LREC 2022

13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Palais du Pharo

Marseille, France

20-25 June 2022

Main Conference: 21-22-23 June 2022

Workshops and Tutorials: 20-24-25 June 2022

The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is glad to announce the 13th edition of LREC, organised with the support of national and international organisations.

We hope to be able to organise a face-to-face conference, but in the unfortunate event that physical gatherings will not be yet allowed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, an online alternative will be set up.

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 to both scientific/technological issues as well as policy and organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss issues 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, sign, gesture, image, in single or multimodal/multimedia data

• 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 (including Linked Data, Knowledge Graphs, etc.)
• LRs and Crowdsourcing
• Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up

Exploitation of LRs in systems and applications

• Sign language, multimedia information and multimodal communication
• LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval, audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer-Aided Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation, speech translation, summarisation, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, sentiment analysis/opinion mining, etc.
• Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensory interactions, voice-activated services, etc.
• Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-government, e-participation, e-culture, e-health, mobile applications, digital humanities, social sciences, etc.
• Industrial LRs requirements
• User needs, LT for accessibility

LRs in the age of deep neural networks

• Semi-supervised, weakly-supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches
• Representation Learning for language
• Techniques for (semi-)automatically generating training data
• Cross-language NLP & Cross-domain NLP with reduction of human effort

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 initiatives
• 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
• Replicability and reproducibility issues
• Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues

DESCRIBE AND SHARE YOUR LRs!

In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map – now a normal step in the submission procedure of many conferences – LREC recognises the importance of sharing resources and making them available to the community. When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC repository set up by ELRA. Your LRs will be made available to all LREC participants before the conference, to be re-used, compared, analysed. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

PROGRAMME

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

We will also organise an Industrial Track for which there will be a separate Call.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES

• Submission of proposals for workshops and tutorials: 29 October 2021
• Submission of oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: 10 January 2022

LREC2022 asks for full papers from 4 pages to 8 pages (plus more pages for references if needed) , which must strictly follow the LREC stylesheet which will be available on the conference website.

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)
• Frédéric Béchet – LIS-CNRS, Aix Marseille University – France
• Philippe Blache – LPL-CNRS & Aix-Marseille University – France
• Khalid Choukri – ELRA, Paris – France
• Christopher Cieri – Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA – USA
• Thierry Declerck – DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken – Germany
• Hitoshi Isahara – Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi – Japan
• Bente Maegaard – Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen – Denmark
• Joseph Mariani – LISN, CNRS, University Paris-Saclay, Orsay – France
• Jan Odijk – UIL-OTS, Utrecht – The Netherlands
• Stelios Piperidis – Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens – Greece

CONFERENCE EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

• Sara Goggi, CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa, Italy
• Hélène Mazo, ELDA/ELRA, Paris, France

Contact: lrec@lrec-conf.org

Follow: @LREC2022