Workshop on The Software Engineering and Architecture of Language Technology Systems (SEALTS) HLT-NAACL03 31 May 2003 Edmonton, Canada http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/research/sealts.html Overview A number of researchers argued in the early and middle 1990s that the field of computational infrastructure, or architecture, for Natural Language Processing, merited an increase in attention. The reasoning was that the increasingly large-scale and technologically significant nature of NLP science was placing increasing burdens of an engineering nature on R&D workers seeking robust and practical methods. Over the intervening period a number of significant systems and practices have been developed in what we may call Software Architecture for Language Engineering. Of the most prominent are: RAGS, Reference Architecture for Generation Systems (Brighton and Edinburgh) LT XML (Edinburgh) TEI, CES, XCES (Oxford, Vassar, etc.) ATLAS (LDC, NIST) Galaxy Communicator Software Infrastructure (MIT & MITRE) ProtE9gE9 (Stanford) GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering (Sheffield) This workshop represents an opportunity for practitioners in this area to report their work in a coordinated setting. The value to the community at large will be to get a snapshot of the state-of-the-art in infrastructural work, which may indicate where further take-up of these systems can be of benefit Topics We solicit papers from the following research areas, and other allied topics: The Architecture of Language Technology Systems (LTS) Standards of best practice Standards for knowledge transfer and code sharing between LTS Language resource construction and management Relationship of LTS to Semantic Web architectures Engineering LTS for different purposes Comparative Reviews of Architectures Comparative experiments of different architectures and implementations Data Sharing in LT Systems Knowledge storage Message Passing LT System project management Strategies for Distribution and Scalability Data Models Instructions for Authors Due to the short time for submission two types of papers will be accepted, namely: Full papers: 7-8 pages Short papers: 1-6 pages. Short papers will be given half the speaking time of full papers. No differentiation will be made in the publication of the Proceedings. The Organisers reserve the right to request a paper to be reduced to short paper length if they believe it is appropriate. This policy is aimed at encouraging researchers who have experimental plans that have not yet been tested by implementation, or by papers that are exploratory or speculative. Significant review papers aimed to point the way to the future are also encouraged. Submissions Papers should be in PDF format and formatted according to the HLT-NAACL guidelines (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/hlt-naacl03/ format.html). Do not anonymize submissions, since reviewing for the workshop will not be blind. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the style files accessible through the above web page. Send your submission to Jon Patrick (jonpat@it.usyd.edu.au). Important Dates Paper submission deadline: 23 March Notification of acceptance for papers: 7 April Camera ready papers due: 14 April Workshop date: May 31 Organisers Jon Patrick, University of Sydney (http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~jonpat/) Hamish Cunningham, University of Sheffield (http://gate.ac.uk/hamish) Program Committee Xabier Artola Zubillaga, IXA, University of the Basque Country Stephen Bird, Melbourne University Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield Walter Daelemans, Universities of Antwerp and Tilburg Thierry DeClerck, University of Saarland (CL-Lab) and DFKI (LT-lab) Bill Dolan, Microsoft Research, Redmond Alistair Knott, Otago University Mark Maybury, MITRE Corporation Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield Alan Marwick, IBM, TJ Watson Laboratory Cecile Paris, CSIRO, Australia Yorick Wilks, Sheffield University Ming Zhou, Microsoft Research, Beijing