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, the Artificial Intelligence Association of Thailand, the Korean Society for Language and Information, the Korean Special Interest Group of Human and Cognitive Language Technology, ...

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.

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.

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.

There
 is also no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations.
 Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less
interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered.

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