BUCC,  SIXTH WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA

When: 8 August 2013
Where: Sofia, Bulgaria
Deadline for papers: 26 April 2013
Notification of acceptance: 24 May 2013
Camera-ready deadline: 7 June 2013
Website: http://www.limsi.fr/~pz/bucc2013
Website for submissions: https://www.softconf.com/acl2013/BUCC2013/

Motivation

In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In language engineering, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as statistical machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest in themselves by making possible intra-linguistic discoveries and comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that comparable corpora are documents in one or several languages that are comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions. We believe that the linguistic definitions and observations related to comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for applications of statistical NLP. As such, it is of great interest to bring together builders and users of such corpora.

Parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons and terminologies. However, beyond a few language pairs such as English-French or English-Chinese and a few contexts such as parliamentary debates or legal texts, they remain a scarce resource, despite the creation of automated methods to collect parallel corpora from the Web. Interest in non-parallel forms of comparable corpora in language engineering primarily ensued from the scarcity of parallel corpora. This has motivated research concerning the use of comparable corpora: pairs of monolingual corpora selected according to the same set of criteria, but in different languages or language varieties. Non-parallel yet comparable corpora overcome the two limitations of parallel corpora, since sources for original, monolingual texts are much more abundant than translated texts. However, because of their nature, mining translations in comparable corpora is much more challenging than in parallel corpora. What constitutes a good comparable corpus, for a given task or per se, also requires specific attention: while the definition of a parallel corpus is fairly straightforward, building a non-parallel corpus requires control over the selection of source texts in both languages. 

Topics

The special theme for this edition is terminology mining, which featured in a number of submissions in the past years, and this time it will serve as the highlighted theme for the  workshop.

In addition to this special theme, we solicit contributions including but not limited to other relevant topics:

Building Comparable Corpora:
   Human translations
   Automatic and semi-automatic methods
   Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the Web
   Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
   Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora
   Rare and minority languages
   Across language families
   Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora

Applications of comparable corpora:
   Human translations
   Language learning
   Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization
   Bilingual projections
   Machine translation
   Writing assistance

Mining from Comparable Corpora:
   Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from comparable corpora
   Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of single words and multi-word expressions; proper names, named entities, etc.


Organizers: 
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK (Chair)
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI-CNRS and ERTIM-INALCO, France
Reinhard Rapp, Universities of Mainz, Germany, and Aix-Marseille, France

Programme Committee:
Carol Ann Peters	(ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy)??
Chris Biemann (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Hervé Déjean (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
Kurt Eberle (Lingenio, Heidelberg, Germany)
Andreas Eisele (European Commission, Luxembourg)
Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)
Éric Gaussier (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France)
Gregory Grefenstette (Exalead, Paris, France)
Askar Hamdulla (Xinjiang University, China)??
Silvia Hansen-Schirra (University of Mainz, Germany)
Hitoshi Isahara (Toyohashi University of Technology)
Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd, UK)??
Natalie Kübler (Université Paris Diderot, France)
Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Tony McEnery (Lancaster University, UK)??
Emmanuel Morin (Université de Nantes, France)
Lene Offersgaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Emmanuel Prochasson (HKUST)??
Reinhard Rapp (University of Tarragona, Spain)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
Mandel Shi (Xiamen University, China)
Michel Simard (National Research Council Canada)
Monique Slodzian (INALCO, Paris, France)??
Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, US)
Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver, Inc., US)
Benjamin T'sou (The Hong Kong Institute of Education)??
Justin Washtell (University of Leeds, UK)
Yujie Zhang (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan)??
Michael Zock (Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale, CNRS, Marseille)
Pierre Zweigenbaum (LIMSI-CNRS, France)