Named Entities Workshop

Named Entities Workshop
Joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing

Named Entities (NEs) play a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, such as search, machine translation, document clustering, summarization, information extraction, etc. While identifying and analyzing NEs in a given natural language is a challenging research problem by itself, the phenomenal growth in the Internet user population, especially among the non-English speaking parts of the world, has extended this problem to the cross-language arena, making the handling of NEs in multiple languages critically important. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in various aspects of NEs in natural language text. In addition, the NEWS workshop will feature a shared task on Machine Transliteration of NEs.

This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of Named Entities (NEs), including identification, analysis, extraction, mining, transformation and applications to NLP and IR systems. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• NE Analysis
• • Distributional characteristics of NEs in mono- & multi-lingual corpora
  • Orthographic/phonetic characteristics of NEs
  • NE origin/genre recognition
  • Social network analysis and entity resolution
• NE extraction
• • Language-independent monolingual NE extraction
  • Cross-language NE extraction
  • • General techniques
    • Specific datasets (such as, Wikipedia, news, etc.)
  • Unsupervised and semi-supervised methods for NE extraction
  • Complex NEs, domain-specific term extraction
  • NE set expansion
  • Creation of annotated data
• Machine Transliteration
• • Computational phonology, including modeling of phonological rules, structure, behavior, etc.
  • Transliteration modeling
  • • Phonetic, phonetic-semantic transliteration, grapheme > phoneme and phoneme > grapheme conversions
    • Statistical and machine learning based approaches, transliteration unit alignment
    • Forward and backward transliterations
    • Learning transliteration from comparable corpora, transliteration lexicon construction
    • Romanization of Asian languages
  • Transliteration evaluation metrics
• Applications
• • Monolingual and Cross-Language IR
  • Machine Translation
  • Information Extraction and Management
  • Question Answering
  • Computational Journalism

Dates

• Research Paper Submission Deadline: 1-May-2009
• Acceptance Notification: 1-Jun-2009
• Camera-Ready Copy Deadline: 7-Jun-2009
• Workshop Date: 7 Aug 2009