The 10th Web as Corpus Workshop

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
WAC-X
Location: 
Humboldt University
Friday, 12 August 2016
State: 
Berlin
Country: 
Germany
Contact Email: 
City: 
Berlin
Contact: 
Paul C. Cook
Stefan Evert
Roland Schäfer
Egon Stemle
Submission Deadline: 
Sunday, 15 May 2016

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The 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-X)
Deadline extension (15 May) and FINAL Call for Papers
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Endorsed by the Special Interest Group of the ACL on Web as Corpus (SIGWAC)

Co-located with ACL 2016
August 12, 2016, Berlin

Website: http://www.sigwac.org.uk/wiki/WAC-X
Contact email: wacx2016 [at] gmail.com

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WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The World Wide Web has become increasingly popular as a source of linguistic data, not only within the NLP communities, but also with theoretical linguists facing problems of data sparseness or data diversity. Accordingly, web corpora continue to gain importance, given their size and diversity in terms of genres/text types. The field is still new, though, and a number of issues in web corpus construction need much additional research, both fundamental and applied. These issues range from questions of corpus design (e.g., assessment of corpus composition, sampling strategies and their relation to crawling algorithms, and handling of duplicated material) to more technical aspects (e.g., efficient implementation of individual post-processing steps in document cleaning and linguistic annotation, or large-scale parallelization to achieve web-scale corpus construction). Similarly, the systematic evaluation of web corpora, for example in the form of task-based comparisons to traditional corpora, has only recently shifted into focus. For almost a decade, the ACL SIGWAC (http://www.sigwac.org.uk/), and especially the highly successful Web as Corpus (WAC) workshops have served as a platform for researchers interested in compilation, processing and application of web-derived corpora. Past workshops were co-located with major conferences on computational linguistics and/or corpus linguistics (such as EACL, NAACL, LREC, WWW, and Corpus Linguistics).

WAC-X will also feature the final workshop of the EmpiriST 2015 shared task "Automatic Linguistic Annotation of Computer-Mediated Communication/Social Media" (see https://sites.google.com/site/empirist2015/ for details) and the panel discussion "Corpora, open science, and copyright reforms" (see https://www.sigwac.org.uk/wiki/WAC-X#paneldisc for details).

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IMPORTANT DATES

15 May 2016: EXTENDED Workshop paper due date (23:59 GMT-12)
5 June 2016: Notification of acceptance
22 June 2016: Camera-ready papers due
12 August 2016: Workshop date

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SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

As in previous years, the 10th Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-X) invites contributions pertaining to all aspects of web corpus creation, including but not restricted to

* data collection (both for large web corpora and smaller custom web corpora)
* cleaning/handling of noise
* duplicate removal/document filtering
* linguistic post-processing (including non-standard data)
* automatic generation of meta data (including register, genre, etc.)
* corpus evaluation (quality of text and annotations, comparison to other corpora, etc.)

Furthermore, aspects of usability and availability of web-derived corpora are highly relevant in the context of WAC-X

* development of corpus interfaces
* visualization techniques
* tools for statistical analysis of very large (e.g., web-derived) corpora
* long-term archiving
* documentation and standardization
* legal issues

Finally, reports of the use of web corpora in language technology and linguistics are welcome, for example

* information extraction & opinion mining
* language modeling, distributional semantics
* machine translation
* linguistic studies of web-specific forms of communication
* linguistic studies of rare phenomena
* web-specific lexicography, grammaticography, and language documentation

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SUBMISSION WEBSITE

Please submit your paper using SoftConf:
https://www.softconf.com/acl2016/WAC-X/

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SUBMISSION FORMAT

All submissions must be in PDF format and should follow the ACL 2016 style guidelines. We strongly recommend the use of the ACL 2016 LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files. The style files and example documents will be available from the workshop website or directly from http://acl2016.org. We reserve the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these styles including font and page size restrictions.

Full paper submissions may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus any number of pages consisting of only references. Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus any number of pages consisting of only references. Full papers will be distinguished from short papers in the proceedings.

Papers will be presented either orally or as posters at the workshop. There will be no distinction between papers presented orally and those presented as posters in the proceedings.

Reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore, the paper must not include the author's names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith (1991) previously showed ...". Papers not conforming to these requirements will be rejected without review.

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ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Paul Cook (University of New Brunswick)
Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Roland Schäfer (Freie Universität Berlin)
Egon Stemle (European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano)

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PROGRAMM COMMITTEE

Adrien Barbaresi, ÖAW (AT)
Silvia Bernardini, University of Bologna (IT)
Douglas Biber, Northern Arizona University (US)
Felix Bildhauer, Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim (DE)
Katrien Depuydt, INL, Leiden (NL)
Jesse de Does, INL, Leiden (NL)
Cédrick Fairon, UC Louvain (BE)
William H. Fletcher, U.S. Naval Academy (US)
Iztok Kosem, Trojina, Institute for Applied Slovene Studies (SI)
Simon Krek, Jožef Stefan Institute (SI)
Lothar Lemnitzer, BBAW (DE)
Nikola Ljubešić, Sveučilišta u Zagrebu (HR)
Siva Reddy, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Steffen Remus, TU Darmstadt (DE)
Pavel Rychly, Masaryk University (CZ)
Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis University (US)
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds (UK)
Klaus Schulz, LMU München (DE)
Kay-Michael Würzner, BBAW (DE)
Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen (DE)
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI (FR)