NEW TEXT - Wikis and blogs and other dynamic text sources
Trento, Italy April 3, 2006
newtext@sics.se
http://www.sics.se/jussi/newtext
Call for participation
The EACL 2006 Workshop on New Text will be hosted in conjunction with
the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for
Computational Linguistics ( EACL, http://eacl06.itc.it/ )
that will take place April 3-7, 2006, in Trento, Italy.
New types of text sources, multi-lingual, with numerous cooperating or
even adversarial authors and little or no editorial control are one
effect of the recently dramatically lowered publication threshold.
Many contain linguistic items or features classically associated with
spoken language - combining the high interactivity of dialogue with
the low bandwidth of written text and with the multicasting
capabilities of digital communication.
New material published today most noticeably includes *blogs* - a
genre that has evolved from diaries, logbooks, commentaries, columns,
and editorials into a multi-faceted and networked churn of text with
widely ranging viewpoints and perspectives and varying application and
ambition on the part of the creator. One of the most noticeable
charateristics of the blog genre is its opinionated nature and its
timeliness. Blog texts are often ill-edited and hastily cobbled
together in a language reminiscent of brief notes, spoken asides, or
short letters, rather than of essays or newsprint. This, at any rate,
is the public perception.
Another emergent genre is that of the *wiki*. More closely patterned
on a classic text genre, that of the encyclopedia, wiki texts are
written and edited by open teams of authors. In contrast to blogs,
wikis have high ambitions as regards factual correctness, persistence,
editorial quality, and trustworthiness.
Bridging the two are genres such as discussion boards, web fora, and
mailing lists.
Let us call these various new types of text (or indeed other modes of
linguistic communication) collectively NEW TEXT.
THIS WORKSHOP is intended to discuss the analysis and application of
new text, formulate research measures that are crying out to be taken,
discuss which methodological steps are obsoleted, and which babies can
be saved from the bath water.
NEW TEXT - Challenge questions
NEW TEXT provides a number of research issues, immediately obvious
questions, and tentative applications for our research fields:
1. New possibilities for the philologically inclined: How does new
text cast new light on human communicative behaviour? This
includes question on style and genre: the characteristics of new
text and relations to traditional media. Do blogs in fact resemble
spoken language in any important way? Do wikis hold up their
promise of qualitative information dissemination?
2. New challenges for building text analysis tools -- how are the
today's algorithms portable to new text? This includes questions
on multilinguality, code-switching, register variation, and
formality melange apparent in new text.
3. New challenges for evaluation methodologies for information access
systems:
+ Can new text, with dynamic information sources and streams of
variable quality and impact be plugged into
relevance-oriented evaluation frameworks without revising the
target notion of text relevance?
+ Some new texts have high social impact; some sink without a
trace; some have high import in tightly knit circles and
communities. Traditional media have sales figures, citation
indices, and distribution analyses. How can the impact of new
texts be analyzed?
+ New texts have variable perceived intellectual status and
quality -- how can it be measured and predicted?
4. New opportunities for new services -- e.g. linking different types
of text in dynamic and interactive sessions of information
refinement and elaboration.
Signing up for the workshop
To participate in the workshop: begin by announcing your interest to
us (newtext@sics.se) as soon as possible! We may be sending out a data
set and a common task for everyone to play with before the workshop.
If you wish to present your work or your ideas at the workshop you are
invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the
topic area. A presentation should address some of the challenge
questions stated above. We are also thinking of making a sample text
set available for experimentation for all participants before the
workshop.
Submissions should be formatted using the EACL 2006 stylefiles with
overt author and affiliation information and not exceeding 8 pages.
The EACL 2006 stylefiles are available at
http://eacl06.itc.it/submission/submission.htm .
LaTeX submissions are much preferred.
Please send your PDF file no later than January 6, 2006, to
newtext@sics.se
Each submission will be reviewed at least by two members of the
programme committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop
proceedings.
Dual submissions to the main EACL 2006 conference and this workshop
are allowed; if you submit to the main session, do indicate this when
you submit to the workshop. If your paper is accepted for the main
session, you should withdraw your paper from the workshop upon
notification by the main session.
Important dates
* Deadline for workshop paper submissions: Jan. 6, 2006
* Notification of workshop paper acceptance: Jan. 27, 2006
* Deadline for camera-ready workshop papers: Feb. 10, 2006
Workshop program committee
* Jussi Karlgren, SICS (chair)
* Shlomo Argamon, IIT
* Björn Gambäck, SICS
* Michael Gamon, Microsoft
* Gilad Mishne, University of Amsterdam
* Martin Svensson, SICS
* Özlem Uzuner, MIT
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