First NLP12 Coordination Meeting

Maison de la Recherche

Representatives of Major Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics Organizations meet to harmonize and coordinate their activities within the field.

Hosted by ELRA in Paris on Monday 18 November 2013, the meeting took place at:

La Maison de la Recherche 54, rue de Varenne 75007 Paris

Participating Organisations

Organisation

Represented by

Organisation website

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)

 Elisabeth Burr http://adho.org/
Arianna Ciula

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Gertjan van Noord www.aclweb.org

Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP)

 Yuji Matsumoto www.afnlp.org
Pushpak Bhattacharyya

COLING Committee

Nicoletta Calzolari http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/iccl
Junichi Tsujii

European Data Forum (Big Data)

Marko Grobelnik www.data-forum.eu

European Language Resources Association (ELRA)

Khalid Choukri www.elra.info
Nicoletta Calzolari
Joseph Mariani

International Committee for the Coordination & Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques (COCOSDA)

 Satoshi Nakamura  www.cocosda.org

International Association for Machine Translation ( IAMT)

Andy Way www.eamt.org/iamt.php

International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

Nick Campbell www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb
Tanja Schultz

Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)

Chris Cieri https://www.ldc.upenn.edu
Mark Liberman

Oriental COCOSDA

Satoshi Nakamura www.cocosda.org/asia.html

Language Resource Management Agency (RMA)

Justus C Roux http://rma.nwu.ac.za/

Meeting Agenda

08:30 – 09:30 Welcome coffee

9:30 – 10:15 Session 1: Introduction and expectations

  • Welcome and Introduction to the meeting
  • Introduction of the participants and their organizations (history, core activities)
  • Revision and Adoption of the agenda

10:15 – 11:00 Session 2: Review of current initiatives, coordination & harmonization

  • Long term planning of major conferences (ACL, COLING, LREC, IJCNLP, EACL, .., .., ..) per region
    • How to work out a list of major eventsHow to avoid overlap/clashes between our conferences?
    • Mutually agreed conference discounts across associations?
    • Participation in Digital Humanities Conferences
  • Reuniting Computational Linguistics / Language Resources and Digital Humanities (because we need each other and because borders are becoming more and more obsolete / an obstacle to our work)
  • Adoption of the LRE Map (Discovery of Language Resources through a community involvement) as a regular feature in our conferences? (already happening in practice in most of them)

11:00 – 11:20 Coffee break

11:20 – 12:30 Session 3: Language Resource Identification and Citation

  • Introduction of the ISLRN (International Standard Language Resource Number) by ELRA, LDC, Oriental COCOSDA
  • Citation of Language Resources 12:30 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 16:00 Session 3: Sharing Language Resources

  • Sharing of Language Resources related to scientific papers (favoring replicability of research results), example from LREC2014
  • Legal Issues … need to move towards common licensing schemas?
  • International Copyright exception for R&D in Human Language Technologies
  • Is it possible / desirable to think of some type of “impact factor” for LRs?

16:00 – 16:20 Coffee break

16:20 – 18:00 Session 4: Wrap up, Conclusions, Common Declaration and follow-up

  • Conclusions Drafting of a joint declaration to stress the need for cooperation and the first results (Paris Declaration)
  • Next steps

NLP12 Paris Declaration

18 November 2013

Hosted by ELRA

The 12 major organisations* from Language Resources and Technologies, Computational Linguistics, and Digital Humanities met on November 18, 2013 in Paris, France to discuss cooperation and harmonisation of their activities.

Reporting on their core missions and sharing common concerns led the organisations to elaborate on a set of important issues and challenges to be jointly addressed:

1. Plan conferences and work out a common coherent planning of major events to avoid overlaps, clashes and boost synergies: the organisations agreed to work on a 6-year cycle conference planning in order to optimise the management of both conference schedules and locations.

2. Identify and discover Language Resources, and promote best practices in Language Resource citation in publications: the organisations agreed to announce the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), a Persistent Unique Identifier, to be assigned to each Language Resource. Experiment replicability, an essential feature of scientific work, would be enhanced by such unique identifier. Set up by ELRA, LDC and AFNLP/Oriental-COCOSDA, the ISLRN Portal will provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, as a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers. It will be supervised by a steering committee composed of representatives of participating organisations and enlarged whenever necessary.

3. Encourage Language Resources and Tools sharing through the use of interoperable formats and easy-to-use licensing schemas, in particular Creative Commons.

4. Join forces to boost bilateral and multilateral partnerships and strengthen the bridges between various communities (e.g. Language technologies and Humanities).

* Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations ( ADHO ), Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), COLING Committee (ICCL), European Data Forum, European Language Resources Association (ELRA), International Association for Machine Translation ( IAMT), International Committee for the Coordination & Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques (COCOSDA), International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), Oriental COCOSDA, Language Resource Management Agency (RMA)