4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages:
Corpora and Sign Language Technologies (CSLT)

May 22nd/23rd, 2010 in Valletta (Malta)

http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec2010/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Abstracts are invited for a one-and-a-half-day workshop on sign language corpora to take place following the 2010 LREC conference. Recent technological developments allow sign language researchers to create relatively large video corpora of sign language use that were unimaginable ten years ago. Several national projects are currently underway, or about to start. This workshop aims to share experiences from current and past efforts: What are the technical problems that were encountered and the solutions created, what are the linguistic decisions taken? At the same time, the workshop shall also look into the future: How can we establish standards for linguistic tagging and metadata, avoid reinventing the wheel, but instead add sign language specifics to well-established or emerging best practices from the general Language Resources community? Corpus data becoming available is essential for sign language technology, and at the same time, advances in technologies make corpus work more efficient. Reports on exploring these synergies are especially welcome.
We invite abstracts for 20-minutes papers or posters (with or without
demonstrations) on the following topics:
•       Experiences in building sign language corpora
•       Elicitation methodology appropriate for corpus collection
•       Proposals for standards for linguistic annotation or for metadata descriptions
•       Experiences from linguistic research using corpora
•       Use of corpora in teaching and eLearning contexts
•       Use of (parallel) corpora in interpreting and translation studies
•       Language documentation and long-term accessibility for sign language data
•       Video compression and streaming for sign language
•       Tool development
•       Lexicon construction
•       Linking corpora and lexicons
•       Multimodal visual anaysis for automatic sign language processing
•       Computer recognition and machine translation of sign language
•       Steps towards automatic annotation of sign language
•       Signing avatars

Short papers of both paper presentations and posters (4-6 pages) of this workshop will be published as workshop proceedings that are included in the conference package.
Please submit your abstract (max. 500 words) through the LREC START system at https://www.softconf.com/lrec2010/CSLT2010/ not later than Feb 10th, 2010.

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research.
For further information on this new initiative, please refer to
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?LREC2010-Map-of-Language-Resources.

Organising Committee:
Philippe Dreuw, Aachen DE
Eleni Efthimiou, Athens GR
Thomas Hanke, Hamburg DE
Trevor Johnston, Sydney AU
Gregorio Martínez Ruiz, Barcelona ES
Adam Schembri, London GB

For contacting the organisers, please send an email to
lrec2010@sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de.

Programme Committee:
Richard Bowden, Guildford GB
Penny Boyes Braem, Zürich CH
Annelies Braffort, Orsay FR
Onno Crasborn, Nijmegen NL
Patrice Dalle, Toulouse FR
Evita Fotinea, Athens GR
John Glauert, Norwich GB
Jens Heßmann, Magdeburg DE
Jette Kristoffersen, Copenhagen DK
Lorraine Leeson, Dublin IE
Petros Maragos, Athens GR
Johanna Mesch, Stockholm SE
Carol Neidle, Boston US
Hermann Ney, Aachen DE
Christian Rathmann, Hamburg DE
Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa, Pelotas BR
Graham Turner, Edinburgh GB
Meike Vaupel, Zwickau DE
Chiara Vettori, Bolzano IT
Christian Vogler, Athens GR

Important dates:
• Deadline for abstracts (max. 500 words): February 10, 2010
• Notification of acceptance: February 25, 2010
• Submission of short paper: March 22, 2010
• Workshop: May 22 (all day) & May 23 (morning), 2010
• LREC main conference: May 19-21, 2010
• LREC pre-conference workshops May 17/18

Workshop languages:
English and International Sign. Deaf participants who prefer to bring interpreters for their national sign language are kindly encouraged to do so and to contact the organisers to make further arrangements.

About the workshop series:
Workshops on sign language representation and processing at the last day of LREC are now becoming a tradition: At LREC 2004 in Lisbon, the series started with a workshop dedicated to sign notation and sign writing as well as image processing. In 2006, at LREC in Genova, the focus was on information technology in learning sign language or learning with sign language. At the third incarnation of this workshop, in 2008 at LREC in Marrakesh, the focus was on sign language corpora, esp. on how sign language corpora are designed and constructed, and also on what to use corpora for. This last workshop was so successful both in number of participants and contributions that we could successfully apply for a duration of one and a half days – rather uncommon for LREC satellite workshops.

About LREC (Language Resources and Evaluation Conference):
The workshop is organised as an LREC satellite workshop right after the main conference. Please visit http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/ for more information on the main conference (as well as on the location).

This workshop is supported by the EU-funded FP7 projects Dicta-Sign(http://www.dictasign.eu) and SignSpeak (http://www.signspeak.eu).