more challenging than
in parallel corpora. What constitutes a good comparable corpus, for a
given task or per se, also requires specific attention: while the
definition of a parallel corpus is fairly straightforward, building a
non-parallel corpus requires control over the selection of source texts
in both languages.

Topics

The special theme for this edition is terminology mining, which featured
in a number of submissions in the past years, and this time it will
serve as the highlighted theme for the workshop.

In addition to this special theme, we solicit contributions including
but not limited to other relevant topics:

Building Comparable Corpora:
Human translations
Automatic and semi-automatic methods
Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the Web
Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora
Rare and minority languages
Across language families
Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora

Applications of comparable corpora:
Human translations
Language learning
Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization
Bilingual projections
Machine translation
Writing assistance

Mining from Comparable Corpora:
Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from comparable corpora
Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of single
words and multi-word expressions; proper names, named entities, etc.

Organizers:
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK (Chair)
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI-CNRS and ERTIM-INALCO, France
Reinhard Rapp, Universities of Mainz, Germany, and Aix-Marseille, France

Programme Committee:
Chris Biemann (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Hervé Déjean (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
Kurt Eberle (Lingenio, Heidelberg, Germany)
Andreas Eisele (European Commission, Luxembourg)
Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)
Éric Gaussier (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France)
Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France)
Silvia Hansen-Schirra (University of Mainz, Germany)
Hitoshi Isahara (Toyohashi University of Technology)
Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd, UK)
Natalie Kübler (Université Paris Diderot, France)
Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Emmanuel Morin (Université de Nantes, France)
Lene Offersgaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Reinhard Rapp (University of Tarragona, Spain)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
Mandel Shi (Xiamen University, China)
Michel Simard (National Research Council Canada)
Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, US)
Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver, Inc., US)
Justin Washtell (University of Leeds, UK)
Michael Zock (Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale, CNRS, Marseille)
Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS, France)