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4th WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA

Comparable Corpora and the Web

Co-located with ACL-HLT 2011
Portland, Oregon
24 June 2011

DEADLINE FOR PAPERS: *Extended to* 11 April 2011
http://www.limsi.fr/~pz/bucc2011-comparable-corpora/
Submission: https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/comparable/

Endorsed by ACL SIGWAC
(Special Interest Group on Web as Corpus)

INVITED SPEAKER
Kevin Knight, Information Sciences Institute, USC
"Putting a Value on Comparable Data"

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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 inter-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.

With the advent of online data, the potential for building and
exploring comparable corpora is growing exponentially. Comparable
documents in languages that are very different from each other
pose special challenges as very often, the non-parallelness in
sentences can result from cultural and political differences.

TOPICS
The theme of the workshop will be "Comparable Corpora and the
Web". Nevertheless we solicit contributions to other topics as well,
including the following:

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.

IMPORTANT DATES
11 April 2010 Deadline for submission
27 April 2011 Notification
6 May 2011 Final version
24 June 2011 Workshop

SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Submissions should follow the ACL HLT 2011 length and formatting
requirements for long papers of six to eight (6--8) pages of
content with two (2) additional pages of references, found at
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml . They should be submitted
as PDF documents to the following address:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2011/comparable/

For further information, please contact Pierre Zweigenbaum
(pz(erase_at)limsi(erase_dot)fr)

ORGANISERS
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI, CNRS, Orsay,
and ERTIM, INALCO, Paris (France)
Reinhard Rapp, Universities of Mainz (Germany)
and Tarragona (Spain)
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds (UK)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Srinivas Bangalore (AT&T Labs, US)
Caroline Barrière (National Research Council Canada)
Chris Biemann (Microsoft / Powerset, San Francisco, US)
Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Hervé Déjean (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
Kurt Eberle (Lingenio, Heidelberg, Germany)
Andreas Eisele (European Commission, Luxembourg)
Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France)
Silvia Hansen-Schirra (University of Mainz, Germany)
Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd, UK)
Natalie Kübler (Université Paris Diderot, France)
Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Tony McEnery (Lancaster University, UK)
Emmanuel Morin (Université de Nantes, France)
Reinhard Rapp (University of Tarragona, Spain)
Sujith Ravi (Information Sciences Institute, University of
Southern California, US)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
Michel Simard (National Research Council, Canada)
Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, US)
Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver, Inc., US)
Yujie Zhang (National Institute of Information and Communications
Technology, Japan)
Michael Zock (Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale, CNRS,
Marseille, France)
Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS, France)