[ntcir:299] "Named Entities Workshop (NEWS-2009)" ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop

[A Kumaran <A.Kumaran@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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

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


* 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,


* Organizing Committee
 + 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

* 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-juss? 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx