9th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-9) @ ​EACL 2014

April 26, 2014 (Gothenburg, Sweden)

Endorsed by ​ACL SIGWAC.

Description

The World Wide Web has become increasingly popular as a source of linguistic data, not only within the NLP communities, but also with theoretical linguists facing problems of data sparseness or data diversity. Accordingly, web corpora continue to gain importance, given their size and diversity in terms of genres/text types. However, the field is still new, and a number of issues in web corpus construction still needs much research (fundamental and applied), ranging from questions of corpus design (e.g., corpus composition assessment, sampling strategies and their relation to crawling algorithms, handling of duplicated material) to more technical aspects (e.g., efficient implementation of individual post-processing steps in document cleansing and linguistic annotation, or large-scale parallelization to achieve web-scale corpus construction). Similarly, the systematic evaluation of web corpora, for example in the form of task-based comparisons to traditional corpora, has only lately shifted into focus.

For almost a decade, the ACL SIGWAC, and especially the highly successful Web as Corpus (WaC) workshops have served as a platform for researchers interested in building and working with web-derived corpora. Past workshops have been co-located with major conferences on computational linguistics and/ or corpus linguistics (such as EACL, LREC, WWW, Corpus Linguistics). As part of the workshop, we will have a panel discussion dedicated to the planning of a shared task for WaC10 (2015), including the nomination of organizers of the shared task. The tracks of the shared task will focus on the quality of web corpus creation tools, tools for linguistic annotation (at least lemmatization, possibly also POS tagging, etc.), and the quality of web corpora themselves.

Call for papers

As in previous years, the 9th Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-9) invites original contributions pertaining to all aspects of web corpora, including data collection, cleaning, duplicate removal, document filtering, linguistic post-processing, and use of web corpora in language technology and linguistics.

However, a major challenge in the construction of web corpora is the question of the quality and the evaluation of both the software used in the construction of web corpora as well as the corpora themselves. Therefore, WaC9 seeks to put special emphasis on these topics, and it particularly encourages submissions addressing the following points:

• noise in web corpora: normalization and implications for linguistic annotation (lemmatization, POS tagging, parsing, etc.)
• task-based ("extrinsic") evaluation of web corpora, especially in comparison to traditional corpus resources and n-gram databases (Web 1T 5-Grams, Google Books)
• missing meta data in web corpora: enriching web corpora with data by automatic classification with high accuracy
• sampling strategies/ crawling algorithms and their effect on corpus composition/ corpus quality
• non-destructive cleaning and normalization of web data (Currently available web corpora have usually undergone radical cleaning procedures in order to produce "high-quality" data. At least for some uses of the data, aggressive and sometimes arbitrary removal of material in the form of whole documents or parts thereof can be problematic. The same is true for aggressive normalization of the data. To meet such problems, ways of cleaning and normalizing the data transparently, i.e., preserving the non-normalized forms, should be discussed.)

Submission details

Abstracts should be

• anonymous
• no longer than two pages (including figures and references)
• in PDF-format
• formatted according to the EACL stylesheet (LaTeX and MS Word templates are available ​here)
• submitted via the ​START online submission system no later than 23 January 2014

Organizing Committee

• Felix Bildhauer, Freie Universität Berlin
• Roland Schäfer, Freie Universität Berlin

Program Comittee

Organizing comittee, plus

• Adrien Barbaresi, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
• Silvia Bernardini, Università di Bologna
• Chris Biemann, Technische Universität Darmstadt
• Jesse Egbert, Northern Arizona University
• Stefan Evert, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Adriano Ferraresi, Università di Bologna
• William Fletcher, United States Naval Academy
• Dirk Goldhahn, Universität Leipzig
• Adam Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing Ltd.
• Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Alexander Mehler, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Uwe Quasthoff, Universität Leipzig
• Paul Rayson, Lancaster University
• Sabine Schulte, im Walde, Universität Stuttgart
• Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds
• Egon Stemle, European Academy of Bolzano
• Stephen Wattam, Lancaster University
• Yannick Versley, Universität Heidelberg
• Torsten Zesch, Universität Darmstadt

Important dates

• 11 November 2013: First Call for Workshop Papers
• 12 December 2013: Second Call for Workshop Papers
• 4 January 2014: Final Call for Workshop Papers
• 23 January 2014: Workshop Paper Due Date (0:00 UTC-12)
• 20 February 2014: Notification of Acceptance
• 3 March 2014: Camera-ready papers due
• 26-27 April 2014: EACL Workshop Dates