The 8th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2017)

The 8th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2017)

Dear Colleagues,

The 8th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2017), a meeting
organized by the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Adam
Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland and the Adam Mickiewicz University
Foundation, will take place on November 17-19, 2017. Following the
tradition of the past events, it is supported by ELRA, FlaReNet, and
META-NET.

Yes, we started 22 years ago ! Our tradition goes back to the Language
and Technology Awareness Days, a meeting organized in 1995 with the
assistance of the European Commission (DG XIII). Among the key speakers
were Antonio Zampolli (Italy), Dafydd Gibbon (Germany), Dan TufiÅŸ
(Romania), Orest Kossak (Ukraina). Today, we refer to this event as the
first LTC. Ten years later, we decided to meet again, and since then the
conference is being organized every two years as the “Language &
Technology Conference : Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for
Computer Science and Linguistics”.

Since the very beginning (1995) the meetings of the LTC series continue
to address Human Language Technologies (HLT) as a challenge for computer
science, linguistics and related fields. Fostering language technologies
and resources remains an important objective in our dynamically changing
information-saturated world that motivate us to invite you for joining
us at the LTC 2017 in Poznań.

Zygmunt Vetulani and Patrick Paroubek
LTC 2017 Co-Chairs
vetulani@amu.edu.pl and pap@limsi.fr

________________________________________________________________________

*LTC KEYNOTE LECTURES*

*Chris Cieri*, Executive Director, Linguistic Data Consortium,University
of Pennsylvania,3600 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA. 19104 Penn State
University, USA

*Title :* Addressing the Language Resource Gap through Alternative
Incentives, Workforces and Workflows

*Abstract :*For most languages, genres and technologies, the absence of
Language Resources impedes progress despite several decades of intensive
effort from governments and companies around the world. This deficiency
even affects languages with worldwide economic and political influence
and for most of the world’s 7000 linguistic varieties, the absence is
acute. Current approaches cannot hope to meet the resource demand for
even a reasonable subset of languages because they seek to document
phenomena of great variability using resources that are highly
constrained in terms of amount, duration and scope. This paper describes
efforts that use non-monetary incentives to elicit greater contributions
of linguistic data, metadata and annotation and sketches the adjustments
to workforces, workflows and post-processing needed to collect and
exploit data so elicited. MORE
http://ltc.amu.edu.pl/book2017/talks2017/Cieri-invited-talk-abstract.pdf

*BIO* : Christopher Cieri’s interests lie at the intersection of
language, large data, and computation. He received his PhD in
Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania where he focused on
sociolinguistics, language contact, phonetics, phonology and morphology.
He has worked since 1983 applying technology to linguistic analysis and
language teaching using data sets that are too large to process with
purely human effort. Cieri became the Executive Director of the
Linguistic Data Consortium in 1998 and has since been responsible for
overseeing all aspects of the Consortium’s operations including the
publication of over 500 data sets and the management of many sponsored
programs. His current work focuses on the science of linguistic
annotation and the analysis of conversational data, most recently in
identifying linguistic features to correlate with clinical diagnostic
categories.See here for CV
https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/www.ldc.upenn.edu/files/staff/cv/cieri.pdf

________________________________________________________________________

*Joseph van Genabith*, DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken, Germany

*Title :* The Impact of Neural Networks on Language Technologies : a Case
Study on Machine Translation

*Abstract :* Deep Neural Nets (DNNs) are revolutionising many (if not
most) areas in Artificial Intelligence, including Language Technologies
(LTs), often with remarkable performance improvements. In this talk, I
would like to take a closer look at why this is the case, focusing on
Machine Translation (MT). I will contrast neural MT with previous
approaches to MT. In doing so I will be drawing on research carried out
in the QT21 H2020 research and innovation project (http://www.qt21.eu/)
and QT21 systems for the WMT-2015, -2016 and -2017 shared tasks. I will
concentrate on morphologically complex languages with less constrained
word order. I will also consider the more general impact of DNNs on
processing pipelines, interoperability (as in system engineering) and
end-to-end training for complex LT systems. I will outline potential
benefits and end with a list of some of the currently open research
questions.

*BIO* : Josef van Genabith is one of the Scientific Directors of DFKI,
the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, where he heads
the Multilingual Technologies (MLT) Group, and jointly with Prof. Hans
Uszkoreit, the Language Technology (LT) Lab. He is also Professor of
Translation-Oriented Language Technologies at Saarland University,
Germany. He was the founding Director of the Centre for Next Generation
Localisation (CNGL, now ADAPT), in Dublin, Ireland, and a Professor in
the School of Computing at Dublin City University (DCU). He worked as a
researcher at the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (IMS) at
the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He was awarded a PhD from the
University of Essex, U.K., and obtained his first degree at RWTH Aachen,
Germany. His research interests include machine translation, parsing,
generation, computer-assisted-language-learning and morphology.
Currently he coordinates the QT21 H2020 research and innovation project
on machine translation (http://www.qt21.eu/) and heads EC SMART
2014/1074 and 2015/1091 service contracts on European Language Resource
Coordination (ELRC) (http://www.lr-coordination.eu/). The Impact of
Neural Networks on Language Technologies : a Case Study on Machine
Translation. MORE
https://www.dfki.de/web/research/mlt/staff-directory/base_view?uid=jova02

*Alain Colmerauer, Pionieer of logic programming in NLP - Special
Session*

*Alain Colmerauer (1941-2017), Pioneer of logic programming in natural
language processing and LTC Program Committee member in 2005 left us on
May 13, 2017 *

In Memory of Alain Colmerauer, to which LTC 2017 is dedicated, we plan
to organize a specific session, for which papers that rely or extend his
work are solicited. These papers can be research as well as state of the
art papers or mini-tutorials. Authors who wish to contribute to this
specific session must submit their paper according to the standard
procedure indicated on this web page, and to inform the LTC 2017
organizers of their intention. Please contact the organizers writing to
vetulani@amu.edu.pl and stdizier@irit.fr (cc to ltc17@amu.edu.pl and
mkubis@amu.edu.pl).

Zygmunt Vetulani and Patrick Saint-Dizier

________________________________________________________________________

*CONFERENCE TOPICS*

The list of conference topics includes the following (the ordering is
not significative) :

* communicative intelligence
* computational semantics
* computer modeling of language competence
* corpora-based methods in language engineering
* electronic language resources and tools
* formalization of natural languages
* HLT related policies
* HLT standards and best practices
* HLTs as support for e-learning
* HLTs as support for foreign language teaching
* HLTs as support in solving homeland security problems (technology
applications and legal aspects)
* knowledge representation
* language-specific computational challenges for HLTs (especially for
languages other than English)
* legal issues connected with HLTs (problems and challenges)
* less resourced languages
* logic programming in natural language processing
* man-machine NL interfaces
* methodological issues in HLT
* NL applications in robotics
* NL based interfaces
* NL understanding by computers
* NL user modeling
* NLP methods in cyber-criminality detection and prevention
* parsing and other forms of NL processing
* question answering
* sentiment, opinion and emotion analysis
* speech processing
* system prototype presentations
* systems with NL competence
* technological aspects of nonverbal linguistics
* text-based information retrieval and extraction
* tools and methodologies for developing multilingual systems
* translation enhancement tools
* validation in all areas of HLTs
* visionary papers in the field of HLT
* WordNet-like ontologies

This list is by no means closed and we are open to further proposals.
Please do not hesitate to contact us in order to feed us with your
suggestions and ideas of how to satisfy your expectations concerning the
program. The Program Committee is also open to suggestions concerning
accompanying events (workshops, exhibits, panels, etc). Suggestions,
ideas and observations should be addressed directly to the LTC Co-Chairs
by email (vetulani@amu.edu.pl or pap@limsi.fr).

________________________________________________________________________

*CALL FOR DEMOS of Language Resources (LR), LR Tools and LR-based
Software*

We are pleased to announce the "Call for Demos of Language Resources
(LR), LR Tools and LR-based Software at the LTC 2017. *This call is
addressed to all Language Technology providers* for both business and
research purposes. We propose to *companies* as well as *individuals* to
present their novel or state-of-the-art products in form of demos. We
are interested in :

* language technology based products,
* application-scale language engineering tools,
* applications for production, conservation and maintenance of HLT
language resources.

The above must fit exactly to the LTC fields of interest (cf. the LTC
topics as presented above). For more information please contact Marek
Kubis at (mkubis@amu.edu.pl).

________________________________________________________________________

*The Second Workshop on Processing Emotions, Decisions and Opinions (EDO
2017) *

*EDO Workshop paper submission deadline : September 25, 2017.*
*Acceptance/rejection notification : October 10, 2017.*
*Final version submission deadline (camera ready) : October 23, 2017.*
*Conference/Workshop dates : November 17-19, 2017 (half-day, afternoon) *

*Topics of interest include, but are not limited to :*
- Affect Analysis (and its applications)
- Cognitive aspects of decisions and opinions
- Decisions and NLP
- Ethics and NLP
- Knowledge acquisition
- Opinion Mining
- Pragmatics of decision making
- Preference models
- Recommendation Systems
- Sentiment Analysis
- Social Informatics
- Text mining techniques

*Program*

The access to the program of both the main conference and the workshops
(as well as the social program) is the same for all LTC/EDO
participants.

*Organizers*

- Michał Ptaszyński, ptaszynski@cs.kitami-it.ac.jp (Kitami Institute of
Technology, Japan)
- Rafał Rzepka, rzepka@ist.hokudai.ac.jp (Hokkaido University, Japan)
(Hokkaido University, Japan)
- Paweł Dybała, aweldybala1@gmail.com (Jagiellonian University, Poland)

*Program Committee*
- Alladin Ayesh, aayesh@dmu.ac.uk (De Montfort University, UK)
- Karen Fort, karen.fort@paris-sorbonne.fr (Sorbonne, France)
- Dai Hasegawa, daihasg@gmail.com (Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan)
- Magdalena Igras-Cybulska, migras@agh.edu.pl (AGH, Poland) - Yasutomo
Kimura, kimura@res.otaru-uc.ac.jp (Otaru University of Commerce,
Japan)
- Paweł Lubarski, Pawel.Lubarski@cs.put.poznan.pl (Poznań University of
Technology, Poland) - Fumito Masui, f-masui@mail.kitami-it.ac.jp
(Kitami Institute of Technology, Japan)
- Mikołaj Morzy, mikolaj.morzy@put.poznan.pl (Poznań University of
Technology, Poland)
- Koji Murakami, koji.murakami@rakuten.com (Rakuten, USA)
- Noriyuki Okumura, okumura@akashi.ac.jp (National Institute of
Technology, Akashi College, Japan) - Michał B. Paradowski,
michal.paradowski@uw.edu.pl (University of Warsaw) - Tyson Roberts,
tyson@goldengate.net (Google, Japan)
- Marcin Skowron, marcin.skowron@ofai.at (Johannes Kepler University,
Austria)
- Yuzu Uchida (Hokkai-gakuen University, Japan)
- Zygmunt Vetulani (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)
- Katarzyna Węgrzyn-Wolska (Efrei/Esigetel, France)
- Adam Wierzbicki (Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology,
Poland)
- Bartosz ZióÅ‚ko (AGH, Poland)

*Inscription procedure :* as for the general LTC (+ cc to workshop
chairs)

*Fees : *The EDO Workshop is an integral part of the LTC (with autonomous
Program Committee). Fees and payment procedures are the same as for LTC
and cover participation in the general program. Free for participants
registered to the general LTC. Single registration covers only one paper
presentation (cf. the Publication Policy section).

*Papers :*

The EDO Workshop accepts papers in English only. Submitted texts should
not disclose the author(s) in any manner. Format and templates are the
same as for the general LTC (see the Paper Submission Section ; above).
Papers should be submitted using EasyChair
(https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ltc2015) exactly as for the
general LTC but copies should also be sent to the EDO Workshop )
organizers i.e. to : Kenji Araki (araki@ist.hokudai.ac.jp) and PaweÅ‚
Dybała (paweldybala1@gmail.com). Please also put *"EDO 2015 submission"*
as Subject of your mail and *"EDO"* as a key word (both in the EasyChair
form and in the paper itself).

*Presentation :* publication in the LTC proceedings (paper + CD)

*More about EDO 2017 : * cf.
http://arakilab.media.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/LTC8/EDO2017/ABOUT.html (the
access to the program of both the main conference and the workshop (as
well as the social program) is the same for all LTC/EDO participants).

________________________________________________________________________

*The 5th LRL Workshop (a Joint LTC-ELRA-FLaReNet-META_NET Workshop on
Less-Resourced Languages) : "Language Technology for Less Resourced
Languages" *

*Chairs*
- Girish Nath Jha (girishjha@jnu.ac.in) (JNU, India)
- Claudia Soria (claudiasoria16@gmail.com) (CNR-ILC, Italy)

*Papers submission deadline : September 25, 2017.*
*Workshop dates : November 17-19, 2017.
Deadline for submission of camera-ready final versions of the accepted
papers : October 23, 2017. *
*See also the 5th LRL website
(http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in/conf/ltc/lrl2017.htm).*

Eadline extention *** *September 25, 2017.*

The 8th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2017), Poznan, Nov.
17-19 2017

The Second Workshop on Processing Emotions, Decisions and Opinions (EDO
2017)

The 5th LRL, a Joint LTC-ELRA-FLaReNet-META_NET Workshop on
Less-Resourced Languages, "Language Technology for Less Resourced
Languages"

*Theme and Motivation*

The rapid growth of language technology has created a new challenge for
many languages of the world today. While for some, this can take the
shape of a positive competition among the stake holders, for others it
can push them further down in the race towards endangerment and
extinction. The LT-LRL Workshop is an attempt to bring together all
stake holders, users, developers, researchers, language activists,
policy makers on a single platform and discuss how resources, policies,
standards could be developed for these languages so that they can
develop technologies to enable themselves in the digital age. We will
particularly welcome contributions addressing the following issues :

1) LRL : charting the field - what do we know about currently available
LTs for LRLs ? What is the current status of language technologies and
use of LRLs in the digital and social media environments ? How to draw
a comprehensive and accurate picture and create a road map for
future ? Who are the actors to be involved ? What is the experience of
researchers and developers ?

2) LRL : Resource development - how are the LRLs dealing with resource
crunch, creation and related issues of standards, IDEs and platforms,
funding, usability, sharing etc ? What are the perceptions and roles
of various stake holders including the governments, industry and
language communities ? What are the additional challenges posed by
multilingual societies ? What are the language preservation strategies
for LRLs in the digital age ?

3) LRL : technology development - challenges in the development of
specific enabling technologies for LRLs at language, speech and
multi-modal levels. How are these technologies used in areas such as
communication, education, entertainment, health, administration.
governance etc ?

*Fees : *LRL is an integral part of the LTC (with autonomous Program
Committee). Fees and payment procedures are the same for general LTC and
worshop participants (cover participation in the general LTC program).
Notice : the workshop is free for participants registered to the general
LTC. Single registration covers only one paper presentation (general LTC
or workshops) (cf. the Publication Policy section in case of more than
one submitted paper).

*Submition :
See the LRL web site : the 5th LRL website
(http://sanskrit.jnu.ac.in/conf/ltc/lrl2017.htm).*

*Publication :*
The papers accepted for LRL 2017 will be published in the LTC
Proceedings (hard copy, with ISBN number) and on CD-ROM. After the
Workshop, a selection of the best papers will be published together with
best LTC papers in a dedicated volume in the Springer Series Lecture
Notes in Artificial Intelligence.

*Reviewing and acceptance :* on the ground of blind reviewing

*More LRL participation details : * cf. also the general program (the
access to the program of both the main conference and the workshop (as
well as the social program) is the same for all LTC/LRL participants).