Call for Participation
   
   
                      A Workshop on Minimizing the Effort
                      for Language Resource Acquisition
                      Granada, Spain, 26 May, 1998
                  
                           in conjunction with 
   
                     The First International Conference
                     on Language Resources and Evaluation
   
                       Granada, Spain, 28-30, May 1998
   
   
An applied NLP system must produce adequate results and must be made deployable
within reasonable time. Gathering and acquiring language  resources to build an
application system is very time-consuming, and it is imperative to find ways of
speeding up  acquisition of high quality, useful  static knowledge sources such
as a variety of grammars, lexicons, corpora, etc. Viability of avoiding massive
resource acquisition, if possible, must also be carefully considered.
Resource acquisition should include methods,   based both on sound  theoretical
principles  and practical experience, of deciding,  among  other things, on the
amount of knowledge one *really* needs for a given application.  Increasing the
size of knowledge sources or their number and variety does not necessarily lead
to a commensurate improvement  of  output quality in  an application,  though a
correlation between the two  certainly exists, but  it definitely needs to much
increased costs.
No matter how large  the acquired resources are and  how many of them have been
acquired,  there will always remain  a residue  of language processing problems
which can be tackled only by foregoing the requirement of full automation
and involving expensive semi-automatic or even  manual acquisition.  It becomes
imperative, therefore, to assess  when the static knowledge  source acquisition
is  NO  LONGER PROFITABLE.  Thus,  in  a system  for  interactive authoring and
automatic generation of patent  claim texts, the  lexical knowledge base can be
restricted to a  lexicon of domain-related  verbs marked  for subcategorization
(as the nominals are provided interactively by the author).

The proposed workshop will be devoted to ANY TECHNOLOGICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE
FACET OF ECONOMY OF ACQUISITION EFFORT. 

The technological issues to be discussed at the conference include, BUT ARE NOT
LIMITED TO:
- minimization of effort in acquiring monolingual and multilingual text corpora;
- minimization of effort in acquiring computational lexicons, including
phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and other (including
application-specific) information;
- minimization of effort in acquisition of resources for the support of
corpus-based language engineering methods;
- minimization of effort in acquiring grammatical coverage of languages and
sublanguages ;
- methods of determining levels of reusability of existing language resources;
- balancing the needs of the application and the grain size of language
description; 
- minimization of effort through balancing automatic and interactive methods of
knowledge acquisition;
- evaluation of potential utility of resources to applications;

We particularly encourage reports about actual practical large-scale
resource acquisition efforts in which economy of effort has been a conscious
choice. 

Organizing Committee:
Svetlana Sheremetyeva, NMSU CRL, USA (Chair)
Eduard Hovy, USC ISI, USA
Bernardo Magnini, IRST, Italy
Sergei Nirenburg, NMSU CRL, USA
Victor Raskin,  Purdue University, USA
Frederique Segonde, Xerox Research Centre Europe, France
Leo Wanner, University of Stuttgart, Germany

SUBMISSION  OF PAPERS
Papers should not exceed 4000 words or 10 pages. Presentations will  be 
selected on  the  basis of a  review of papers and project reports. 

SUBMISSION MODE
Each submission should  include a title  page containing  the title, author(s),
affiliation(s),   submitting author's mailing   address, telephone  number, fax
number and e-mail address. 

The authors may submit three hard copies OR submit ELECTRONICALLY in
postscript form to: 

Svetlana Sheremetyeva
Computing Research Laboratory   
New Mexico State University, USA
Box30001/Dept.3CRL/Las Cruces
New Mexico 88003-8001
lana@crl.nmsu.edu

Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged. 

IMPORTANT DATES
Thursday, February 19, 1998    Submissions due
Monday, March, 16 1998         Acceptances and rejections sent to authors
Friday, April 10 1998          Final papers due
Tuesday, May 26, 1998          Workshop date

Registration for the workshop will be:
10,000 pesetas for those not attending LREC
5,000 pesetas for those attending LREC

These fees will include a coffee break and the proceedings of the workshop.
Participation in the workshop will be limited by the venue. Requests for
participation will be processed on the first come first served basis.