Call for Papers
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.
Important Dates
Research Paper Submissions |
Research Paper Submission Deadline |
1-May-2009 |
Shared Task |
Registration Opens |
16-Feb-2009 |
Registration Closes |
9-Apr-2009 |
Release Training/Development Data |
16-Feb-2009 |
Release Test Data |
10-Apr-2009 |
Results Submission Due |
14-Apr-2009 |
Results Announcement |
29-Apr-2009 |
Task (short) Papers Due |
3-May-2009 |
For All Submissions |
Acceptance Notification |
1-Jun-2009 |
Camera-Ready Copy Deadline |
7-Jun-2009 |
Workshop Date |
7-Aug-2009 |
Topics of Interest
This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of Named Entities (NEs), including identification, analysis, extraction, mining, transformation and applications 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 (such as, 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, including modeling of phonological rules, structure, behavior, etc.
- Transliteration modeling
- Phonetic, phonetic-semantic transliteration, grapheme ® phoneme and phoneme ® grapheme conversions
- Statistical and machine learning based approaches, transliteration unit alignment
- 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
- Machine Translation
- Information Extraction and Management
- Question Answering
- Computational Journalism
Paper Format
Paper submissions to NEWS 2009 should follow the ACL-IJCNLP-2009 paper submission policy, including paper format, blind review policy and title and author format convention. Full papers (research paper) are in two-column format without exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus one extra page for references and short papers (task paper) are also in two-column format without exceeding four (4) pages, including references. Submission must conform to the official ACL-IJCNLP-2009 style guidelines. For details, please refer to
http://www.acl-ijcnlp-2009.org/main/authors/stylefiles/index.html.
Paper Submission
Submission is electronic using paper submission software at:
https://www.softconf.com/acl-ijcnlp09/NEWS/.
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 is available here.
Organizing Committee
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-jussà |
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 U., 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 |
Contact Information
For any information about the workshop or the shared task, please contact:
Dr. A. Kumaran
Microsoft Research India
Scientia, 196/36, Sadashivnagar 2nd Main Road, Bangalore
INDIA 560080
a.kumaran@microsoft.com
