Natural Language Processing Workshop RANLP-09

We are pleased to announce the workshop on Natural Language Processing methods and corpora in translation studies, lexicography, and language learning, to be held in conjunction with the main RANLP-09 conference in Borovets, Bulgaria, on 17-18 September 2009.

Motivation

Corpora are now indispensable tools in research and everyday practice for translators, lexicographers, second language learners. Specialists in these areas share a general goal in using corpora in their work: corpora provide the possibility to find and analyse linguistic patterns characteristic of various kinds of language users, monitor language change, and reveal important similarities and divergences across different languages.

For professional translators corpora present an invaluable linguistic and cultural awareness tools. For language learners, they serve as a means to gain insights into specifics of competent language use as well as to analyse typical errors of fellow
learners. For lexicographers, corpora are key for monitoring the development of the vocabularies of languages, making informed decisions as to lexicographic relevance of the lexical material, and for general verification of all varieties of lexicographic data.

While simple corpus analysis tools such as concordancers have been long in use in these specialist areas, in the past decade there have been important developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies: it has become much easier to construct corpora and powerful NLP methods have become available that can be used to analyse corpora not only on the surface level, but also on the syntactic, and
even semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic levels.

This workshop aims to bring together the developers and the users of NLP technologies for the purposes of translation, translation studies, lexicography, terminology, and language learning in order to present their research and discuss new possibilities and challenges in these fields.

Topics

Submissions are invited for the following topics of interest to the workshop:

- NLP methodologies for processing parallel and comparable corpora
- Context-sensitive dictionary look-up
- Corpus-based study and identification of cognates and false friends
- Compilation and use of corpora in translation studies
- Corpus-based study of properties of translated text: translation universals, phraseology, lexical and grammatical patterns
- Corpora in translator training
- Translation of terms and collocations using corpora
- Bilingual concordancing in translation applications
- NLP methods for Computer-Aided Translation
- Compilation of specialised terminologies
- Compilation of corpora for bilingual lexicography
- Detection of gaps in bilingual dictionaries
- Corpus-based estimation of lexicographic relevance
- Term and collocation extraction
- Discovery of illustrative examples and definitions of words and word senses in corpora
- Reading and writing aid applications for language learners
- Automated text glossing in Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL)
- Corpus-based design of assessment materials in CALL
- Error detection and error analysis in CALL
- Detection of first-language interference in learner corpora

Important dates

Submission deadline: 10 June 2009
Acceptance notification: 20 July 2009
Final copies due: 24 August 2009

Submission instructions

Papers must be submitted in PDF format as e-mail attachments to Iustina Ilisei at iustina.ilisei@gmail.com. The e-mail should use the subject header “RANLP-2009 workshop”.

Format
Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Papers (in PDF format conforming to the RANLP 2009 stylefiles) should not exceed 8 pages. The RANLP 2009 stylefiles are available at:

http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2009/submissions.htm

As reviewing will be blind, the papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the authors' identities should be avoided. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Reviewing
Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the Program Committee. Reviewers will be asked to provide detailed comments, and to score submitted papers on the following factors:
- Relevance to the workshop
- Significance and originality
- Technical/methodological accuracy
- References to related work
- Presentation (clarity, organisation, English)

Accepted papers policy
Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. By submitting a paper at the workshop the authors agree that, in case the paper is accepted for publication, at least one of the authors will attend the workshop; all workshop participants are expected to pay the RANLP-2009 workshop registration fee.

Workshop webpage
http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~in0963/ranlp/

Programme Committee

Marco Baroni (University of Trento)
Jill Burstein (Educational Testing Service)
Michael Carl (Copenhagen Business School)
Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Malaga)
Le An Ha (University of Wolverhampton)
Patrick Hanks (Masaryk University)
Marie-Claude Homme (Université de Montréal)
Federico Gaspari (University of Bologna)
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing)
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton)
Roberto Navigli (University of Rome 'La Sapienza')
Miriam Seghiri (University of Malaga)
Pete Whitelock (Oxford University Press)
Richard Xiao (Edge Hill University)
Federico Zanettin (University of Perugia)

Organising Committee

Iustina Ilisei – University of Wolverhampton
Viktor Pekar – Oxford University Press
Silvia Bernardini – University of Bologna

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