CALL FOR PAPERS

The First Baltic Conference

Human Language Technologies –
the Baltic Perspective

RIGA, Latvia, April 21 – 22, 2004

The conference will provide a significant push for research, development and implementation of computer technologies for languages of the Baltic countries. The main goals of the conference include raising public awareness of the important role of the human language technologies in information society, sharing information about latest developments in the area of computer linguistics, building interdisciplinary ties between specialists of computational science, linguistic and information management, raising awareness about development of smaller languages in the European Union and sharing experience and establishing co-operation between different institutions of the Baltic countries and the European Union.

The conference will bring together researchers and IT companies developing HLT and users of these technologies.

The conference will be one of the major events of Baltic IT&T 2004 Forum (www.ebaltics.com) which has long traditions and important parallel events:

-         The 8th International Conference "ICT in the Baltic Sea and CEE Region"

-         Exhibition "Baltic IT&T 2004"

-         Global Cities Dialogue Workshop

-         Baltic ICT Partneriat Workshop

-         Meeting of Senior Officials of the Information Society of the Baltic region countries

Combining the conference with a forum provides an excellent opportunity to obtain a comprehensive overview about the activities in HLT particularly and within ICT sector overall in the Baltic Sea region and the new European Union member states.

Venue

The Conference will be held at Radisson SAS Daugava Hotel, Kugu 24, Riga, LATVIA

MOTIVATIONS

HLT is a new and developing field in Baltic countries. So far the Baltic specialists in computer linguistics and HLT have had only one common dedicated event - seminar supported by European Union “Language and Technology 2000” in November 1994.

The main goals of the 2004 conference ten after years after the first event are:

• to raise public awareness about important role of the HLT in information society;
• to share information about latest developments in the area of HLT;
• to build interdisciplinary ties between specialists of computational science, linguistic and information management;
• to promote public-private partnership in development of HLT applications;
• to introduce Baltic participants to programs and activities of the European Union in this field;
• to raise awareness about development of languages of the new member states in the European Union;
• to share experience and establish cooperation between different institutions of the Baltic countries and the European Union.

Conference themes

The conference is the first event in 10 years to provide a wide coverage of HLT-related research and development in Baltics. The wide range of topics to be addressed in the conference includes, but is not limited to:

HLT in Baltic countries – overview, policy, cooperation, opportunities

• Language policy and new technologies – Baltic perspective
• Current situation in the area of HLT in Baltic countries
• European Union HLT policy, programs and supported activities
• Towards building of global policy on promotion of language diversity in cyberspace
• Baltic Sea region and European Cooperation: opportunities, existing and potential projects

Research and Development of HLT

• Machine Translation and inter-language communication systems
• Speech technologies
• Information retrieval systems
• Multimodal dialog systems
• Methods and tools for language processing

Language Corpora and Content Development

• Promoting native-language content in Baltic cyberspace
• Terminology databases

• Text corpora, thesauruses, ontologies
• Electronic dictionaries
• Speech corpora
• Methods for development and maintenance of corpora
• Corpora and Copyrights

 Demonstrations and user studies

• Demonstration of practical applications in different HLT areas
• User needs, user experience in practical application of HLT

IMPORTANT DATES

• February 20, 2004: Deadline for abstract submission
• March 5, 2004: Acceptance notifications and preliminary program
• April 5, 2004: Deadline final version of accepted papers
• April 21 – 22, 2004: Conference

SUBMISSIONS

The conference will consist primarily of paper presentations, panel and demonstration sessions. Papers of the conference will be published in official conference proceedings.

Abstract of presentation (not exceeding 500 characters) should be sent till February 20, 2004 to the following e-mail:

bitt.paper@dtmedia.lv

Full papers in English (not exceeding 15000 characters) should be sent after acceptance notification until April 5, 2004.

Demonstrations of HLT tools and applications are encouraged (a demonstration outline of 2 pages can be submitted).

Language

The conference language for presentations and publications is English.

Sponsorship opportunities

Please contact conference organizers for sponsorship opportunities.

CONFERENCE ORGANISERS

The initiator and host of the conference is the Commission of the Official Language at the Chancellery of the President of Latvia. Partners in organisation of the conference are Latvian Information Technology and Telecommunications Association (LITTA) and Data Media Group. Among institutions to be invited to participate in the organisation of conference and program committee are Estonian Language Commission, Lithuanian Language Commission, European Network of Language Excellence, University of Latvia, University of Kaunas, Tartu University, SICS, IT Committee of Cabinet of Ministers of Lithuania, Tampere University and others.