[ntcir:301] 2nd CFP for NEWS 2009 (An ACL 2009 Workshop)

[A.Kumaran@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

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Named Entities Workshop: Shared Task on Transliteration

(NEWS 2009 : An ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Workshop)

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* 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

Research Paper Submission Deadline .............1-May-2009

Task - Registration (Opens)...............16-Feb-2009

Task - Release Training/Development Data..16-Feb-2009

Task - Registration (Closes)...............9-Apr-2009

Task - Release Test Data..................10-Apr-2009

Task - Results Submission Deadline........14-Apr-2009

Task - Evaluation Results Announcement....29-Apr-2009

Short Papers (Task) Deadline...............3-May-2009

Acceptance Notification..........................1-Jun-2009

Camera-Ready Copy Deadline.......................7-Jun-2009

Workshop Date....................................7 Aug 2009

* Paper Submission

Submission to NEWS is through https://www.softconf.com/acl-ijcnlp09/NEWS/.

* Shared Task on Transliteration

Transliteration is defined as phonetic translation of names across
languages. Transliteration of Named Entities (NEs) is necessary in many
applications, such as machine translation, corpus alignment,
cross-language IR, information extraction and automatic lexicon
acquisition. All such systems call for high-performance transliteration,
which is the focus of the shared task in

the NEWS 2009 workshop. The objective of the shared task is to promote
machine transliteration research by providing a common benchmarking
platform for the community to evaluate the state-of-the-art technologies.

Details of the task are available in the workshop homepage, and may also
be downloaded from:

http://www.acl-ijcnlp2009.org/workshops/NEWS2009/documents/NEWS2009_Task_Details_V1.1.pdf.


* 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-jussa` 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/.