Re: CFP: Workshop on Open Infrastructures and Analysis Frameworks for HLT

[Jens Grivolla <j+...@grivolla.net>]

The submission deadline for the workshop was just extended significantly to
align with some of the other COLING 2014 workshop.

The new dates are:
Paper Submission Deadline: 1st June 2014
Author Notification Deadline: 30th June 2014
Camera-Ready Paper Deadline: 10th July 2014
Workshop: 23rd August 2014

You can find the workshop description and CFP at
http://glicom.upf.edu/OIAF4HLT/

I hope to see you there and look forward to your contributions.

-- Jens


On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Jens Grivolla <j+...@grivolla.net> wrote:

> Workshop on Open Infrastructures and Analysis Frameworks for HLT
> ================================================================
>
> http://glicom.upf.edu/OIAF4HLT/
>
> At the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING
> 2014)
> Helix Conference Centre at Dublin City University (DCU)
> 23-29 August 2014
>
> Description
> -----------
>
> Recent advances in digital storage and networking, coupled with the
> extension of human language technologies (HLT) into ever broader areas and
> the persistence of difficulties in software portability, have led to an
> increased focus on development and deployment of web-based infrastructures
> that allow users to access tools and other resources and combine them to
> create novel solutions that can be efficiently composed, tuned, evaluated,
> disseminated and consumed. This in turn engenders collaborative development
> and deployment among individuals and teams across the globe. It also
> increases the need for robust, widely available evaluation methods and
> tools, means to achieve interoperability of software and data from diverse
> sources, means to handle licensing for limited access resources distributed
> over the web, and, perhaps crucially, the need to develop strategies for
> multi-site collaborative work.
>
> For many decades, NLP has suffered from low software engineering standards
> causing a limited degree of re-usability of code and interoperability of
> different modules within larger NLP systems. While this did not really
> hamper success in limited task areas (such as implementing a parser), it
> caused serious problems for building complex integrated software systems,
> e.g., for information extraction or machine translation. This lack of
> integration has led to duplicated software development, work-arounds for
> programs written in different (versions of) programming languages, and
> ad-hoc tweaking of interfaces between modules developed at different sites.
>
> In recent years, two main frameworks, UIMA and GATE, have emerged that aim
> to allow the easy integration of varied tools through common type systems
> and standardized communication methods for components analysing
> unstructured textual information, such as natural language. Both frameworks
> offer a solid processing infrastructure that allows developers to
> concentrate on the implementation of the actual analytics components. An
> increasing number of members of the NLP community have adopted one of these
> frameworks as a platform for facilitating the creation of reusable NLP
> components that can be assembled to address different NLP tasks depending
> on their order, combination and configuration. Analysis frameworks also
> reduce the problem of reproducibility of NLP results by formalising
> solution composition and making language processing tools shareable.
>
> Very recently, several efforts have been devoted to the development of web
> service platforms for NLP. These platforms exploit the growing number of
> web-based tools and services available for tasks related to HLT, including
> corpus annotation, configuration and execution of NLP pipelines, and
> evaluation of results and automatic parameter tuning. These platforms can
> also integrate modules and pipelines from existing frameworks such as UIMA
> and GATE, in order to achieve interoperability with a wide variety of
> modules from different sources.
>
> Many of the issues and challenges surrounding these developments have been
> addressed individually in particular projects and workshops, but there are
> ramifications that cut across all of them. We therefore feel that this is
> the moment to bring together participants representing the range of
> interests that comprise the comprehensive picture for community-driven,
> distributed, collaborative, web-based development and use for language
> processing software and resources. This includes those engaged in
> development of infrastructures for HLT as well as those who will use these
> services and infrastructures, especially for multi-site collaborative work.
>
>
> ### Workshop Objectives
>
> The overall goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of
> the requirements for an envisaged open “global laboratory” for HLT research
> and development and establish the basis of a community effort to develop
> and support it. To this end, the workshop will include both presentations
> addressing the issues and challenges of developing, deploying, and using
> the global laboratory for distributed and collaborative efforts and
> discussion that will identify next steps for moving forward, fostering
> community-wide awareness, and establishing and encouraging communication
> among the various players.
>
> It aims at bringing together members of the NLP community specifically
> users, developers or providers of components and tools for these frameworks
> in order to explore and discuss the opportunities and challenges in using
> such platforms for modern, well-engineered NLP applications.
>
> The challenge of creating reusable and interoperable components raises
> particular interest and are affected by legal issues, such as potentially
> incompatible licenses of components and tools as well as the technical
> aspects of packaging and distribution of components. Also, tools are
> important, for example to assemble complex processing pipelines, to manage
> the bodies of data that are to be analysed and to visualize, explore, and
> further deploy the analysis results. Further challenges are involved in
> embedding framework based analysis within applications or using it in
> distributed computing scenarios, such as deployment of and access to
> required resources. Finally, the preservation of analysis results, their
> provenance and reproducibility are of particular interest to the scientific
> user community.
>
> ### Topics
>
> Workshop topics include, but are not limited to:
>
> - processing of very large data collections: scale-out, parallelization,
> and performance optimization
> - advanced applications driven by an NLP framework
> - sophisticated tools to build and manage complex processing pipelines
> - analysis of results: exploration, evaluation, visualization, and
> statistical analysis
> - experience reports combining components from different sources, as well
> as solutions to interoperability issues
> - experience reports combining different frameworks (e.g.
> GATE/UIMA/WebLicht/etc.)
> - UIMA components with a special focus on genericity and type-system
> independence
> - repositories of ready-to-use components for UIMA and/or GATE
> - distribution of components: documentation, licensing and packaging
> - developing for UIMA or GATE: simplified APIs, debugging, unit testing,
> and limitations of the frameworks
> - combining annotation type systems in processing frameworks (GATE, UIMA,
> etc.) with standardization efforts, such as done in the ISO TC37/SC4 or TEI
> contexts.
> - use of NLP frameworks in real-world "industry" settings
> - reports on current projects and frameworks, their challenges and
> proposed or implemented solutions, including efforts to address
> interoperability
> - issues and challenges of multi-site collaborative projects, including
> reports of implemented or proposed strategies
> - pipeline management, including authentication, strategies for passing
> resources through disparate tools and across hosting nodes, and licensing
> - development and use of evaluation environments that facilitate
> assessment of HLT component performance, iterative application development,
> and replication of results
> - community awareness and implementation of open infrastructures,
> including how to engage the community, establish confidence in the process,
> and promote use
>
> Dates
> -----
> Paper Submission Deadline: 2nd May 2014
> Author Notification Deadline: 6th June 2014
> Camera-Ready Paper Deadline: 27th June 2014
> Workshop: 23rd August 2014
>
> Organisers
> ----------
> Nancy Ide
> Department of Computer Science, Vassar College
>
> James Pustejovsky
> Department of Computer Science, Brandeis University
>
> Eric Nyberg
> Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie
> Mellon University
>
> Christopher Cieri
> Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
>
> Jonathan Wright
> Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
>
> Jens Grivolla
> GLiCom, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
>
> Kalina Bontcheva
> Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
>
>