8th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-8) @ ​Corpus Linguistics 2013

Lancaster, UK; Monday 22nd July 2013

Web corpora and other Web-derived data have become a gold mine for corpus linguistics and natural language processing. The Web is an easy source of unprecedented amounts of linguistic data from a broad range of registers and text types. However, a collection of Web pages is not immediately suitable for exploration in the same way a traditional corpus is.

Since the first Web as Corpus Workshop organised at the Corpus Linguistics 2005 Conference, a highly succesful series of yearly Web as Corpus workshops provides a venue for interested researchers to meet, share ideas and discuss the problems and possibilities of compiling and using Web corpora. After a stronger focus on application-oriented natural language processing and Web technology in recent years -- with workshops taking place at the NAACL-HLT 2010, 2011 and WWW 2012 -- the 8th Web as Corpus Workshop returns to its roots in the corpus linguistics community.

Accordingly, the leading theme of this workshop is the application of Web data in language research, including linguistic evaluation of Web-derived corpora as well as strategies and tools for high-quality automatic annotation of Web text. We invite papers on all aspects of building and using Web corpora, with a particular focus on (but not limited to) the following:

• applications of Web corpora and other Web-derived data sets for language research
• automatic linguistic annotation of Web data such as tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatisation and semantic tagging (the accuracy of established software tools is still unsatisfactory for many types of Web data)
• critical exploration of characteristics of Web data from a linguistic perspective and its applicability to language research
• presentation of Web corpus collection projects or software tools required for some part of the process (crawling, filtering, de-duplication, language identification, indexing, ...)

Submission Information

Authors are invited to submit extended abstracts on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Contributions must be submitted in PDF format and should not exceed two (2) pages, including references. We strongly encourage use of the LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files provided on the workshop Web page.

Authors of those papers that are accepted will be invited to submit full papers (up to eight pages) before the workshop itself and these will appear in an online proceedings.

Important dates

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Organising committee

• Stefan Evert, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)
• Egon Stemle, European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC)
• Paul Rayson, Lancaster University

Programme committee

Organising committee plus:

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