Call for Papers

We invite papers on various topics concerning the use of Web resources for corpus research and NLP applications, including (but not limited to) the following:

• linguistic Web crawler technology and Web corpus collection projects
• applications of Web-derived corpora and other kinds of Web data
• how far does the “easy way” get you? (using search engines, or Google's n-gram lists; we are particularly interested in a critical discussion of the usefulness and limitations of such approaches)
• methods and tools for “cleaning” Web pages to turn them into a corpus (contributors to this topic will be encouraged to participate in the second CLEANEVAL competition to be held in 2009)
• automatic linguistic annotation of Web data: tokenisation, POS tagging, lemmatisation, semantic tagging, etc. (established tools often perform very poorly on Web data)
• search engine architectures for linguists: bringing linguistics to commercial search engines, or high-performance search technology to linguistics?
• search engine-related topics such as result ranking (e.g. how to identify “typical” uses rather than returning 50 very similar matches on the first page)
• duplicate detection, interactive query refinement, etc.
• reviews and clever uses of search engine APIs (Google, Yahoo, Altavista, and in particular Microsoft's current generous Live Search API)

The workshop will be held on 7 September, 2009, in San Sebastian, preceding SEPLN, the Spanish NLP conference: ​http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/sepln2009/

We particularly welcome submissions on the use of languages other than English. One of the bottlenecks in corpus linguistic research on a particular language consists in availability of corpora for this language: translation studies for, say, Ukrainian or Vietnamese are limited by the existence of diverse corpora for these languages. The Web gives the opportunity to alleviate this bottleneck, as millions of Ukrainian or Vietnamese texts are available on the Web, but we still do not know many parameters of what is there and how useful it is for translation, language teaching, linguistics research, etc.

Submission information

Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Submissions should follow the format of LREC proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of LREC LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files tailored for this year's conference. Submissions are managed via EasyChair.org. In order to submit a paper, login at ​http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wac5 (or register an account with EasyChair if you don't have one yet), then click New Submission and fill in the standard fields.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: 17 April, 2009
• Decisions sent by: 12 June, 2009
• Camera-ready submission deadline: 17 July, 2009
• Welcome party: 6 September, 2009
• Workshop: 7 September, 2009

Programme committee

• Silvia Bernardini, U of Bologna, Italy
• Massimiliano Ciaramita, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain
• Jesse de Does, INL, Netherlands
• Katrien Depuydt, INL, Netherlands
• Stefan Evert, U of Osnabrück, Germany
• Cédrick Fairon, UCLouvain, Belgium
• William Fletcher, U.S. Naval Academy, USA
• Gregory Grefenstette, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, France
• Péter Halácsy, Budapest U of Technology and Economics, Hungary
• Katja Hofmann, U of Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Adam Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing Ltd, UK
• Igor Leturia, Elhuyar Fundazioa, Basque Country, Spain
• Preslav Nakov, National U of Singapore
• Phil Resnik, U of Maryland, College Park, USA
• Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis U, USA
• Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, U Gent, Belgium
• Klaus Schulz, LMU München, Germany
• Serge Sharoff, U of Leeds, UK
• Eros Zanchetta, U of Bologna, Italy

Organising committee

• Stefan Evert, University of Osnabrück
• Igor Leturia, Elhuyar Fundazioa
• Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds