Nodalida 2009 workshop call: Nordic perspectives on the CLARIN infrastructure of common language resources

All day workshop on May 14 at Nodalida 2009, Odense, Denmark.
Room 0-95
Nodalida main conference: May 15-16, 2009.
Nodalida website: http://beta.visl.sdu.dk/nodalida2009/
Workshop papers are published as Vol. 5 in the NEALT proceedings series at http://dspace.utlib.ee/dspace/handle/10062/9207

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

9.00 Opening
9.10 Introduction by Steven Krauwer
9.30 Swedish CLARIN activities. Maia Andréasson et al.
10.00 CLARIN in Denmark – European and Nordic perspectives. Hanne Fersře & Bente Maegaard

10.30 Coffee

11.00 Nordic co-operation in building the language resource infrastructures. Kimmo Koskenniemi & Antti Arppe
11.30 Two decades of Lithuanian language technology. Rūta Marcinkevičienė
12.00 Estonian language technology Anno 2009. Einar Meister, Tiit Roosmaa & Jaak Vilo

12.30 Lunch

13.30 Icelandic Language Resources and Technology: Status and Prospects. Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson et al.
14.00 CLARIN in Latvia: current situation and future perspectives. Inguna Skadiņa
14.30 The Possible NEALT Role in the Consolidation of the Nordic and Baltic Language Resources. Pavel Skrelin, Vera Evdokimova & Karina Evgrafova

15.00 Coffee

15.30 CLARIN: Norwegian and Nordic perspectives. Koenraad de Smedt
16.00 Summary, discussion and conclusions
17.00 End of day

TOPIC/PURPOSE

The main topic of the workshop is Nordic strengths and opportunities of cooperation within the NEALT Geographic Region in constructing an infrastructure of common language resources in connection to the European CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) initiative (see NEALT Constitution for a definition of the region).

The purpose is to find ways of cooperating that will strengthen the contribution of the associated countries to the development of an infrastructure of common language resources within the CLARIN intitiative. In the workshop, participants in CLARIN from the NEALT-associated countries will be given the chance to present their national projects and discuss possible ways of cooperating, sharing resources, coordinating activities, consider new projects and such. Opportunities and proposals for closer cooperation and coordination will be presented and discussed.

Examples of questions to discuss:

• What are the strengths of the NEALT-associated countries and how could they be developed further?
• Do we need to cooperate? Why? How can we do that in a concrete way?
• Which resources can be shared, if any? Language data? Tools?
• How can we benefit from the European CLARIN initiative? Both where we are strong and where we are weaker.
• Which research groups would gain from more cooperation? How?
• How can cooperation be organised? Which activities can be coordinated on a higher level?
• How can we utilize our resources to strengthen language technology teaching, and vice versa?
• How do we make governments invest more in language technology infrastructure on a Nordic level? How can we help each other to strengthen infrastructural work on the national level? How can CLARIN contribute to this? How can we contribute to the CLARIN infrastructure?
• Are there existing platforms for Nordic research infrastructure cooperation (such as NDGF) that we can build on?
• And more ...

SUBMISSION AND REQUIREMENTS

CLARIN participants in the NEALT-associated countries are invited to present their national work from the perspective of possible cooperation between groups and projects in the different countries: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden.

The workshop is intended for participants having an interest in developing the language resources and technology in the NEALT Geographic Region for languages spoken in that region. There will be an opportunity for each such country to present an overview of the status of their national language resource infrastructure. There will also be room for some presentations on subjects of special importance for the region.

Abstracts of 3-5 pages is to be submitted for review by the workshop organizers. Submissions should include proposals for concrete actions that could strengthen the joint contribution of the associated countries to the development of common language resources and technology. The action proposals will be presented and discussed at the workshop. The presentations will be about 20-30 minutes long and there will be plenty of time for discussions.

Submissions should follow the two-column format of EACL proceedings and must use either the LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word document template that will be made available on the conference web site, courtesy of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Submissions should be submitted in pdf-format to bmaegaard at hum.ku.dk.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission deadline: February 18, 2009
  
• Submission of abstracts: February 18, 2009
• Notification of acceptance: March 23, 2009
• Submission of camera-ready papers/extended abstracts: April 14, 2009

BACKGROUND

The Nordic countries have a long tradition of cooperating within many areas, including politics, education and science. Many languages are closely related and sometimes also the same language is spoken over national boundaries (for example Sámi and Swedish). Language technology is relatively well developed in these countries, but much more is needed to build the infrastructure needed for advanced R&D, and to secure the languages of the region for the future. The CLARIN project is an initiative on the European level to meet those challenges by making language resources and technology available and usable.

In recent years, new regions around the Baltic have become parts of the Nordic area. With increased cooperation, coordination and consolidation of common strengths, the Nordic/Baltic countries could strengthen their work in language technology infrastructure and their contribution to CLARIN.

ORGANIZERS

• Rickard Domeij, the Language Council of Sweden, chairman of the Nordic language councils' working group on language technology and chairman of the NEALT SigInfra.
• Kimmo Koskenniemi, Prof. of language technology at the University of Helsinki, Department of General Linguistics, Executive Board member of CLARIN.
• Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University, CLARIN Coordinator
• Bente Maegaard, Head of Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Executive Board member of CLARIN.
• Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, Prof. of Icelandic Language, University of Iceland.
• Koenraad De Smedt, Prof. of Computational Linguistics, University of Bergen; national coordinator of CLARIN in Norway.