Balto-Slavonic Natural Language Processing 2007 (BSNLP 2007)
with Special Theme: Information Extraction and Enabling Technologies

June 29, 2007 
Prague, Czech Republic

http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007

BSNLP will be held in conjunction with the ACL 2007 conference (http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/)
and is co-organised by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre

TOPIC AND MOTIVATION:

The recent political and economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe 
and the related on-going enlargement of the European Union brings into focus new 
cultures and languages. Among them, the languages from the Balto-Slavonic
group have an outstanding role because of their rich cultural heritage and the
widespread use - over 400 million speakers.

The topic of the workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the 
Balto-Slavonic languages, with the focus on Information Extraction (IE) and 
enabling technologies for this language family. The task of IE is to identify a 
predefined set of concepts from natural language text. The spectrum of IE 
tasks ranges from named-entity recognition, through relation extraction and 
co-reference resolution to the identification of complex events and 
cross-document entity profile extraction. Although a considerable 
amount of IE-related work exists, most of the studies are concentrated on a
few major languages. Research on this topic, as well as on general-purpose NLP 
tools in the context of Balto-Slavonic languages, is still in its early stage and is
progressing relatively slowly. Due to some specific  phenomena like the highly inflectional 
character and relatively free word order, a construction of IE systems and other 
language processing tools (question-answering, text summarization, machine translation) 
for these languages is an intriguing and challenging task.

This workshop can be seen as the follow-up to the successful workshop on 
Information Extraction for Slavonic and Other Central and Eastern European 
Languages (http://lml.bas.bg/IESL2003) held in conjunction with the RANLP 2003 
conference. It is also related to the EACL 2003 workshop on Morphological 
Processing of Slavic Languages (http://nl.ijs.si/mpsl03). In particular, we would 
strongly encourage submissions describing systems, resources or solutions that 
are made available to the wider public, as these would help to promote 
computational linguistics applications for these languages.

AREAS OF INTEREST include, but are not limited to:

A. Specific challenges for Balto-Slavonic NLP, in particular in the context of IE
and enabling technologies

- text segmentation
- morphological analysis
- morphology models
- morpho-syntactic disambiguation
- named-entity recognition 
- named-entity disambiguation (e.g., geo-referencing)
- named-entity lemmatisation
- term and keyword extraction
- name variant recognition and merging
- syntactic parsing and chunking
- co-reference resolution
- word sense disambiguation
- corpus-based knowledge acquisition

B. Multilingual IE frameworks and techniques applied to these languages

- tools and resources (freely available for research purposes will be preferred)
- experience with, and evaluation of, linguistic data and processing resources
- comparative evaluation between languages

C. IE solutions for these languages:

- scenario template filling / event extraction
- relation extraction
- automatic pattern learning
- corpus studies and statistical techniques for IE
- IE from Web sources
- IE-based ontology population
- IE evaluation
- IE techniques for Question/Answering and Answer Extraction
- Utilisation of IE-based techniques in other NLP applications

INTENDED AUDIENCE

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners
working on NLP for Balto-Slavonic languages, in particular on IE and core 
technologies supporting IE for these languages. The workshop will 
give an opportunity to exchange ideas and experience, to discuss 
hard-to-tackle problems in this field of research, and to make available 
resources more widely known.

SUBMISSION

Papers should describe original work and should indicate the state of 
completion of the reported results. In particular, an overlap with previously 
published work should be clearly mentioned. Submissions will be 
judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation,
usability, and significance/relevance to the workshop. 

Submissions should follow the two-column format of the ACL 2007 
main-conference proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, 
including references. We recommend to use either the LaTeX style file 
or the Microsoft-Word style file, which can be found at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles.

The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include the authors' 
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-citations and other references that could 
reveal the author's identity should be avoided. 

Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted papers 
is Adobe PDF. Papers must be submitted no later than  April 1   April 9 , 2006 (the call is now closed)
using the submission webpage http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007/submission.

Submissions will be reviewed by 3 members of the Program Committee. 
Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce 
camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the ACL workshop 
proceedings.

IMPORTANT DATES

Workshop Paper Submission deadline:  April 1  April 9 (deadline extension). The call is now closed.
Notification of Acceptance:  April 25   April 30 
Camera-ready Version: May 9
Workshop: June 29, 2007.

LOCATION

Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, is located in the centre of Europe. It
is one of the most valuable historical city reserves in Europe. The historical core 
of the city is listed in the UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage Register. 
The workshop itself will take place in the TOP HOTEL Praha, located in the quiet 
neighbourhood of the Prague 4 district, only 15-20 minutes from the historic centre 
of Prague. 

Prague is easily reachable by car, bus or train from Central Europe (only 3-hour 
drive from Vienna or Budapest or 4 hours from Berlin or Munich), by cheap flights 
from the rest of Europe, and by several direct flights from overseas. 

FURTHER INFORMATION

For further information please write to any staff member (see http://langtech.jrc.it/JRC_staff.html)
or check the workshop web page http://langtech.jrc.it/BSNLP2007.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Tania Avgustinova (University of Saarland / DFKI, Germany)
Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield, UK)
Tomaz Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Vaclav Kubon (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic)
Anna Kupsc (University Paris III, France)
Ruta Marcinkeviciene (Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania)
Agnieszka Mykowiecka (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Bruno Pouliquen (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Marko Tadic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Agata Savary (University of Tours, France)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Wojciech Skut (Google Inc., USA)
Ralf Steinberger (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Dusko Vitas (University of Beograd, Serbia)
Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki, Finland) 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR

Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Jakub Piskorski (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Bruno Pouliquen (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre, Italy)
Ralf Steinberger (Joint Research Centre, Italy)