Call for Demonstrations and Interactive Presentations

BSNLP 2015: the 5th International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing
Hissar, Bulgaria
10-11 September 2015
http://bsnlp-2015.cs.helsinki.fi

Held in conjunction with:
RANLP 2015: Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
5-11 September 2015

Workshop is endorsed by:
SIGSLAV: ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Processing in Slavic Languages

THEME and MOTIVATION

The BSNLP workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Balto-Slavic languages. The NLP tasks in urgent need of attention include, but are not limited to:

  • morphological analysis and generation,
  • morpho-syntactic tagging and parsing,
  • semantic parsing,
  • lexical semantics,
  • named-entity recognition,
  • co-reference resolution,
  • information extraction,
  • sentiment analysis,
  • question answering,
  • information retrieval,
  • text summarization,
  • machine translation.

Research on theoretical and applied topics in the context of many Balto-Slavic languages is still in its early stages. The linguistic phenomena specific to Balto-Slavic languages — such as rich morphological inflection and free word order — make the construction of NLP tools for these languages a challenging and intriguing task.

The goal of this Workshop is to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on NLP for Balto-Slavic languages. In particular, the Workshop will serve as an instrument to further stimulate the research on NLP techniques for Balto-Slavic languages, and to foster the creation of tools for these languages. The Workshop will provide an forum for exchanging ideas and experience, discussing difficult-to-tackle problems in this field of research, and making the available resources more widely-known.

Special Note for Commercial Presentations:

We welcome presentation of any tool or resource that includes an evaluation, or at least an estimate of its quality, which can be verified without having to purchase a license to use the tool or resource. This includes:

  • presentation of any tool that is open-source;
  • presentation of any tool that is free of charge for non-commercial use.

Tools or resources that are not accompanied by such an evaluation are also welcome for the interactive session; however, these will not be included in the published proceedings.

SUBMISSION

The aim of the interactive session is to facilitate networking and dissemination of information about relevant activities, experiences, projects, endeavours, resources and tools that are relevant to all stakeholders in the domain of Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing. Furthermore, the session provides an opportunity to promote computational linguistics applications for Balto­Slavic languages.

We invite submissions proposing interactive presentations related to Balto-Slavic NLP on: (a) past, present and future nationally or EU-funded research projects, (b) user experiences with tools and resources, including different types of applications, i.e., commercial, government, and academic applications, (c) completed and under-development software tools, whether freely or commercially available, which can benefit the community, (d) ongoing initiatives related to promoting research in this field.

The interactive session will begin with a two-minute pitch-style introduction of each presentation, followed by a longer period where attendees will have an opportunity to directly interact with the presenters, whose work will be displayed on posters and/or accompanied by demos.

We accept only electronic submissions, which must be sent to: contact

The submissions will be judged on relevance to the themes of the Workshop, usability and clarity of presentation. Submissions will be reviewed by at least two members of the Program Committee.

The length of each submission should not exceed a maximum of two pages for main content (plus any number of pages for references), and must conform to the official style guidelines of RANLP 2015, which are contained in the style files. The submissions should not be anonymized. All submissions must be in PDF. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers must be provided in LaTeX.

In particular, submissions describing systems, resources, or solutions that are made available to the wider public would be strongly encouraged, as this would help to promote computational linguistics applications for Balto­Slavic languages.

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the workshop is English.

PUBLICATION

The papers accepted for BSNLP 2015 will be published in BSNLP Workshop Proceedings.

After the Workshop, we intend to make a selection of the best papers based on this year's and previous years' Workshops, and to publish extended versions of these papers in a dedicated volume on Balto­-Slavic NLP, as a book or as a special journal issue. We are currently in the process of negotiating with reputable publishers.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Interactive presentation proposals due: 7 August 2015
  • Notification of acceptance: 12 August 2015
  • Camera-ready versions due: 16 August 2015
  • Workshop: 10-11 September 2015

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

The current make-up of the Programme Committee is available HERE