Call for Papers: CLARIN Annual Conference 2017

18 Sep 2017 - 00:00

CLARIN ERIC is happy to announce the 2017 CLARIN Annual Conference and calls for the submission of papers. CLARIN is a research infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities that coordinates work on collecting language resources and tools, making them easily accessible, as well as on building easy-to-use research applications for processing speech and text data. 

LOCATION 

The 6th CLARIN Annual Conference will be held in Budapest, Hungary. 

IMPORTANT DATES

1 February 2017 First call published and submission system open 
8 May 2017 Submission deadline (extended)
24 June 2017 Notification of acceptance
1 September 2017 Final version of extended abstracts due
18–20 September 2017 CLARIN Annual Conference 

CONFERENCE AIMS 

The CLARIN Annual Conference is organized for the wider humanities and social sciences community in order to exchange ideas and experiences with the CLARIN infrastructure. This includes the design, construction and operation of the CLARIN infrastructure, the data, tools and services that it contains or should contain, its actual use by researchers, its relation to other infrastructures and projects, and the CLARIN Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure. 

CONFERENCE TOPICS

THEMATIC SESSION: Multilingual Processing for Social Sciences and Humanities

The social sciences and humanities (SSH) have formulated research agendas with questions pertaining to research data in a multitude of different languages. However, the number of research tasks in SSH in which language technology has been applied in order to cross language barriers or to conduct comparative analyses of similar phenomena based on material expressed in different languages is still relatively small. The situation is different in the case of genuine linguistic research, but multilingual research in SSH is mostly based on ‘bag of words’ models, and very rarely utilise more advanced multilingual language technology methods.
The general aim of this thematic session is to present examples of multilingual approaches in SSH research, and to discuss infrastructural solutions to the problem of multilingual interoperability of language technologies that are necessary for more advanced research. We expect to organize presentations and discussions during the session on one or more of the following aspects:

  1. Examples of applications of language technology to multilingual processing for the needs of research in SSH.
  2. Research tasks and ongoing projects in SSH on the basis of multilingual material and the application of language technology.
  3. Interoperability of language resources and tools for the needs of multilingual applications in SSH: models for linking, standards and formats, mapping and linking algorithms, complex processing methods, architectures and platforms.

We invite submissions describing CLARIN relevant work addressing these aspects. Submissions (for oral presentations, posters, or demos) intended for the thematic session should be marked as such, and will be evaluated with respect to their appropriateness for the theme, in addition to the general acceptance criteria listed below.

Operation and use of the CLARIN infrastructure, e.g. 

  • Use of the CLARIN infrastructure in humanities and social sciences research, including needs for updated and new functionality
  • Usability studies and evaluations of CLARIN services
  • Analysis of the CLARIN infrastructure usage, identification of user audience and impact studies
  • Showcases, demonstrators and research projects in humanities and social sciences that are relevant to CLARIN
  • Models for the sustainability of the infrastructure, including issues in curation, migration, financing and cooperation
  • Legal and ethical issues in operating the infrastructure

Design and construction of the CLARIN infrastructure, e.g.

  • Metadata and concept registries, cataloguing and browsing
  • Persistent identifiers
  • Access, including single sign-on authentication and authorisation
  • Search, including Federated Content Search
  • Web applications, web services, workflows and use of the infrastructure
  • Standards and solutions for interoperability of language resources, tools and services

CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure and Dissemination, e.g. 

  • User assistance (help desks, user manuals, FAQs)
  • CLARIN portals and outreach to users
  • Videos, screencasts, recorded lectures
  • Researcher training activities
  • Knowledge infrastructure centres

CLARIN in relation with other infrastructures and projects, e.g. 

  • Relations with other SSH research infrastructures such as DARIAH, CESSDA, etc.
  • Relations with meta-infrastructure projects such as EUDAT and RDA
  • Relations with national and regional initiatives

FORMAT OF THE PROGRAMME SESSIONS

The programme of both the general sessions and the thematic session may include oral presentations, posters, and demos. The type of session for which a paper will be selected will be not be dependent on the quality of the paper but only on the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) in view of the content of the paper.

SUBMISSIONS 

Proposals for oral presentations, poster presentations and/or demos must be submitted as extended abstracts (length: up to four A4 pages including references) in PDF format, in accordance with the template provided on the website.
It is not required that the authors are or have been directly involved in national or international CLARIN projects, but their work must be clearly relevant to the CLARIN activities, resources, tools or services.
Extended abstracts must be submitted through the EasyChair submission system (link) and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.
All proposals will be reviewed on the basis of both individual criteria and global criteria. The latter include thematic, linguistic and geographical spread. Individual acceptance criteria are the following:

  • Appropriateness: the contribution must pertain to the CLARIN infrastructure or be relevant for it (e.g. use CLARIN, contribute to the CLARIN design, construction, operation, exploitation, illustrate possible applications etc.). In addition, submissions to the thematic session will be selected on the basis of their appropriateness to the theme.
  • Soundness and correctness: the content must be technically and factually correct and methods must be scientifically sound, according to best practice, and preferably evaluated.
  • Meaningful comparison: the abstract must indicate that the author is aware of alternative approaches, if any, and highlight relevant differences. 
  • Substance: concrete work and experiences will be preferred over ideas and plans.
  • Impact: contributions with a higher impact on the research community and society at large will be preferred over papers with lower impact. 
  • Clarity: the extended abstract must be informative, clear and understandable for the CLARIN audience. 
  • Timeliness and novelty: the work must convey relevant new knowledge to the audience at this event. 

ATTENDANCE

For each accepted paper one author will be granted reimbursement of travel costs (up to 220 Euros), and free accommodation and meals.

PROCEEDINGS 

If a submission is accepted, it will be published (possibly in revised form) in the conference Book of Abstracts. After the conference, the author(s) will be invited to submit a full paper (max. 12 pages) to be reviewed according to the same criteria as the abstracts. Accepted full papers will be published in a digital conference proceedings volume at Linköping University Electronic Press within about 6 months after the conference.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE 

The Programme Committee for the conference consists of the following members:

  • Jan Theo Bakker, Dutch Language Union, The Netherlands/Flanders
  • Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • António Branco, University of Lisbon, Portugal 
  • Koenraad De Smedt, University of Bergen, Norway
  • Tomaž Erjavec, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
  • Eva Hajičová, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic
  • Erhard Hinrichs, University of Tübingen, Germany
  • Nicolas Larrousse, Huma-Num, France
  • Krister Lindén, University of Helsinki, Finland
  • Bente Maegaard, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Monica Monachini, Institute for Computational Linguistics «A. Zampolli», Italy
  • Karlheinz Mörth, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
  • Jan Odijk, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
  • Maciej Piasecki, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland (chair)
  • Stelios Piperidis, ILSP, Athena Research Center, Greece
  • Kiril Simov, IICT, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
  • Inguna Skadiņa, University of Latvia, Latvia
  • Jurgita Vaičenonienė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
  • Tamás Váradi, Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
  • Kadri Vider, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Martin Wynne, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

LINKS