The 6th Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing
http://bsnlp.cs.helsinki.fi/

In conjunction with EACL 2017, Valencia, Spain

Sponsored by SIGSLAV: Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing of the ACL


DATES

Submission deadline: 16 January 2017

Notification of acceptance: 11 February 2017

Camera-ready papers due: 21 February 2017

Workshop: 3 or 4 April 2017


THEME and MOTIVATION

Languages from the Balto-Slavic group play an important role due to their diverse cultural heritage and widespread use -- with over 400 million speakers worldwide. The recent political and economic developments in Central and Eastern Europe have brought Balto-Slavic societies and their languages into focus in terms of rapid technological advancement and rapidly expanding consumer markets.

This Workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Balto-Slavic languages. The NLP tasks in urgent need of attention include, but are not limited to:

- morphological analysis and generation,

- morphosyntactic tagging,

- syntactic and semantic parsing,

- lexical semantics,

- named-entity recognition,

- text normalisation and processing non-standard language

- coreference resolution,

- information extraction,

- question answering,

- information retrieval,

- text summarization,

- machine translation,

- development of linguistic resources.

Research on theoretical and applied topics in the context of some of the Balto-Slavic languages is still in its early stages. The linguistic phenomena specific to Balto-Slavic languages -- such as rich morphological inflection and free word order -- make the construction of NLP tools for these languages a challenging and intriguing task.

The goal of this Workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry working on NLP for Balto-Slavic languages. In particular, the Workshop will serve to stimulate the research on NLP techniques for Balto-Slavic languages, and to foster the creation of tools and resources for these languages. The Workshop will provide a forum for exchanging ideas and experience, discussing difficult-to-tackle problems, and making the resources that are available more widely-known. One fascinating aspect of this sub-family of languages is the striking structural similarity, as well as an easily recognizable core vocabulary and inflectional inventory spanning the entire group of languages -- despite a lack of mutual intelligibility -- which creates a special environment in which researchers can fully appreciate the shared problems and solutions and communicate naturally.

SUBMISSION:

There will be two types of submissions: long papers and short papers.

Long papers should describe original, unpublished and completed work. Short papers should describe: (a) work in progress and/or small focused contributions, or (b) system demonstrations, new linguistic resources and experience of using existing software and resources, or (c) ongoing projects and activities that are relevant to all stakeholders in the domain of Balto-Slavic NLP.

Overlap with previously published work should be clearly mentioned. The authors should indicate along with their submission if the paper has been submitted elsewhere. In case the paper is rejected by the main conference, it should be indicated in the submission.

All submissions will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, usability, and significance/relevance to the Workshop. Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.

The reviewing of long papers will be blind. Therefore, long papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Self-citations and other references that reveal the authors' identity must be avoided.

In particular, submissions describing systems, resources, or solutions that are made available to the wider public would be strongly encouraged, as this would help to promote computational linguistics applications for Balto-Slavic languages.

Long paper submissions should follow the two-column format of EACL 2017 proceedings not exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus two (2) additional pages for references. Short paper submissions should follow the same format, and should not exceed four (4) pages for content plus two (2) additional pages for references. Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines of EACL 2017, which are contained in the style files (http://eacl2017.org/images/site/eacl-2017-template.zip), and must be in PDF.

Camera-ready versions of accepted papers must be provided both in LaTeX and PDF format.

SHARED TASK

For the first time at BSNLP, we are organi sing a shared task on multilingual named entity recognition aims at recognizing mentions of named entities in web documents
in Slavic languages, their normalization / lemmatization, and cross-language matching. Further details can be found at:
http://bsnlp-2017.cs.helsinki.fi/shared_task.html

Programme Committee

Željko Agić (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Tomaž Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Katja Filippova (Google, Zurich, Switzerland)
Darja Fišer (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Radovan Garabik (Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia)
Goran Glavaš (University of Mannheim, Germany)
Maxim Gubin (Facebook Inc., Menlo Park CA, USA)
Miloš Jakubíček ( Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Tomas Krilavičius (Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania)
Vladislav Kubon (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic)
Nikola Ljubešić (Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Olga Mitrofanova (St. Petersburg State University, Russia)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Maciej Ogrodniczuk (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
Petya Osenova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Maciej Piasecki (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)
Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy/PAS, Warsaw, Poland)
Lidia Pivovarova (University of Helsinki/St.Petersburg State University, Russia)
Alexandr Rosen (Charles University, Prague)
Tanja Samardžić (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Agata Savary (University of Tours, France)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Inguna Skadina (University of Latvia, Latvia)
Jan Šnajder (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Josef Steinberger (University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic)
Stan Szpakowicz (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Irina Temnikova (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Marcin Woliński (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)

Organizing Committee

Tomaž Erjavec, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Jakub Piskorski, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Ispra, Italy
Lidia Pivovarova, University of Helsinki, Finland
Jan Šnajder, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Josef Steinberger, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
Roman Yangarber, University of Helsinki, Finland