Dates:
DEADLINE FOR PAPERS: 15 February 2012
Workshop Saturday, 26 May 2012
Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre
Istanbul, Turkey
Some of the information is from: Call for papers. the main conference site does not (yet) have the call for papers posted. Suggest that you verify dates with conference organizers before making travel arrangements.
From the call for papers:
In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In language engineering, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as statistical machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest in themselves by making possible inter-linguistic discoveries and comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that comparable corpora are documents in one or several languages that are comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions. We believe that the linguistic definitions and observations related to comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for applications of statistical NLP. As such, it is of great interest to bring together builders and users of such corpora.
The scarcity of parallel corpora has motivated research concerning the use of comparable corpora: pairs of monolingual corpora selected according to the same set of criteria, but in different languages or language varieties. Non-parallel yet comparable corpora overcome the two limitations of parallel corpora, since sources for original, monolingual texts are much more abundant than translated texts. However, because of their nature, mining translations in comparable corpora is much more challenging than in parallel corpora. What constitutes a good comparable corpus, for a given task or per se, also requires specific attention: while the definition of a parallel corpus is fairly straightforward, building a non-parallel corpus requires control over the selection of source texts in both languages.
Parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons and terminologies. However, beyond a few language pairs such as English-French or English-Chinese and a few contexts such as parliamentary debates or legal texts, they remain a scarce resource, despite the creation of automated methods to collect parallel corpora from the Web. To exemplify such issues in a practical setting, this year’s special focus will be on
Language Resources for Machine Translation in Less-Resourced Languages and Domains
with the aim of overcoming the shortage of parallel resources when building MT systems for less-resourced languages and domains, particularly by usage of comparable corpora for finding parallel data within and by reaching out for “hidden” parallel data. Lack of sufficient language resources for many language pairs and domains is currently one of the major obstacles in further advancement of machine translation.
Curious about the use of topic maps in the creation of comparable corpora? Seems like the use of language/domain scopes on linguistic data could result in easier construction of comparable corpora.