Participants of former LTC events came from:

Since 1995! 22nd Anniversary!

Patronage:

Dear Colleagues,

The 8th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2017), a meeting organized by the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland and the Adam Mickiewicz University Foundation, will take place on November 17-19, 2017. Following the tradition of the past events, it is supported by ELRA, FlaReNet, and META-NET.

Yes, we started 22 years ago! Our tradition goes back to the Language and Technology Awareness Days, a meeting organized in 1995 with the assistance of the European Commission (DG XIII). Among the key speakers were Antonio Zampolli (Italy), Dafydd Gibbon (Germany), Dan Tufiş (Romania), Orest Kossak (Ukraina). Today, we refer to this event as the first LTC. Ten years later, we decided to meet again, and since then the conference is being organized every two years as the “Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics”.

Since the very beginning (1995) the meetings of the LTC series continue to address Human Language Technologies (HLT) as a challenge for computer science, linguistics and related fields. Fostering language technologies and resources remains an important objective in our dynamically changing information-saturated world that motivate us to invite you for joining us at the LTC 2017 in Poznań.

Zygmunt Vetulani and Patrick Paroubek
LTC 2017 Co-Chairs
vetulani@amu.edu.pl and pap@limsi.fr

Chris Cieri

Executive Director, Linguistic Data Consortium,University of Pennsylvania,3600 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA. 19104 Penn State University, USA

BIO: Christopher Cieri’s interests lie at the intersection of language, large data, and computation. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania where he focused on sociolinguistics, language contact, phonetics, phonology and morphology. He has worked since 1983 applying technology to linguistic analysis and language teaching using data sets that are too large to process with purely human effort. Cieri became the Executive Director of the Linguistic Data Consortium in 1998 and has since been responsible for overseeing all aspects of the Consortium’s operations including the publication of over 500 data sets and the management of many sponsored programs. His current work focuses on the science of linguistic annotation and the analysis of conversational data, most recently in identifying linguistic features to correlate with clinical diagnostic categories. See here for CV

Title: Addressing the Language Resource Gap through Alternative Incentives, Workforces and Workflows

Abstract:For most languages, genres and technologies, the absence of Language Resources impedes progress despite several decades of intensive effort from governments and companies around the world. This deficiency even affects languages with worldwide economic and political influence and for most of the world’s 7000 linguistic varieties, the absence is acute. Current approaches cannot hope to meet the resource demand for even a reasonable subset of languages because they seek to document phenomena of great variability using resources that are highly constrained in terms of amount, duration and scope. This paper describes efforts that use non-monetary incentives to elicit greater contributions of linguistic data, metadata and annotation and sketches the adjustments to workforces, workflows and post-processing needed to collect and exploit data so elicited. MORE

Joseph van Genabith

DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken, Germany

BIO: Josef van Genabith is one of the Scientific Directors of DFKI, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, where he heads the Multilingual Technologies (MLT) Group, and jointly with Prof. Hans Uszkoreit, the Language Technology (LT) Lab. He is also Professor of Translation-Oriented Language Technologies at Saarland University, Germany. He was the founding Director of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL, now ADAPT), in Dublin, Ireland, and a Professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University (DCU). He worked as a researcher at the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (IMS) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Essex, U.K., and obtained his first degree at RWTH Aachen, Germany. His research interests include machine translation, parsing, generation, computer-assisted-language-learning and morphology. Currently he coordinates the QT21 H2020 research and innovation project on machine translation (http://www.qt21.eu/) and heads EC SMART 2014/1074 and 2015/1091 service contracts on European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) (http://www.lr-coordination.eu/). The Impact of Neural Networks on Language Technologies: a Case Study on Machine Translation. MORE

Title: The Impact of Neural Networks on Language Technologies: a Case Study on Machine Translation

Abstract: Deep Neural Nets (DNNs) are revolutionising many (if not most) areas in Artificial Intelligence, including Language Technologies (LTs), often with remarkable performance improvements. In this talk, I would like to take a closer look at why this is the case, focusing on Machine Translation (MT). I will contrast neural MT with previous approaches to MT. In doing so I will be drawing on research carried out in the QT21 H2020 research and innovation project (http://www.qt21.eu/) and QT21 systems for the WMT-2015, -2016 and -2017 shared tasks. I will concentrate on morphologically complex languages with less constrained word order. I will also consider the more general impact of DNNs on processing pipelines, interoperability (as in system engineering) and end-to-end training for complex LT systems. I will outline potential benefits and end with a list of some of the currently open research questions.

Verónica Dahl
Computing Science Department, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby B.C., Canada

Verónica Dahl is an Argentine/Canadian computer scientist who is recognized as one of the 15 founders of the field of logic programming. She has contributed over 100 scientific publications in the fields of computational linguistics, deductive knowledge bases, computational molecular biology and web based virtual worlds. She has received numerous scientific awards, such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Award for Science and Technology, and a few literary awards as well. Her greatest ambition is to help bridge the gap between the formal and the humanistic sciences, in the hopes that this will be conducive to an overall more balanced world. She is presently Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University. Her research is supported by NSERC.
See here for full CV

Title:Truth and Beauty in Computational Linguistics

Abstract:
We coin and propose the "Colmerauer test" as an alternative to the Turing test as a method to evaluate computational linguistic theories along the axes of truth (how much of the truth are we able to glean within a given approach?) and beauty (how elegant are the formulations resulting from a given approach?). We argue that in computational linguistics, the Colmerauer test is superior to the more widely used Turing test.

Jan Wielemaker
University of Amsterdam, Computer Science, Netherlands

Jan Wielemaker, original author of SWI Prolog... (will be completed soon)

Title: Will be announced soon

Abstract: Soon here

Alain Colmerauer (1941-2017), Pioneer of logic programming in natural language processing and LTC Program Committee member in 2005, left us on May 12, 2017

The list of conference topics includes the following (the ordering is not significative):

• communicative intelligence
• computational semantics
• computer modeling of language competence
• corpora-based methods in language engineering
• electronic language resources and tools
• formalization of natural languages
• HLT related policies
• HLT standards and best practices
• HLTs as support for e-learning
• HLTs as support for foreign language teaching
• HLTs as support in solving homeland security problems (technology applications and legal aspects)
• knowledge representation
• language-specific computational challenges for HLTs (especially for languages other than English)
• legal issues connected with HLTs (problems and challenges)
• less resourced languages
• logic programming in natural language processing
• man-machine NL interfaces
• methodological issues in HLT
• NL applications in robotics
• NL based interfaces
• NL understanding by computers
• NL user modeling
• NLP methods in cyber-criminality detection and prevention
• parsing and other forms of NL processing
• question answering
• sentiment, opinion and emotion analysis
• speech processing
• system prototype presentations
• systems with NL competence
• technological aspects of nonverbal linguistics
• text-based information retrieval and extraction
• tools and methodologies for developing multilingual systems
• translation enhancement tools
• validation in all areas of HLTs
• visionary papers in the field of HLT
• WordNet-like ontologies

This list is by no means closed and we are open to further proposals. Please do not hesitate to contact us in order to feed us with your suggestions and ideas of how to satisfy your expectations concerning the program. The Program Committee is also open to suggestions concerning accompanying events (workshops, exhibits, panels, etc). Suggestions, ideas and observations should be addressed directly to the LTC Co-Chairs by email (vetulani@amu.edu.pl or pap@limsi.fr) .

On numerous requests and questions we are pleased to announce a special call for demos and posters to be presented during the LTC 2017 (November 17-19, 2017) at dedicated time slots.

This Call for Demos and Posters Language is addressed to the whole concerned community: researchers, language engineers, language engineering providers. We welcome demos and/or posters presenting final results as well as current on-going projects concerning Language Resources (LR), LR Tools and LR-based Software, as well as related theoretical issues.
Companies are invited to present their novel or state-of-the-art products. We are interested in:

• language technology based products,
• application-scale language engineering tools,
• applications for production, conservation and maintenance of HLT language resources.

The content of demos/posters must be strictly compatible with the thematic scope of the LTC (see above).

SUBMISSION
Submission should be made in the same way as for LTC papers. Authors are supposed to submit an abstract of 300 – 500 words (including title, affiliation, keywords), no longer than one page.
Submission procedure as for regular LTC papers (with DEMO/POSTER in the paper description).

ACCEPTANCE/REJECTION
Submissions should not be anonymous and will be checked by Organizers for compatibility with the general LTC activity area, as well for formal correctness.

ABSTRACTS
Abstracts will be published in the “Abstracts Corner” of the proceedings:
- in both paper and electronic form if submitted before October 29 and the payment of the conference fee effected by November 1,
- in the electronic form only in case of submission before November 6 and payment before November 9 (Thursday).

TECHNICAL ASPECTS
Demo presenters are supposed to be equipped with necessary mobile computer equipment. No additional screens will be available. Internet will be provided. Posters must be in the A0 format and will be displayed horizontally. No other format will be accepted.

DATES/DEADLINES
Submission deadline: November 9

REGISTRATION AND FEES
All presenters must register to the LTC and pay the conference fee. Fees as well as the payment procedure are the same for demo, poster and paper presenters.
Presentation of demos and posters closely related to an accepted paper (the same title with the subtitle respectively DEMO or POSTER) is free for paper presenters.

CONTACT
ltc17@amu.edu.pl
mkubis@amu.edu.pl
vetulani@amu.edu.pl

The conference language is English.

Acceptance will be based on the reviewers' assessments (anonymous submission model /blind reviewing/). The accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings (hard copy, with ISBN number) and on CD-ROM. The abstracts of the accepted contributions will also be made available via the conference page (during its lifetime). Publication requires full electronic registration and payment of the conference fee (full registration) by at least one of the co-authors before (*The date to be announced*). For the obvious reason that the conference fee must cover (in particular) the publication costs, the following rule is applied: "One registration fee entitles publication of one paper.

A post-conference volume with extended versions of selected papers will be published in the Springer Verlag series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.

The LTC 2005 post conference selection appeared in form of Special Issue of Archives of Control Sciences (2005, Volume 15 nb. 3 and Volume 15 nb. 4)

The LTC 2007 post-conference volume (revised, extended papers) appeared in the Springer Verlag series LNAI (vol. 5603).

The LTC 2009 post-conference volume (revised, extended papers) appeared in the Springer Verlag series LNAI (vol. 6562).

The LTC 2011 post-conference volume (revised, extended papers) appeared in the Springer Verlag series LNAI (vol. 8387).

The LTC 2013 post-conference volume (revised, extended papers) appeared in the Springer Verlag series LNAI (vol. 9561).

The LTC 2015 post-conference volume (revised, extended papers) is in preparation.

The conference accepts papers in English only. Papers (5 pages in the conference format) are due by September 25, 2017 (midnight, any time zone) and should not disclose the author(s) in any manner. In order to facilitate submission we have decided to reduce the formatting requirements as much as possible at this stage. Please, however, do observe the following:

1. Accepted fonts for texts are Times Roman, Times New Roman. Courier is recommended for program listings. Character size for the main text should be 10 points, with 11 points leading (line spacing).
2. Text should be presented in 2 columns, 8,42 cm each with 0,95 cm between columns (gutter).
3. The accepted document size is 5 pages formatted according to (1) and (2) above.
4. The paper must be submitted as a PDF document, together with an editable source in MS Word or Latex. (Please no other formats.)

The Word template (ELRA/LREC based format) is available here.

The Latex template (ELRA/LREC based format) is available here.

All submissions are to be made electronically via the LTC'17 web submission system (EasyChair).

Acceptance/refusal notification will be sent by October 16, 2017. At the same time, the detailed guidelines for the final submission of accepted papers will be published on the conference web site.

The deadline for final submissions is October 27, 2017.

Final papers should be sent by e-mail to ltc17@amu.edu.pl as an attachment and should conform to the following rules:

• The attached file should be named ltc-PAPERID-FirstAuthorName.pdf   /example: ltc-005-copernicus.pdf (the paper #5 with Copernicus as the submitting author).
• The subject of your e-mail should be LTC FINAL PAPER  PAPERID   /example: LTC FINAL PAPER 005.
• The required final format is the same as for the initial paper submission. Please use the same templates to prepare the final PDF file.

• Deadline for submission of papers for review: September 25, 2017
• Acceptance/Refusal notification: October 16, 2017
• Deadline for submission of final versions of accepted papers: October 23, October 27, 2017
• Conference: November 17-19, 2017
• LTC affiliated workshops and demo/poster sessions: see the sections corresponding to respective workshops and sessions

Registration and payment details will be announced soon.

Non-student participants:

• Regular registration fee (payment before November 1, 2017): 200 EURO
• Late registration fee (payment after October 31, 2017): 260 EURO

• Regular registration fee (payment before November 1, 2017): 140 EURO
• Late registration fee (payment after October 31, 2017): 190 EURO

To be entitled to student rates the participant must present a student card (or equivalent document) valid on July 31, 2017.

Student registrations must be accompanied by proof of full-time student status (in form of scanned copy of a student ID card or equivalent document) and send by e-mail to ltc17@amu.edu.pl. The e-mail subject field must have the following format:
LTC-17-student-ID-card-'Name_of_participant'
(e.g. LTC-17-student-ID-card-Vetulani)

The conference fee covers:

• participation in the scientific program /including presentation of one paper/*)
• conference materials
• proceedings on CD and paper
• social events (banquet,...)
• coffee breaks

Conference fee for an accompanying persons is 60 EUR. The fee covers participation in non-scientific program (banquet,session coffee breaks).

The fee for one extra page (max. 2 allowed) will be charged 21 Euro.

*) In case of multiple submission the extra fee of 126 Euro for one additional paper of standard length (not covered by the conference fee paid by a co-author) is to be paid.

In the due time.

EDO Workshop paper submission deadline : September 25, 2017.
Acceptance/rejection notification: October 10, 2017.
Final version submission deadline (camera ready): October 23, 2017.
Conference/Workshop dates: November 17-19, 2017 (half-day, afternoon)

Inscription procedure: as for the general LTC (+ cc to workshop chairs)

Fees: The EDO Workshop is an integral part of the LTC (with autonomous Program Committee). Fees and payment procedures are the same as for LTC and cover participation in the general program. Free for participants registered to the general LTC. Single registration covers only one paper presentation (cf. the Publication Policy section).

Presentation: publication in the LTC proceedings (paper + CD)

More about EDO 2017: cf. http://arakilab.media.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/LTC8/EDO2017/ABOUT.html (the access to the program of both the main conference and the workshop (as well as the social program) is the same for all LTC/EDO participants).

Chairs
• Girish Nath Jha (JNU, India)
• Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy)


Papers submission deadline : September 25, 2017.
Workshop dates: November 17-19, 2017.
Deadline for submission of camera-ready final versions of the accepted papers: October 23, 2017.
See also the 5th LRL website.

The rapid growth of language technology has created a new challenge for many languages of the world today. While for some, this can take the shape of a positive competition among the stake holders, for others it can push them further down in the race towards endangerment and extinction. The LT-LRL Workshop is an attempt to bring together all stake holders, users, developers, researchers, language activists, policy makers on a single platform and discuss how resources, policies, standards could be developed for these languages so that they can develop technologies to enable themselves in the digital age. We will particularly welcome contributions addressing the following issues:

1) LRL: charting the field - what do we know about currently available LTs for LRLs? What is the current status of language technologies and use of LRLs in the digital and social media environments? How to draw a comprehensive and accurate picture and create a road map for future? Who are the actors to be involved? What is the experience of researchers and developers?

2) LRL: Resource development - how are the LRLs dealing with resource crunch, creation and related issues of standards, IDEs and platforms, funding, usability, sharing etc? What are the perceptions and roles of various stake holders including the governments, industry and language communities? What are the additional challenges posed by multilingual societies? What are the language preservation strategies for LRLs in the digital age?

3) LRL : technology development - challenges in the development of specific enabling technologies for LRLs at language, speech and multi-modal levels. How are these technologies used in areas such as communication, education, entertainment, health, administration. governance etc?

Fees: LRL is an integral part of the LTC (with autonomous Program Committee). Fees and payment procedures are the same for general LTC and worshop participants (cover participation in the general LTC program). Notice: the workshop is free for participants registered to the general LTC. Single registration covers only one paper presentation (general LTC or workshops) (cf. the Publication Policy section in case of more than one submitted paper).

Submition:
See the LRL web site: the 5th LRL website.

Reviewing and acceptance: on the ground of blind reviewing

More LRL participation details: cf. also the general program (the access to the program of both the main conference and the workshop (as well as the social program) is the same for all LTC/LRL participants).

PolEval Organizing Committee

Maciej Ogrodniczuk (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Łukasz Kobyliński (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences / Sages)
Aleksander Wawer (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Theme and Motivation

PolEval is a SemEval-inspired evaluation campaign for natural language processing tools for Polish. Submitted tools compete against one another within certain tasks selected by organisers, using available data and are evaluated according to pre-established procedures. PolEval 2017-related papers will be presented at a special session during LTC 2017.

Task 1: POS Tagging

There is an ongoing discussion whether the problem of part of speech tagging is already solved, at least for English, by reaching the tagging error rates similar or lower than the human inter-annotator agreement, which is ca. 97%. In the case of languages with rich morphology, such as Polish, there is however no doubt that the accuracies of around 91% delivered by taggers leave much to be desired and more work is needed to proclaim this task as solved. The aim of this proposed task is therefore to stimulate research in potentially new approaches to the problem of POS tagging of Polish, which will allow to close the gap between the tagging accuracy of systems available for English and languages with rich morphology.

Registered systems compete in three settings:

Subtask (A): Morphosyntactic disambiguation and guessing: Given a sequence of segments, each with a set of possible morphosyntactic interpretations, the goal of the task is to select the correct interpretation for each of the segments and provide an interpretation for segments for which only 'ign' interpretation has been given (segments unknown to the morphosyntactic dictionary).
Subtask (B): Lemmatisation: Given a sequence of segments, each with a set of possible morphosyntactic interpretations, the goal of the task is to select the correct lemma for each of the segments and provide a lemma for segments for which only 'ign' interpretation has been given (segments unknown to the morphosyntactic dictionary).
Complete system (C): POS tagging: Given a raw text in Polish, the goal of the task is to segment the text by separating individual flexemes and provide the correct lemma and POS tag for each of the segments.

Task 2: Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is a vital research area, approached at different levels: phrase-level (either in the context of opinion targets/aspects or phrases defined as syntactic sub-trees), sentence-level (related to the task of tweet-level analysis). The aim of this task is to promote research on this topic in the context of the Polish language, provide reference data sets to work and motivation for potentially new methods.

The systems compete in one setting: Given a set of syntactic dependency trees, the goal of the task is to provide the correct sentiment for each sub-tree (phrase). Phrases correspond to sub-trees of dependency parse tree. The annotations assign sentiment values to whole phrases (and in some cases, sentences), regardless of their type.

Important Dates

September 25, 2017: Deadline for submission of papers for review
October 16, 2017: Acceptance/Refusal notification
October 23, 2017: Deadline for submission of final versions of accepted papers
November 17-19, 2017: Conference

Presentation of results

All accepted system descriptions, following the LTC 2017-compatible review process (in a special track and with a special deadline set to end of August) will be published in the conference proceedings provided the author registers to the conference under standard LTC conditions. Extended versions of best papers from each main track will be recommended for publication in the post-conference Springer's LNAI volume (subject to additional rounds of reviews).

LTC 2017 will be located in Poznań, Poland. More information soon.

As at the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th Language and Technology Conferences (2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013,2015) special awards will be granted to the best student papers. The regular or PhD students (on the date of paper submission) are concerned. Co-authored papers will be considered provided that the students' contributions exceeds 60% and that the main author(s) is (are) student(s)(this fact must be documented by a written declaration signed by all co-authors).

In 2005 the Jury, composed of the Program Committee members participating in the conference, awarded this distinction to: Ronny Melz (University of Leipzig), Hartwig Holzapfel (University of Karlsruhe), Marcin Woliński (IPI PAN, Warsaw) (picture at LTC 2011).

This site is in progress. Further important practical information will be published shortly. Please consult this site again from time to time.