LREC-2012: SALTMIL-AfLaT Workshop on “Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages”

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A full-day workshop at LREC 2012
Tuesday, 22 May 2012.
Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre, Istanbul, Turkey

SALTMIL: http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil/
AfLaT: http://AfLaT.org/
LREC 2012: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME

09:15–09:30 Welcome / Opening Session
09:30–10:30 Invited Talk: Sjur Moshagen Nørstebø. How to build language technology resources for the next 100 years
10:30–11:00 Coffee Break
11:00–13:00 Oral papers: Resource Creation

13:00–14:00 Lunch Break
14:00–16:00 Oral papers: Resource Use

16:00–16:30   Coffee Break
16:30–17:30   Poster Session


CONTEXT AND FOCUS

The 8th International Workshop of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages (SALTMIL, http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/saltmil) and the 4th Workshop on African Language Technology (AfLaT2012) will be held as a joint effort in Istanbul, in May 2012, as part of the 2012 International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012).

Entitled "Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages", the workshop is intended to continue the series of SALTMIL/LREC workshops on computational language resources for minority languages, held in Granada (1998), Athens (2000), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2002) and Lisbon (2004), Genoa (2006), Marrakech (2008) and Malta (2010) and the series of AfLaT workshops, held in Athens (EACL2009), Malta (LREC2010) and Addis Ababa (AGIS11).

The Istanbul 2012 workshop aims to share information on tools and best practices, so that isolated researchers will not need to start from scratch. An important aspect will be the forming of personal contacts, which can minimize duplication of effort. There will be a balance between presentations of existing language resources, and more general presentations designed to give background information needed by all researchers.

While less-resourced languages and minority languages often struggle to find their place in a digital world dominated by only a handful of commercially interesting languages, a growing number of researchers are working on alleviating this linguistic digital divide, through localisation efforts, the development of BLARKs (basic language resource kits) and practical applications of human language technologies. The joint SALTMIL/AfLaT workshop on "Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages" provides a unique opportunity to connect these researchers and set up a common forum to meet and share the latest developments in the field.

ORGANIZERS (SALTMIL and AfLaT)

* Mikel L. Forcada (SALTMIL): Machine Translation Group, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
* Guy De Pauw (AfLaT): CLiPS - Computational Linguistics Group, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
* Gilles-Maurice de Schryver(AfLaT): African Languages and Cultures, TshwaneDJe HLT, South Africa & Ghent University, Belgium
* Kepa Sarasola(SALTMIL): Dept. of Computer Languages, University of the Basque Country
* Francis M. Tyers(SALTMIL), Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics, Universitat d'Alacant, Spain
* Peter Waiganjo Wagacha(AfLaT): School of Computing & Informatics, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

* Iñaki Alegria: University of the Basque Country
* Núria Bel, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
* Lars Borin, Göteborgs universitet, Sweden
* Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa, South Africa
* Khalid Choukri (ELRA,ELDA, France)
* Mikel L. Forcada, Universitat d’Alacant
* Dafydd Gibbon, University of Bielefeld, Germany
* Girish Nath Jha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
* Hrafn Loftsson,  Reykjavik University
* Guy De Pauw, CLiPS, Universiteit Antwerpen
* Laurette Pretorius, University of South Africa, South Africa
* Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Odetunji Odejobi, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria
* Benoît Sagot, INRIA Paris Rocquencourt & Université Paris 7, France
* Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Universitat d'Alacant
* Kepa Sarasola, University of the Basque Country
* Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis University, USA
* Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Universiteit Gent
* Trond Trosterud, Universitetet i Tromsø, Norway
* Francis M. Tyers, Universitat d'Alacant
* Peter Waiganjo Wagacha, University of Nairobi


REGISTRATION

See Registration in LREC 2012 site