LTC09: News. Getting Less-Resourced Languages On-Board !

Report on the Special joint LTC-FLaReNet session
« Getting Less-Resourced Languages On-Board ! »
LTC’09 Conference
Poznan (Poland), 6-8 November 2009

A special session on the way to develop Language Technologies for Less-Resourced Languages was organized by FLaReNet within the LTC’09 conference in Poznan (Poland). It had been decided within the FLaReNet Steering Committee to organize a joint satellite workshop in connection with the Language & Technology Conference (LTC’09) in Poznan (6-8 November 2009). The choice was finally to organize it as a special session during the conference, on November 6.

The final conclusions extracted from the report of this event (written by J. Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI) and  K. Choukri (ELDA-ELRA) were the following:

• Generally speaking, a strong political will (more than only lip-service) to consider the language dimension and enough funds are necessary.
• This must go with the awareness that Language Technologies and Language Resources are important.
• There should be specialists in the processing of that language, reaching a critical mass, and young researchers should be trained.
• An infrastructure must exist, including:

• a writing system/a transcription code/an agreed orthography,
• Language Resources (sufficient in quantity and quality),
• tools (especially language independent (based on statistical training) ones, if possible as Open Source),
• metadata, annotation schemes, standards,
• development platforms,
• evaluation means (adapted to the language specificities (such as for Machine Translation of morphologically-rich languages)).

• The effort should be devoted in the long-term, resulting in a necessary strong foundation.
• Dialects variants and sociolinguistics should also be taken into account.
• Addressing only the short-term development of a specific product or service for that language (as a kind of simple toy), should be avoided, whereas demonstrating applications based on a strong foundation should be favoured.
• When a majority language also exists, both should be studied together, and it would save time and efforts to consider a family of languages all together.
• Bootstrapping approaches facilitate the coverage of a language.
• Cooperation among countries or programs would greatly help by providing the less advanced ones with examples and Best Practices, such as the definition of a commonly agreed basic set of Language Resources which have already been proven necessary to correctly produce the corresponding technologies for a given language, and the identification of gaps and roadmaps should be aimed at.
• Master keywords should be Interoperability and Sustainability.

SEPLN09. Added publications. IR-IE-LRL workshop

We have added the 8 papers and the invited talk presented last week in our workshop on Saint Sebastian to the "Publications " section in our website.

Four ot the papers are specifically related to Information  Retrieval, Information Extraction or Question Answering:

• Ussishkin, Francom and Woudstra address the issues involved in the creation of corpora and lexica for Maltese and Hebrew,
• Yimam and Libsie describe a question-answering system for Amharic (a Semitic language like Maltese and Hebrew, spoken in Ethiopia),
• Fernandez, Alegria and Ezeiza deal with the translation of named entities, a basic task in cross-language information retrieval
• Alegria and co-workers show how to build a question-answering system from existing resources for a language.

Five papers accepted describe minority-language projects currently under way:

• Pereira-Varela and colleagues describe Babelium, a multimedia framework to learn minority languages;
• Chan, Jones and East describe a system to automate the writing of school reports in Welsh and English,
• Prys describes a special interest group for minority-language speech and language technologies,
• Humphreys describes a project to automatically subtitle television programmes in Welsh, and
• Florie Moulin, Laura Laluque and Geróid Ó Néill describe a shell to manipulate dictionaries.

The paper corresponding to the invited talk by Lars Borin, professor of linguistic computing at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, "Linguistic diversity in the information society" has been added as well. Prof. Borin, after giving some background about the current situation of the languages of the world and reviewing the concept of density of a language, discusses the main issues encountered when trying to develop written-language technologies for lower-density languages; in particular information extraction.

On behalf of the organisers, thanks to everyone for an excellent workshop,

SEPLN09-SALTMIL Workshop Programme

nformation Retrieval and Information Extraction for Less Resourced Languages
                                                                   IE-IR-LRL

                                      SEPLN 2009 pre-conference workshop
                               Donostia-San sebastián. Monday 7th September 2009

DOWNLOAD THE PROCEEDINGS:  IE-IR-LRL.pdf

 09:00 Registration
 09:15 Opening
 09:30 Invited Talk. Lars Borin
 10:30 Papers  (20+5) min.
      1. Information retrieval and extraction in Maltese and Hebrew:
          Issues in creating web-based corpora and lexical tools for
          less-resourced languages.
          Adam Ussishkin, Jerid Francom, Dainon Woudstra
      2. TETEYEQ: A mharic question answering for factoid question.
          Seid Muhie Yimam, Mulugeta Libsie

 11:20 Coffee break

 11:40 Papers (20+5) min.
      3. Using Wikipedia for Named Entities Translation
          Izaskun Fernandez, Iñaki Alegria, Nerea Ezeiza
      4. Ihardetsi: A Question Answering system for Basque built on
          reused linguistic processors.
          Iñaki Alegria, Olatz Ansa, Xabier Arregi , Arantza Otegi,
          Ander Soraluze

 12:30 Projects (10 min. each)
      1. Babelium Project. Promoting the Use and Learning of Minority
         Languages.
         Juan A. Pereira Varela, Silvia Sanz-Santamaría, Julián
         Gutiérrez Serrano.
      2. A web-based system for multilingual school reports
         David Chan, Dewi Jones, Oggy East
      3. The SALT Cymru Special Interest Group – European Funding
         Encouraging Collaboration Between Academia and Business in
         Wales within the field of Speech and Language Technology.
         Gruffudd Prys
      4. Automated English subtitling of Welsh TV Programmes
          Llio Humphreys
      5. A Dictionary Shell
         Florie Moulin, Laura Laluque, Geróid Ó Néill

 13:20 Panel
       "Less resourced languages and Language technology.
        Short- and medium-term objectives"
        SALTMIL

 13:45 Closing

SEPLN09. IR-IE-LRL workshop, Donostia. SALTMIL-SEPLN09

Information Retrieval and Information Extraction for less resourced languages

SEPLN 2009 pre-conference workshop
Donostia-San sebastián. Monday 7th September 2009 Call for papers

Paper submission:   8 June 2009
Organised by the SALTMIL Special Interest Group of ISCA