*** EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE 27 JULY 2005 ***

CALL FOR PAPERS

Language and Speech Infrastructure for Information Access in the Balkan Countries

25 September 2005
Borovets, Bulgaria

Workshop to be held in conjunction with RANLP 2005
http://www.lml.bas.bg/ranlp2005

OVERVIEW

The emerging convergence of internet and media technologies, the abundance of interesting and useful archived and contemporary content and the ever increasing need for access to this content has set new challenges and opportunities for human language technologies (HLT). Useful results from the application of HLT for information access in a number of widely used languages already exist, while only some first attempts have been made in lesser used languages.

At the same time, the enlargement process of the European Union and the forthcoming accession of a number of Balkan countries set new requirements for technologically enhanced access to information generated and consumed in the Balkan Peninsula.

The current workshop aims at bringing together researchers working in a broad range of human language technologies for processing single- and/or multimedia content. The focus of the workshop is on issues relevant to the respective linguistic infrastructure in the Balkan countries. .

Submissions should be related to language and speech resources, tools and applications developed for the languages of the Balkans. More specifically, topics include but are not limited to:

• grammars, lexicons and wordnets
• information retrieval & extraction
• text summarization
• question answering
• natural language generation
• machine translation and computer-aided translation tools
• speech synthesis and recognition
• dialogue systems
• multimedia information processing
• computer-assisted language learning
• architectures and development environments
• evaluation of resources and language processing components and systems

LANGUAGE

The official language of the workshop is English.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions should be A4, two-column format and should not exceed seven pages, including cover page, figures, tables and references. Times New Roman 12 pt font is preferred. The first page should state the title of the paper, the author's name(s), affiliation(s), postal and email address(es), a list of keywords and an abstract. Papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format to Stelios Piperidis, spip@ilsp.gr Each paper will be reviewed by up to three members of the programme committee. Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce camera-ready version of their papers for inclusion in the proceedings. Each paper will be reviewed by up to three members of the programme committee. Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce camera-ready version of their papers for inclusion in the proceedings.

Parallel submissions to the main conference and the workshop are allowed but the review process will be coordinated.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: 27 July 2005
Notification of acceptance: 2 September 2005
Camera ready papers due: 8 September 2005
Workshop date: 25 September 2005

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS

Stelios Piperidis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, GR
Elena Paskaleva, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, BG

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (tbc)

Galia Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, BG
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
Dan Cristea, "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi, RO
Tomas Erjavec, Jozef Stefan Institute, SL
Bojana Gajic, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO
Maria Gavrilidou, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, GR
Florentina Hristea, University of Bucarest, RO
Vangelis Karkaletsis, NCSR Demokritos, GR
Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, US
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Ivan Obradovic, University of Belgrade, SR
Kemal Oflazer, Sabanci University, TR
Petya Osenova, Sofia University "St' Kliment Ohridski", BG
Harris Papageorgiou, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, GR
Elena Paskaleva, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, BG
Katerina Pastra, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, GR
Bojan Petek, University of Ljubljana, SL
Stelios Piperidis, Institute for Language and Speech Processing, GR
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, BG
Sofia Stamou, Computer Technology Institute, GR
Marko Tadic, University of Zagreb, HR
Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy of Sciences, RO
Dusko Vitas, University of Belgrade, SR

FURTHER INFORMATION

For further information, please contact Stelios Piperidis, spip@ilsp.gr or Elena Paskaleva, hellen@lml.bas.bg.