The European Language Resource Association (ELRA) is glad to announce the 11th edition of LREC, organised with the support of international organisations – many from Asia: the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), Oriental COCOSDA, the Association of Natural Language Processing - Japan, the Chinese Information Processing Society of China, the Linguistic Data Consortium, ...

LREC is the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, communicate on-going and planned activities, identify industrial uses and needs, and address requirements from e-science and e-society, with respect to scientific, technology, policy and organisational issues.

For this edition, LREC goes East in order to support a stronger interaction and synergy with the Asian NLP community and to help promoting Asian Language Resources and Language Technologies.

LREC provides a unique forum for researchers, industrials and funding agencies from a wide spectrum of related disciplines to discuss issues and opportunities, find new synergies and promote initiatives for international cooperation, in support of investigations in language sciences, progress in language technologies (LTs) and development of corresponding products, services and applications, and standards.

Issues in the design, construction and use of LRs: text, speech, sign, gesture, image, in single or multimodal/multimedia data
· Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs interoperability

· Methodologies and tools for LRs construction and annotation

· Methodologies and tools for extraction and acquisition of knowledge

· Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation

· LRs and Semantic Web

· LRs and Crowdsourcing

· Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up

Exploitation of LRs in systems and applications
· Sign language, multimedia information and multimodal communication

· LRs in systems and applications such as: information extraction, information retrieval, audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer Aided Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation, speech translation, summarisation, web services, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, sentiment analysis/opinion mining, etc.

· Interfaces: (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensory interactions, voice-activated services, etc.

· Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-government, e-participation, e-culture, e-health, mobile applications, digital humanities, social sciences, etc.

· Industrial LRs requirements

· User needs, LT for accessibility

Issues in LT evaluation
· LT evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures

· Validation and quality assurance of LRs

· Benchmarking of systems and products

· Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems

· User satisfaction evaluation

General issues regarding LRs & Evaluation
· International and national activities, projects and initiatives

· Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies for LRs

· Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages

· Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures

· Replicability and reproducibility issues

· Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues

Special attention will be devoted to highlight the wide variety of initiatives for the creation, use and evaluation of Asian Language Resources and Technologies. Special attention will be paid to Less-Resourced Languages in the Asian area, including (local) Sign Languages.

LREC 2018 would like to promote all LTs that would support better interactions and communications between the Olympics 2020 visitors and the local hosts. This involves all speech- and text-based computer interactions, speech/sign to speech/sign translations, human-human communications mediated by computers, etc. Assessment of the above mentioned technologies is also an important area within LREC 2018.

In a time in which more and more (language) data are generated, either by human beings or by machines, and directly streamed, the question arises how LRs and LTs can cope with this development. A first challenge is to address and to provide for correctives to hate speeches, cyberbullying, fake news, etc. Can LT provide means to process and respond in a timely manner to such language data streamed in a huge amount at high speed? In this context, language technologists have to intensify cooperation with humanities, especially social and political sciences, psychology but also economics, and more.

In addition to describing your LRs in the LRE Map – now a normal step in the submission procedure of many conferences – LREC recognises the importance of sharing resources and making them available to the community.

When submitting a paper, you will be offered the possibility to share your LRs (data, tools, web-services, etc.), uploading them in a special LREC repository set up by ELRA. Your LRs will be made available to all LREC participants before the conference, to be re-used, compared, analysed. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, contributes to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

The Scientific Programme will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster and demo presentations, and panels, in addition to a keynote address by the winner of the Antonio Zampolli Prize.

We will also organise an Industrial Track.

SUBMISSIONS AND DATES
Submission of proposals for oral and poster (or poster+demo) papers: September 25, 2017

· LREC2018 asks for extended abstracts of no less than 3000 words (references excluded), which must strictly follow the LREC stylesheet which will be available on the conference website. Extended abstracts should be submitted through START and will be peer-reviewed.

Submission of proposals for panels, workshops and tutorials: September 25, 2017

· Proposals should be submitted via an online form on the LREC website and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee.

The Proceedings will include both oral and poster papers, in the same format. Final papers will range from 4 to 8 pages, with no difference in quality between shorter and longer submissions.

The importance of LREC in Natural Language Processing is reflected by the H5-Index citation ranking in Google Scholar: LREC is ranked 3rd among Computational Linguistics conferences. In addition, since 2010, LREC Proceedings are included in the Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index.

Nicoletta Calzolari – CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa - Italy (Conference chair)

Khalid Choukri – ELRA, Paris - France

Christopher Cieri – Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia - USA

Thierry Declerck – DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken - Germany

Koiti Hasida – The University of Tokyo, Tokyo - Japan

Hitoshi Isahara – Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi - Japan

Bente Maegaard – Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen - Denmark

Joseph Mariani – LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay - France

Asuncion Moreno – Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona - Spain

Jan Odijk – UIL-OTS, Utrecht - The Netherlands

Stelios Piperidis – Athena Research Center/ILSP, Athens - Greece

Takenobu Tokunaga – Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo – Japan

Sara Goggi, CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Pisa, Italy

Hélène Mazo, ELDA/ELRA, Paris, France