NEWS 2009

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========================================== Named Entities Workshop: Shared Task on Transliteration (NEWS 2009 : An ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop) ---


 * Workshop Focus

Named Entities (NEs) play a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, such as search, machine translation, document clustering, summarization, information extraction, etc. While identifying and analyzing NEs in a given natural language is a challenging research problem by itself, the phenomenal growth in the Internet user population, especially among the non-English speaking parts of the world, has extended this problem to the cross-language arena, making the handling of NEs in multiple languages critically important.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in various aspects of NEs in natural language text. In addition, the NEWS workshop will feature a shared task on Machine Transliteration of NEs.


 * Topics of Interest

This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of NEs, including identification, analysis, extraction, mining, transformation and applications of NE to NLP and IR systems. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

NE Analysis - Distributional characteristics of NEs in mono- & multi-lingual corpora - Orthographic/phonetic characteristics of NEs - NE origin/genre recognition - Social network analysis and entity resolution NE extraction - Language-independent monolingual NE extraction - Cross-language NE extraction - General Techniques - Specific datasets (Wikipedia, news, etc.) - Unsupervised and semi-supervised methods for NE extraction - Complex NEs, domain-specific term extraction - NE set expansion - Creation of annotated data Machine Transliteration - Computational phonology, incl. modeling of phonological rules, structure, behavior, etc.  - Transliteration modeling - Phonetic, grapheme)phoneme and phoneme)grapheme conversions - Statistical & machine learning based approaches, transliteration unit alignments - Forward and backward transliterations - Learning transliteration from comparable corpora - Transliteration lexicon construction - Romanization of Asian languages - Transliteration evaluation metrics Applications - Monolingual and Cross-Language IR, Information Extraction and Management - Machine Translation - Question Answering - Computational Journalism


 * Important Dates

Research Paper Submission Deadline  1-May-2009 Acceptance Notification             1-Jun-2009 Camera-Ready Copy Deadline          7-Jun-2009 Workshop Date                       7 Aug 2009
 * Task Details to be announced soon ***


 * Shared Task on Transliteration

Transliteration of NEs is necessary in many applications, such as machine translation, corpus alignment, cross-language IR, information extraction and automatic lexicon acquisition. This calls for high-performance transliteration systems, which is the focus of the shared task in this workshop. Details of the task will be made available soon in the workshop homepage,

+ Haizhou Li Institute for Infocomm Research  + A Kumaran  Microsoft Research India + Sanjeev Khudanpur  Johns Hopkins University  + Raghavendra Udupa Microsoft Research India  + Min Zhang  Institute for Infocomm Research + Monojit Choudhury Microsoft Research India
 * Organizing Committee


 * Program Committee

+ Kalika Bali           Microsoft Research India + Rafael Banchs         UPC, Spain + Sivaji Bandyopadhyay  Univ of Jadavpur, India + Pushpak Bhattacharyya IIT-Bombay, India + Monojit Choudhury     Microsoft Research India + Marta Ruiz Costa-jussà UPC, Spain + Jianfeng Gao          Microsoft Research, USA + Gregory Grefenstette  Exalead, France + Sanjeev Khudanpur     John Hopkins University, USA + Kevin Knight          ISI, USA + Greg Kondrak          Univ of Alberta, Canada + Olivia Kwong          City Univ, Hong Kong + Gina-Anne Levow       Univ of Chicago, USA + Arul Menezes          Microsoft Research, USA + Jong-Hoon Oh          NICT, Japan + Yan Qu                Advertising.com, USA + Dan Roth              Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA + Sunita Sarawagi       IIT-Bombay, India + Sudeshna Sarkar       IIT-Kharagpur, India + Richard Sproat        Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA + Keh-Yih Su            Behavior Design Corporation, Taiwan + Raghavendra Udupa     Microsoft Research India + Vasudeva Varma        IIIT-Hyderabad, India + Min Zhang             Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore


 * Workshop & Contact Information

For current information about the workshop, please refer to the workshop homepage, http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/workshops/NEWS2009/. For any specific information please contact: news09o@microsoft.com.

=======================================================

Named Entities Workshop: Shared Task on Transliteration (NEWS 2009 : An ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop )

---


 * Workshop Focus

Named Entities (NEs) play a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, such as search, machine translation, document clustering, summarization, information extraction, etc. While identifying and analyzing NEs in a given natural language is a challenging research problem by itself, the phenomenal growth in the Internet user population, especially among the non-English speaking parts of the world, has extended this problem to the cross-language arena, making the handling of NEs in multiple languages critically important. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in various aspects of NEs in natural language text. In addition, the NEWS workshop will feature a shared task on Machine Transliteration of NEs.


 * Topics of Interest

This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of NEs, including identification, analysis, extraction, mining, transformation and applications of NE to NLP and IR systems. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following: NE Analysis - Distributional characteristics of NEs in mono- & multi-lingual corpora - Orthographic/phonetic characteristics of NEs

- NE origin/genre recognition

- Social network analysis and entity resolution NE extraction

- Language-independent monolingual NE extraction

- Cross-language NE extraction - General Techniques - Specific datasets (Wikipedia, news, etc.)

- Unsupervised and semi-supervised methods for NE extraction

- Complex NEs, domain-specific term extraction

- NE set expansion

- Creation of annotated data Machine Transliteration - Computational phonology, incl. modeling of phonological rules, structure, behavior, etc.   - Transliteration modeling - Phonetic, grapheme)phoneme and phoneme)grapheme conversions - Statistical & machine learning based approaches, transliteration unit alignments - Forward and backward transliterations - Learning transliteration from comparable corpora - Transliteration lexicon construction - Romanization of Asian languages - Transliteration evaluation metrics Applications - Monolingual and Cross-Language IR, Information Extraction and Management - Machine Translation - Question Answering - Computational Journalism


 * Important Dates

Research Paper Submission Deadline  1-May-2009 Acceptance Notification             1-Jun-2009 Camera-Ready Copy Deadline          7-Jun-2009 Workshop Date                       7 Aug 2009
 * Task Details to be announced soon ***


 * Shared Task on Transliteration

Transliteration of NEs is necessary in many applications, such as machine translation, corpus alignment, cross-language IR, information extraction and automatic lexicon acquisition. This calls for high-performance transliteration systems, which is the focus of the shared task in this workshop. Details of the task will be made available soon in the workshop homepage,

+ Haizhou Li Institute for Infocomm Research + A Kumaran Microsoft Research India + Sanjeev Khudanpur Johns Hopkins University + Raghavendra Udupa Microsoft Research India + Min Zhang Institute for Infocomm Research + Monojit Choudhury Microsoft Research India
 * Organizing Committee
 * Program Committee

+ Kalika Bali           Microsoft Research India

+ Rafael Banchs         UPC, Spain

+ Sivaji Bandyopadhyay  Univ of Jadavpur, India

+ Pushpak Bhattacharyya IIT-Bombay, India

+ Monojit Choudhury     Microsoft Research India

+ Marta Ruiz Costa-jussà UPC, Spain

+ Jianfeng Gao          Microsoft Research, USA

+ Gregory Grefenstette  Exalead, France

+ Sanjeev Khudanpur     John Hopkins University, USA

+ Kevin Knight          ISI, USA

+ Greg Kondrak          Univ of Alberta, Canada

+ Olivia Kwong          City Univ, Hong Kong

+ Gina-Anne Levow       Univ of Chicago, USA

+ Arul Menezes          Microsoft Research, USA

+ Jong-Hoon Oh          NICT, Japan

+ Yan Qu                Advertising.com, USA

+ Dan Roth              Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

+ Sunita Sarawagi       IIT-Bombay, India

+ Sudeshna Sarkar       IIT-Kharagpur, India

+ Richard Sproat        Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

+ Keh-Yih Su            Behavior Design Corporation, Taiwan

+ Raghavendra Udupa     Microsoft Research India

+ Vasudeva Varma        IIIT-Hyderabad, India

+ Min Zhang             Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore


 * Workshop & Contact Information

For current information about the workshop, please refer to the workshop homepage, http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/workshops/NEWS2009/. For any specific information please contact: news09o@microsoft.com. This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP