Recent initiatives in language technology have led to the development of at least minimal language processing kits for all official European languages. This is a big step towards automatic processing and /or extraction of information especially from official documents produced within the European Union.
Apart from those official languages, a large number of dialects or closely related variants are in use, more and more not only as spoken colloquial languages but also in written media.
Building language resources and tools is a cost-expensive operation and one can benefit from similarities among languages to reduce the effort in constructing LRs. One should be, however, aware also of the discrepancies which are often visible not only at the lexical level. Two examples could be different variants of Spanish in Latin America, German spoken in Austria and Switzerland, French - in France and Belgium, Dutch - in the Netherlands and Flemish - in Belgium, etc. Less attention has been paid up to now to the development of LRs for such languages. This has a major impact on promoting language technology at the educational level, using information processing methods in all-day communication, social media, etc.
This workshop intends to draw attention on issues mentioned above by bringing together scientists working with less resourced language variants and producing a roadmap of existing technologies and still existing gaps. We encourage submission of original, unpublished work related, but not restricted to the following topics:
Petya Osenova (University of Sofia and Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Milena Slavcheva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and EC Joint Research Centre)
Cristina Vertan (University of Hamburg)
César Antonio Aguilar (University Santiago de Chile, Chile)
Laura Alonso y Alemany (Univeristy of Cordoba, Argentina)
Antonio Branco (University of Lisabon)
Gerhard Budin (University of Vienna, Austria)
Jose Casta§ão (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Tomaz Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Maria Gavrilidou (ILSP, Greece)
Walther v. Hahn (University of Hamburg, Germany)
Susane Jekat (ZHAW, Winterthur, Switzerland)
Cvetana Krstev (University of Belgrad)
Vladislav Kubon (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic)
John Nerbone (University of Gr§èningen, the Netherlands)
Petya Osenova (University of Sofia, Bulgaria and Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, Greece)
Laurent Romary (INRIA, France)
Maciej Ogrodniczuk (IPAN, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Milena Slavcheva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and EC Joint Research Centre, Belgium)
Daniel Stein (University of Hamburg, Germany)
Marco Tadic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Cristina Vertan (University of Hamburg)
Dusko Vitas (University of Belgrade, Serbia)
Kalliopi Zervanou (University of Tilburg, the Netherlands)
Dr. Milena Slavcheva
EC Joint Research Centre, Brussels
Directorate Scientific Policy and Stakeholder Relations
Research and Innovation Observatory Project
Milena.Slavcheva@ec.europa.eu
http://www.lml.bas.bg/~milena