Istanbul, May 26-27, 2012, in conjunction with LREC 2012,
the Eigth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Istanbul, May 21-27

isa-7 is the seventh edition of a series of joint workshops (see previous workshop) of the ACL SIGSEM Working Group "The Representation of Multimodal Semantic Information" and ISO TC 37/SC 4 (Language Resources) WG 2: Annotation and representation schemes, plus the ISO External Consultation Group for Dialogue Act Annotation.
isa-7 will form part of the LREC Joint ISA-7, SRSL-3 and I2MRT Workshop on Semantic Annotation and the Integration and Interoperability of Multimodal Resources and Tools.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Joint ISA-7, SRSL-3, and I2MRT LREC 2012 Workshop on Semantic Annotation and the Integration and Interoperability of Multimodal Resources and Tools, Istanbul, 26-27 May 2012

BACKGROUND

Three initiatives join forces in this workshop, which is concerned with issues in semantic annotation for language resources, especially in relation to spoken and multimodal language data, and with the interoperability and integration of multimodal resources and tools.

ISA-7 is the Seventh Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation, and forms part of a series of workshops of ISO TC 37/SC 4 (Language Resources) jointly with ACL-SIGSEM (Computational Semantics). These workshops bring together experts in the annotation of semantic information as expressed in text, speech, gestures, graphics, video, images, and in multiple modalities combined. Examples of semantic annotation include the markup of events, time, space, dialogue acts, discourse relations, and semantic roles, for which the ISO organization pursues the establishment of annotation standards, in order to support the creation of interoperable semantic resources.

SRSL-3 is the Third Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language in Speech and Multimodal Corpora. In these workshops researchers convene who are working on speech and multimodal resources for the semantic annotation of related corpora, and take their inspiration from the observation that the semantic gap between the content conveyed by speech and other modalities and their formal representation is a burning issue in a range of tasks such as content mining, information extraction, dialogue processing, interactive story-telling, assisted health care,and human-robot interaction.

I2MRT (Integration and Interoperability for Multimodal Resources and Tools) is an initiative to address infrastructure aspects of the creation and use of interoperable multimodal resources. The main of objectives of I2MRT are to create awareness of the need to make multimodal data visible via standardized methods and accessible via registered data centers; to discuss possibilities of harmonization and standardization with respect to multimodal annotation schemes and possible mappings between encoding schemes; to discuss ways to make cutting-edge technologies available to multimodality researchers that can currently only be used in specialized labs; and to build a community that is committed to work further on these issues.

PAPER SUBMISSION

Submission of papers will be electronically using the START conference management page of LREC 2012.

When submitting a paper to the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, including also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or that are a new result of your research. For further information on this new initiative, please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012 This 1.5 day workshop has two tracks, one related to interoperable semantic annotation, and one related to multimodal resources and tools. For each track, research papers are invited describing original, unpublished research. Research papers can be either long (6-8 pages) or short (3-4 pages). Short papers are also invited describing ongoing or proposed projects are infrastructure-related activities. Topics for the tracks include, but are not limited to the following:

Track "Interoperable Semantic Annotation":

* methodological aspects of semantic annotation

* semantic annotation and semantic interpretation

* the semantics of semantic annotations

* interoperability of spoken and written corpora

* content identification and segmentation in spontaneous speech

* semantic annotation in dialogue, with a focus on multimodality

* segmentation of multimodal interaction data into semantic units

* issues in semantic annotation in specific domains, such as time and space; relations in discourse and dialogue; semantic roles and predicate-argument structures

* developments in recent, current, and planned ISO projects on developing semantic annotation standards.

Track "Integration and Interoperability for Multimodal Resources and Tools":

* encoding systems in use in multimodal applications

* metadata concepts to describe multimedia/multimodal resources

* attempts to harmonize encoding schemes and to map between them

* cutting-edge multimedia processing technology that may help multimodality researchers to speed up annotation work

* relevance and god examples of usability solutions to efficiently deal with the inherently imperfect results of any recognition technology

* possibilities to create strong data hubs with attention for legal and ethical aspects of transferring multimedia/multimodal data

* approaches to the creation of a service-oriented architecture in this field.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Harry Bunt (co-chair)

Manuel Alcantara-Pla (co-chair)

Peter Wittenburg (co-chair)

Thierry Declerck

Dafydd Gibbon

Nancy Ide

Steven Krauwer

Kiyong Lee

Lorenza Mondada

James Pustefovsky

Laurent Romary

Oliver Schreer

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Jan Alexandersson

Stefan Baumann

Jonas Beskow

Paul Buitelaar

Harry Bunt (co-chair)

Thierry Declerck

Alex Fang

Raquel Fernandez Rovira

Annette Frank

Dafydd Gibbon

Koiti Hasida

Nancy Ide

Michael Kipp

Kiyong Lee

Inderjeet Mani

Jean-Claude Martin

Lorenza Mondada

Martha Palmer

Volha Petukhova

Andrei Popescu-Belis

Rashmi Prasad

James Pustejovsky

Laurent Romary

Oliver Schreer

Mark Steedman

Mariet Theune

Isabel Trancoso

Registration
Registration will be via the on-line registration site of the LREC conference.

For urgent questions send email to Harry.Bunt@uvt.nl

Accomodation and travel:
For travel and accomodation information see the LREC 2012 website.