Call for papers
Workshop on Natural Language Processing methods and corpora in translation, lexicography, and language learning
In conjunction with RANLP 2009
(The International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing)
17-18 September 2009, Borovets, Bulgaria
We are pleased to announce the workshop on Natural Language Processing methods and corpora in translation studies, lexicography, and language learning, to be held in conjunction with the main RANLP-09 conference in Borovets, Bulgaria, on 17-18 September 2009.
Motivation
Corpora are now indispensable tools in research and everyday practice for translators, lexicographers, second language learners. Specialists in these areas share a general goal in using corpora in their work: corpora provide the possibility to find and analyse linguistic patterns characteristic of various kinds of language users, monitor language change, and reveal important similarities and divergences across different languages. For professional translators corpora present an invaluable linguistic and cultural awareness tools. For language learners, they serve as a means to gain insights into specifics of competent language use as well as to analyse typical errors of fellow learners. For lexicographers, corpora are key for monitoring the development of the vocabularies of languages, making informed decisions as to lexicographic relevance of the lexical material, and for general verification of all varieties of lexicographic data.
While simple corpus analysis tools such as concordancers have been long in use in these specialist areas, in the past decade there have been important developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies: it has become much easier to construct corpora and powerful NLP methods have become available that can be used to analyse corpora not only on the surface level, but also on the syntactic, and even semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic levels.
This workshop aims to bring together the developers and the users of NLP technologies for the purposes of translation, translation studies, lexicography, terminology, and language learning in order to present their research and discuss new possibilities and challenges in these fields.
Topics
Submissions are invited for the following topics of interest to the workshop:
- NLP methodologies for processing parallel and comparable corpora
- Context-sensitive dictionary look-up
- Corpus-based study and identification of cognates and false friends
- Compilation and use of corpora in translation studies
- Corpus-based study of properties of translated text:
· translation universals
· phraseology
· lexical and grammatical patterns
- Corpora in translator training
- Translation of terms and collocations using corpora
- Bilingual concordancing in translation applications
- NLP methods for Computer-Aided Translation
- Compilation of specialised terminologies
- Compilation of corpora for bilingual lexicography
- Detection of gaps in bilingual dictionaries
- Corpus-based estimation of lexicographic relevance
- Term and collocation extraction
- Discovery of illustrative examples and definitions of words and word senses in corpora
- Reading and writing aid applications for language learners
- Automated text glossing in Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL)
- Corpus-based design of assessment materials in CALL
- Error detection and error analysis in CALL
- Detection of first-language interference in learner corpora
Important dates
1st call for papers: 30 March 2009
2nd call for papers: 30 April 2009
Submission deadline: 10 June 2009
Acceptance notification: 20 July 2009
Final copies due: 24 August 2009
Submission instructions
Papers must be submitted in PDF format as e-mail attachments to iustina.ilisei@wlv.ac.uk. The e-mail should use the subject header “RANLP-2009 workshop”.
Format
Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Papers (in PDF format conforming to the RANLP 2009 stylefiles) should not exceed 8 pages. The RANLP 2009 stylefiles are available at:
http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2009/submissions.htm
As reviewing will be blind, the papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the authors' identities should be avoided. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.
Reviewing
Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the Program Committee. Reviewers will be asked to provide detailed comments, and to score submitted papers on the following factors:
- Relevance to the workshop
- Significance and originality
- Technical/methodological accuracy
- References to related work
- Presentation (clarity, organisation, English)
Accepted papers policy
Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. By submitting a paper at the workshop the authors agree that, in case the paper is accepted for publication, at least one of the authors will attend the workshop; all workshop participants are expected to pay the RANLP-2009 workshop registration fee.
Organising Commitee
Iustina Ilisei – University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
Viktor Pekar – Oxford University Press, United Kingdom
Silvia Bernardini – University of Bologna, Italy