Season's Greetings from CLARIN
During the holiday season more than ever, our thoughts turn gratefully to those who have made our progress possible.
Thank you and best wishes for the holidays and a happy New Year!
Watch the CLARIN Holiday Greetings 2017 on our YouTube channel
CLARIN ERIC Joins the EUDAT CDI
On 21 November 2017 CLARIN signed the CDI Agreement and officially joined the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) as a thematic provider.
“CLARIN ERIC provides and coordinates data management services for scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and beyond”, comments Franciska de Jong, Executive Director of CLARIN ERIC. “CLARIN has been a key contributor to EUDAT since its very beginning. We see our role in the EUDAT CDI as a natural continuation of our past involvement and want to help the CDI evolve as a successful collaborative platform that is interesting to both service providers and community organisations”.
“We are very pleased to welcome CLARIN ERIC as a new member of the EUDAT CDI, says Damien Lecarpentier, who manages the EUDAT CDI collaboration. EUDAT wants to see the Research Infrastructures play a key role in the CDI and will work with CLARIN ERIC to better organize their participation in the CDI. We are also welcoming further Research Infrastructures to join the CDI! “
CLARIN 2018 in Pisa
Save the date!
In 2018, the CLARIN Annual Conference (CLARIN 2018), will take place 8-10 October in Pisa, Italy.
CLARIN 2018 will have a programme of keynotes, papers, posters and demos.
The CLARIN Annual Conference is the main annual event for those working on the construction and operation of CLARIN across Europe, as well as for representatives of the communities of use in the humanities and social sciences.
More details about CLARIN 2018 will follow on the conference webpage, Twitter (#CLARIN2018) and our upcoming newsflashes.
Call for CLARIN Workshop Proposals 2018
In 2018, a budget of €75000 is available for participants in the CLARIN consortia to organize workshops by representatives of the national consortia. This call is based on a continuous submission scheme.
Funding for two types of workshops can be requested:
-
Workshop type I: addressing a topic that is in line with one or more of
the strategic priorities of CLARIN - Workshop type II: meant to prepare a work plan for a development project of up to three person months, again contributing to one or more of the strategic priorities of CLARIN.
The funding procedure is designed to be as flexible as possible, and therefore, much is left to the imagination and initiative of proposers and to the discretion and judgment of the assessment panel.
This call is meant for workshops and activities that will take place in 2018.
Read the complete Call for CLARIN workshop proposals 2018
Tour de CLARIN
Tour de CLARIN highlights prominent User Involvement (UI) activities of a particular CLARIN national consortium. In October and November 2017 the focus was on the Netherlands. The last two posts included an interview with Melvin Wevers, a Digital Humanities researcher focusing on the study of cultural-historical phenomena with the use of computational means and a resource from the Netherlands: The SoNaR reference corpus of Dutch.
Read more about Tour de CLARIN
New Release of the CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory
A new release of the CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory ( ) has been made available. In this release, once a resource has been found, then a list of similar records is also displayed, making it easy to discover interesting resources similar or related to the one you are viewing. Furthermore, the dialogue showing the full list of available values within a facet (e.g. language, resource type, country) has been redesigned and now offers more options for filtering. The back end has been upgraded to the most recent version of Solr, and a number of small improvements and bug fixes have been implemented.
Visit the VLO to try out the new features
Successful CLARIN Workshop on Interoperability of L2 resources and Tools
A successful CLARIN workshop on interoperability of resources and tools for second language learning and teaching was held in Gothenburg from December 6 to 8, 2017. It brought together 27 specialists in learner language resources and tools. Major challenges related to corpus composition, metadata standardization, error annotation, legal issues and the use of corpus management and search systems were discussed. Progress towards interoperability was made through critical comparisons of approaches and through exploring pathways for cooperation. The workshop was organized by Elena Volodina at the University of Gothenburg.
Post-conference Workshop on NLP Techniques for Online Text
This fall, CLARIN funded a workshop on teaching basic natural language processing techniques for large volumes of online text to researchers in the social sciences and humanities. The workshop was part of a three-day conference entitled ‘Digital Youth in East Asia: Theoretical, Methodological, and Technical Issues’, organized by the East Asian Studies research unit at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Videos of presentations by Yin Yin Lu and Martin Wynne are published on CLARIN’s Videolectures channel.
International Workshop : “Speech Corpora, Text Corpora : Sharing Practices”
News from CLARIN France
On the 13th and 14th of November 2017 a two-day workshop on corpus linguistics was held at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (co-organised by the PRAXILING and DIPRALANG labs).
The main goal of the workshop was to allow experts to compare practices in corpus building, exploration and analysis; the event saw the participation of both French and international researchers working on written and oral corpora. Moreover, the workshop provided a great opportunity for CLARIN France to reach out to a wider community. Bente Maegaard (Centre for Language Technologie, University of Copenhagen & CLARIN ERIC) and Christophe Parisse (Modyco UMR 7114, Université Paris Nanterre & CLARIN France) were among the plenary speakers; a poster presenting the French consortium was also presented, and this was a chance for Huma-Num to launch the new CLARIN-FR mailing list.
A poster was made to present the French participation in CLARIN.
Mini-Workshop on Korp, Strix and BlackLab in Gothenburg
A blogpost by Jan Niestadt
Read the blog post about the mini-workshop on Korp, Strix and BlackLab written by Jan Niestadt who received a CLARIN Mobility Grant in November 2017.
Public Consultation on Europeana, Europe's Digital Platform for Cultural Heritage
How can digital culture enrich your daily life and work? Do you share, access or use cultural heritage materials online?
The European Commission has recently launched a public consultation on Europeana(Europe's digital platform for cultural heritage) to hear opinions from citizens and organisations with a personal or professional interest in online digital culture. The Commission wants to know how citizens, professionals and organisations use Europeana.
The public consultation will be open in all EU languages until 14 January 2018.
Take part in the public consultation
Survey for Practitioners in Cultural Heritage Institutions
Help KPLEX to further understanding the cultural heritage of practitioners' views and experiences by taking part. This survey is part of the research for the Horizon 2020 funded Knowledge Complexity (KPLEX) project, carried out by Data Archiving and Networked Services ( ).
The survey should take no longer than 25 minutes to complete.
EVENTS & CALLS
Call for Papers: Post-Conference Monograph
To be published by Clermont Auvergne University Publishing House, France
After a very successful conference on Computer-Mediated Communication and Social Media Corpora in Bolzano, Italy in October 2017 (cmccorpora17) we are preparing a post-conference monograph to be published by Clermont Auvergne University Publishing House, France in the fall of 2018 as part of their Linguistics collection Cahiers du Laboratoire de Recherche sur le Langage. An open-access version will also be made available.
We invite unpublished original work focusing on the collection, analysis and processing of computer-mediated communication, such as exchanges on social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), forum posts, news comments, wiki discussions and blog entries, as well as e-mail, SMS, WhatsApp, YouTube and discussions in multimodal environments. Authors who did not present at the conference are also welcome.
Contributions should be submitted by 15 January 2018.
For more information, including the template for submissions, please visit the CMC-Corpora website
Special Issue "Towards the Multilingual Web of Data"
Invitation for submissions to this special issue
The MDPI Information Journal invites submissions to a special issue on “Towards the Multilingual Web of Data” and the deadline has been extended to the 31st January 2018.
Read more
Call for Papers: NLP4RE Workshop
19 March 2018, Utrecht, The Netherlands
The call for papers for the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering (NLP4RE) is open.
Natural language processing (
) has played an important role in several computer science areas, and requirements engineering (RE) is not an exception. In the last years, the advent of massive and very heterogeneous natural language (NL) RE-relevant sources, like tweets and app reviews, has attracted even more interest from the RE community.
The workshop will welcome contributions in the field of theory and application of NLP technologies in RE. We also encourage contributions that highlight challenges faced by industrial practitioners when dealing with requirements expressed in NL, and faced by academics in technology transfer studies. The submission deadline is 15 January 2018.
This workshop is co-located with REFSQ'18
Read more about the NLP4RE workshop
2nd Call for Papers- RaPID 2018
8 May 2018, Miyazaki, Japan (Half-day workshop at LREC2018)
This is the 2nd call for papers for RaPID-2018 ( "Resources and Processing of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric impairments").
RAPID 2018 will be an interdisciplinary forum for researchers to share information, findings, and experiences relating to the creation and processing of data acquired or produced by people with various forms of mental, cognitive, neuropsychiatric, or neurodegenerative impairments, such as aphasia, dementia, autism, Parkinsons or schizophrenia.
The submission deadline for papers is 14 January 2018.
Read the full Call for Papers
“Creating, Managing and Analysing Speech Databases using BAS Services and Emu: A Hands-On Tutorial"
12 May 2018, Miyazaki , Japan (held in conjunction with LREC 2018, 7-12 May 2018)
At LREC 2018 the German CLARIN-centre BAS will present a tutorial on speech processing tools:
"Creating, Managing and Analysing Speech Databases using BAS Services and Emu: A Hands-On Tutorial" by Christoph Draxler and Florian Schiel.
The creation of speech databases for spoken language research and development is a time-consuming and largely manual task. In this tutorial we present an optimized and tested workflow comprising the specification, recording, (automatic) transcription, (automatic) segmentation, and effective analysis of a corpus of spoken language. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use a) automatic tools, b) an effective integrated management system (EMU-SDMS) to organize and analyse speech data, and c) crowdsourcing wherever possible to speed up the process. It will also show how to apply established tools to under-resourced languages, thus facilitating access to these languages.
More information can be found in the tutorial outline and the LREC 2018 workshop and tutorial webpage
PEOPLES 2018
5 or 6 June 2018, New Orleans, USA
The first Call for Papers for the 2nd workshop on Computational modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social media (PEOPLES) is open. The submission deadline for papers is March 2, 2018.
The workshop will be held at NAACL HTL 2018 in New Orleans
Read the full Call for Papers
DH Benelux Conference 2018: Amsterdam
6-8 June 2018, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The 5th DH Benelux Conference will take place at the International Institute for Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and will be organised by the KNAW Humanities Cluster in Amsterdam. DH Benelux is an initiative that aims to further the collaboration between Digital Humanities activities in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The conference serves as a platform for the community of interdisciplinary DH researchers to meet, present and discuss their latest research findings and to demonstrate tools and projects.
Find out more about DH Benelux 2018
Call for Papers: Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (LxGr)
16 June 2018, Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom
The symposium will take place at Edge Hill University, with a focus on the interaction of lexis and grammar. The focus is influenced by Halliday’s view of lexis and grammar as “complementary perspectives” (1991: 32), and his conception of the two as notional ends of a continuum (lexicogrammar), in that “if you interrogate the system grammatically you will get grammar-like answers and if you interrogate it lexically you get lexis-like answers” (1992: 64).
The deadline for abstract submission is 18 February 2018. Abstracts will be double-blind reviewed, and decisions will be communicated by 25 March 2018.
Read more about this symposium
Call for Papers: 4th Corpora and Discourse International Conference (CAD 2018)
22-24 June 2018, Lancaster, United Kingdom
The organizers of CAD 2018 welcome proposals on corpus-assisted discourse analysis and, indeed, of any study of discourse where the three corpus linguistics virtues of Collecting, Counting and Collating are deemed to have enabled, enhanced and even perhaps complicated the data analysis. Comparative studies of different discourse types or different periods of time are also highly relevant as well as papers which include reflective considerations on methodological and philosophical issues pertaining to CADS.
The deadline for abstract submission is 15th January 2018.
For further details, please visit the CAD2018 website
Call for Papers: QUALICO 2018
July 05-08 2018, Wrocław, Poland
Following the success of previous QUALICO conferences, organised by the International Quantitative Linguistics Association (IQLA), contributions are invited on all aspects of quantitative linguistics and text analysis. The main topic of the conference is ‘Information in language: coding, extraction and applications’.
Deadline for abstract submission is January 30, 2018.
For further details, please visit the QUALICO website
Call for papers - NLP4SMA 2018
9-15 July 2018, Patras, Greece
The call for papers for the special session on "Natural Language Processing for Social Media Analysis" (NLP4SMA) that will be held at the 10th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence SETN 2018 is open.
The exploitation of natural language from social media data is an intriguing task in the fields of text mining and natural language processing (NLP), with plenty of applications in social sciences and social media analytics. In this special session, the organizers of NLP4SMA 2018 invite submissions of research papers in the broader field of NLP techniques for social media analysis.
The submission date for research papers is 28 February 2018.
Read the full Call for Papers
ESSLI 2018
6-17 August 2018, Sofia, Bulgaria
The 30th ESSLLI (European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information) will take place at the Sofia University “St. Kl. Ohridski” in Sofia. ESSLLI is an event organized every year in a different European country under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI)
Read more about ESSLLI 2018