ELRA is glad to announce the 9th edition of LREC, organised with the support of a wide range of international organisations.

CONFERENCE AIMS
LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, on-going and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from e-science and e-society, with respect both to policy issues and to scientific/technological and organisational ones.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from across a wide spectrum of areas to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies (LT) and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, multimodality
* Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability
* Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation
* Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge
* Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation
* LRs and Semantic Web
* LRs and Crowdsourcing
* Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up
Exploitation of LRs in systems and applications
* Sign language, multimedia information and multimodal communication
* LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval, audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer Aided Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation, speech translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, etc.
* Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensorial interactions, voice-activated services, etc.
* Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-government, e-culture, e-health, e-participation, mobile applications, digital humanities, etc.
* Industrial LRs requirements, user needs
Issues in LT evaluation
* LT evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
* Validation and quality assurance of LRs
* Benchmarking of systems and products
* Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems
* User satisfaction evaluation
General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation
* International and national activities, projects and collaboration
* Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs
* Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages
* Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures
* Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues.

LREC 2014 HOT TOPICS

Big Data, Linked Open Data, LRs and HLT

The ever-increasing quantities of large and complex digital datasets, structured or unstructured, multilingual, multimodal or multimedia, pose new challenges but at the same time open up new opportunities for HLT and related fields. Ubiquitous data and information capturing devices, social media and networks, the web at large with its big data / knowledge bases and other information capturing / aggregating / publishing platforms are providing useful information and/or knowledge for a wide range of LT applications.  
LREC 2014 puts a strong emphasis on the synergies of the big Linked Open Data and LRs/LT communities and their complementarity in cracking LT problems and developing useful applications and services.

LRs in the Collaborative Age

The amount of collaboratively generated and used language data is constantly increasing and it is therefore time to open a wide discussion on such LRs at LREC. There is a need to discuss the types of LRs that can be collaboratively generated and used.
Are lexicons, dictionaries, corpora, ontologies (of language data), grammars, tagsets, data categories, all possible fields in which a collaborative approach can be applied? Can collaboratively generated LRs be standardised/harmonised? And how can quality control be applied to collaboratively generated LRs? How can a collaborative approach ensure that less-resourced languages receive the same digital dignity as mainstream languages?
There is also a need to discuss legal aspects related to collaboratively generated LRs. And last but not least: are there different types of collaborative approaches, or is the Wikimedia style the best approach to collaborative generation and use of LRs?

LREC 2014 SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT

Share your LRs!

In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map – now a normal step in the submission procedure of many conferences – LREC 2014 recognises that the time is ripe to launch another important initiative, the LREC Repository of shared LRs!
When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC META-SHARE repository set up by ELRA.
Your LRs will be made available to all LREC participants before the conference, to be re-used, compared, analysed, …
This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new "regular" feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

PROGRAMME
The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels, in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio Zampolli Prize.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES
Submission of proposals for oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: 15 October 2013
Abstracts should consist of about 1500-2000 words, will be submitted through START and will be peer-reviewed.

Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: 15 October 2013
Proposals should be submitted via an online form on the LREC website and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

PROCEEDINGS
The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format.

There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered.

In addition a Book of Abstracts will be printed.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Nicoletta Calzolari – CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa - Italy (Conference chair)
Khalid Choukri – ELRA, Paris - France
Thierry Declerck – DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany
Hrafn Loftsson – School of Computer Science, Reykjavík University - Iceland
Bente Maegaard – CST, University of Copenhagen - Denmark
Joseph Mariani – LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, Orsay - France
Asuncion Moreno – Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona - Spain
Jan Odijk – UIL-OTS, Utrecht - The Netherlands
Stelios Piperidis – Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens - Greece