ParlaCLARIN - LREC2018 workshop on creating and using parliamentary corpora

ParlaCLARIN - LREC2018 workshop on creating and using parliamentary corpora

1st Call for Papers
Date: 7 May, 2018. To be held as part of the 11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), at the Phoenix Seagaia Resort, Miyazaki, Japan.
Website: https://www.clarin.eu/ParlaCLARIN
Submission Deadline: 10 January 2018

Workshop Description

Parliamentary data is a major source of socially relevant content. It is available in ever larger quantities, is multilingual, accompanied by rich metadata, and has the distinguishing characteristic that it spoken language produced in controlled circumstances that has been traditionally transcribed but now increasingly released also in audio and video formats. All those factors in combination require solutions related to its archiving, structuring, synchronization, visualization, querying and analysis. Furthermore, adequate approaches to its exploitation also have to take into account the need of researchers from vastly different Humanities and Social Sciences fields, such as political sciences, sociology, history, and psychology.
An inspiring CLARIN-PLUS cross-disciplinary workshop "Working with parliamentary records" [1] that was held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in Spring 2017, and a comprehensive overview of a multitude of the existing parliamentary resources within the CLARIN infrastructure [2] clearly indicated a need for better harmonization, interoperability and comparability of the resources and tools relevant for the study of parliamentary discussions and decisions, not only in Europe but worldwide.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in compiling, annotating, structuring, linking and visualising parliamentary records that are suitable for research in a wide range of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We invite unpublished original work focusing on the collection, analysis and processing of parliamentary records.

Objective

Due to Freedom of Information Acts that are supported by the United Nations and set in place in over 100 countries worldwide, parliamentary debates are being increasingly easy to obtain, and have always been of interest to researchers from a wide range fields in Humanities and Social Sciences both for the potential influence of their content, and the specificities of the formalized, often persuasive and emotional language use in this context. As a consequence, there are many initiatives, on the national and international levels, that aim at compiling and analysing parliamentary data. Recent CLARIN-PLUS survey on parliament data has identified over 20 corpora of parliamentary records, with over half of them being available within the CLARIN infrastructure [3].
Given the maturity, variety, and potential of this type of language data as well as the rich metadata it is complemented with, it is urgent to gather researchers both from the side of those producing parliamentary corpora and making them available, as well as those making use of them for linguistic, historical, political, sociological etc. research in order to share methods and approaches of compiling, annotating and exploring them in order to achieve harmonization of the compiled resources, and to ensure current and future comparability of research on national datasets as well as promote transnational analyses.

Topics of interest

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Creation and annotation of parliamentary data in textual and/or spoken format
• Annotation standards and best practices for parliamentary corpora
• Accessibility, querying and visualisation of parliamentary data
• Text analytics, semantic processing and linking of parliamentary data
• Parliamentary corpora and multilinguality
• Studies based on parliamentary corpora

Submission & Publication

We accept submission of long papers (up to 8 pages), short papers (up to 4 pages) and demo papers (up to 4 pages) to be presented as a long or short oral presentation at the workshop. The papers of the workshop will be published in online proceedings.
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones). For contact data, stylesheets, up-to-date details on submission and the workshop itself, please consult the workshop website.

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: 10 January 2018
• Notification of acceptance: 12 February 2018
• Camera-ready paper: 26 February 2018
• Workshop date: 7 May 2018

Organizing Committee

• Darja Fiser, University of Ljubljana, Jožef Stefan Institute
• Franciska de Jong, CLARIN ERIC
• Maria Eskevich, CLARIN ERIC

The workshop is supported by the CLARIN research infrastructure. To contact the organizers, please mail clarin@clarin.eu (Subject: [ParlaCLARIN@LREC2018]).