Call for papers

BSNLP 2015: the 5th Biennial International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing
Hissar, Bulgaria
10-11 September 2015
http://bsnlp-2015.cs.helsinki.fi

Held in conjunction with:
RANLP 2015: Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
5-11 September 2015

Workshop is endorsed by:
SIGSLAV: ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Processing in Slavic Languages

Organizing Committee

THEME and MOTIVATION

The languages from the Balto-Slavic group play an important role due to their diverse cultural heritage and widespread use — with over 400 million speakers. The recent political and economic developments in Central and Eastern Europe have brought Balto-Slavic societies and their languages into focus in terms of rapid technological advancement and rapidly expanding consumer markets.

This Workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Balto-Slavic languages. The NLP tasks in urgent need of attention include, but are not limited to:

  • morphological analysis and generation,
  • morpho-syntactic tagging and parsing,
  • semantic parsing,
  • lexical semantics,
  • named-entity recognition,
  • co-reference resolution,
  • information extraction,
  • sentiment analysis,
  • question answering,
  • information retrieval,
  • text summarization,
  • machine translation.

Research on theoretical and applied topics in the context of many Balto-Slavic languages is still in its early stages. The linguistic phenomena specific to Balto-Slavic languages — such as rich morphological inflection and free word order — make the construction of NLP tools for these languages a challenging and intriguing task.

The goal of this Workshop is to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on NLP for Balto-Slavic languages. In particular, the Workshop will serve as an instrument to further stimulate the research on NLP techniques for Balto-Slavic languages, and to foster the creation of tools for these languages. The Workshop will provide an forum for exchanging ideas and experience, discussing difficult-to-tackle problems in this field of research, and making the available resources more widely-known. One fascinating aspect of this sub-family of languages is the striking structural similarity, as well as an easily recognizable core vocabulary and inflectional inventory spanning the entire group of languages — despite a lack of mutual intelligibility — which creates a special environment in which researchers can fully appreciate the shared problems and solutions and communicate naturally.

This Workshop continues the proud tradition established by the previous BSNLP Workshops:

  • BSNLP 2013: the 4th Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing, co-located with ACL 2013. Sofia, Bulgaria, 8-9 August 2013.
  • the Third BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with TSD 2011, 14th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue in Plzeň, Czech Republic.
  • the Second BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with IIS 2009: Intelligent Information Systems, in Kraków, Poland; and
  • the First BSNLP Workshop, held in conjunction with ACL 2007 Conference in Prague;

SUBMISSION

We accept two types of submissions: (a) full papers and (b) short papers. We accept only electronic submissions via the submission page.

Long papers should describe original unpublished work and should indicate the state of completion of the reported results. Short papers should describe work in progress, small focused contributions and/or interactive software demonstrations.

Overlap with previously published work should be clearly mentioned. The authors should indicate along with their submission if the paper has been submitted elsewhere, e.g., for the main conference. In particular, in case the paper is rejected by the main conference, it should be indicated in the submission.

All submissions, both long and short papers, will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, usability, and significance/relevance to the Workshop. Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.

The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Self ­citations and other references that reveal the authors' identities should be avoided.

In particular, submissions describing systems, resources, or solutions that are made available to the wider public would be strongly encouraged, as this would help to promote computational linguistics applications for Balto­Slavic languages.

Long paper submissions should follow the two-column format of RANLP 2015 proceedings not exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus two (2) additional pages for references. Short paper submissions should follow the same format, and should not exceed five (5) pages for content plus two (2) additional pages for references. Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines of RANLP 2015, which are contained in the style files, and must be in PDF. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers must be provided in LaTeX.

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the workshop is English.

PUBLICATION

The papers accepted for BSNLP 2015 will be published in BSNLP Workshop Proceedings.

After the Workshop, we intend to make a selection of the best papers based on this year's and previous years' Workshops, and to publish extended versions of these papers in a dedicated volume on Balto­-Slavic NLP, as a book or as a special journal issue. We are currently in the process of negotiating with reputable publishers.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Paper submissions due: 26 June 2015 5 July 2015
  • Notification of acceptance: 25 July 2015 7 August 2015
  • Camera-ready versions due: 6 August 2015 12 August 2015
  • Workshop: 10-11 September 2015

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

The current set up of the Programme Committee is available HERE