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Call for Abstracts: CLARIN Annual Conference 2021

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

CLARIN is happy to announce the CLARIN Annual Conference 2021 and calls for the submission of extended abstracts. CLARIN is the European research infrastructure that makes digital language resources available to scholars, researchers, students and citizen-scientists from all disciplines, coordinates work on collecting language resources and tools, and offers advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine such datasets, wherever they are located.

Submission deadline (extended!): 28 April 2021

LOCATION 

The hope was to be able to at least partially return to the traditional face-to-face format, for which in 2021 Madrid, Spain, would be the venue, but in May it was decided that this year's edition will again be a virtual event.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • 19 January 2021: Call for Abstracts issued 
  • 1 March 2021: Second Call for Abstracts issued 
  • 28 April 2021: Submission deadline
  • 30 June 2021: Notification of acceptance
  • 3 September 2021 (extended!): Camera-ready submission deadline  
  • 27-29 September 2021: CLARIN Annual Conference

CONFERENCE AIMS

The CLARIN Annual Conference is organized for the wider Humanities and Social Sciences community in order to exchange experiences and best practices in working with the CLARIN infrastructure and to share plans for future developments. The programme will cover a range of topics, including the design, construction and operation of the CLARIN infrastructure, the data, tools and services that it contains or should contain, its actual use by researchers, teachers or interested parties, its relation to other infrastructures and projects, and the CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

The keynote speakers for the 10th CLARIN Annual Conference will be:

  • Elena González-Blanco (General Manager of Europe at CoverWallet, Director and Founder of LINHD, Spain)
  • Tomáš Mikolov (senior researcher leading a new group studying unsupervised learning inspired by evolutionary principles at CIIRC, Czech Institute for Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics of the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic).
  • Marco Passarotti (Director of the CIRCSE Research Centre, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milano, Italy)

CONFERENCE TOPICS

We invite submissions describing CLARIN related work addressing the following aspects:

Use of the CLARIN infrastructure, e.g.

  • Use of the CLARIN infrastructure in Humanities and Social Sciences research and beyond 
  • Usability studies and evaluations of CLARIN services,
  • Analysis of the CLARIN infrastructure usage and impact studies
  • Identification and analysis of user audiences and developer communities, including Digital Humanities, computer science, human-centered AI
  • Showcases, demonstrations and research projects that are relevant to CLARIN
  • Teaching and learning cases in which CLARIN resources and services are involved

Design and construction of the CLARIN infrastructure, e.g.

  • Recent tools and resources added to the CLARIN infrastructure
  • Metadata and concept registries, cataloguing and browsing
  • Persistent identifiers and citation mechanisms
  • Access, including authentication and authorisation 
  • Search, including Federated Content Search
  • Web applications, web services, workflows
  • Standards and solutions for interoperability of language resources, tools and services,
  • Models for the sustainability of the infrastructure, including issues in curation, migration, financing and cooperation 
  • Legal and ethical issues in operating the infrastructure

CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure and Dissemination, e.g.

  • User assistance (help desks, user manuals, FAQs),
  • CLARIN portals and outreach to users,
  • Videos, screencasts, recorded lectures,
  • Researcher training activities,
  • Knowledge infrastructure centres

CLARIN in relation with other infrastructures, initiatives and projects, e.g.

  • SSH research infrastructures such as DARIAH, CESSDA, etc.
  • Generic infrastructural initiatives such as , , Europeana, , etc.
  • Projects such as SSHOC, TRIPLE, ELE, ELEXIS, ELG, Prêt-à-LLOD, etc.
  • National and regional initiatives

FORMAT OF THE PROGRAMME SESSIONS

The conference programme may include oral presentations, posters, and demos. The type of session for which a paper will be selected depending on the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) in view of the content of the paper. The authors of accepted submissions will be provided an additional opportunity to demo their work. 
Conference organisers will ensure the authors of accepted contributions to have a possibility to present and discuss their work irrespective of the event format (face-to-face, hybrid or virtual). 
 

SUBMISSIONS

The language of the conference is English and presentations will be made in English. Proposals for oral or poster presentations (optionally with demo) must be submitted as extended abstracts (length: 3-4 pages A4 including references) in PDF format, in accordance with the template (ZIP-archive, Overleaf template). Authors can freely choose between anonymous and non-anonymous submission.
 
Extended abstracts should address one or more topics that are relevant to the CLARIN activities, resources, tools or services, and this relevance should be explicitly articulated in the submission, as well as in the presentation at the conference. Contributions addressing desiderata for the CLARIN infrastructure that are currently not in place are also eligible. It is not required that the authors are or have been directly involved in national or cross-national CLARIN projects.
 
Extended abstracts must be submitted through the EasyChair submission system and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. All proposals will be reviewed on the basis of the following criteria:
  • Appropriateness: the contribution must pertain to the CLARIN infrastructure or be relevant for it (e.g., its use, design, construction, operation, exploitation, illustration of possible applications, etc.), and this relevance should be explicitly articulated in the submission.
  • Soundness and correctness: the content must be technically and factually correct and methods must be scientifically sound, according to best practice, and preferably evaluated.
  • Meaningful comparison: the abstract must indicate that the author is aware of alternative approaches, if any, and highlight relevant differences.
  • Substance: concrete work and experiences will be preferred over ideas and plans.
  • Impact: contributions with a higher impact on the research community and society at large will be preferred over papers with lower impact.
  • Clarity: the abstract should be clearly written and well structured.
  • Timeliness and novelty: the work must convey relevant new knowledge to the audience at this event.

PhD STUDENTS SPECIAL SESSION

After the success of last years' editions, the edition of this year will again feature a PhD Students Session. The aim of the session is to enable PhD students to share the next generation of research that is supported by or contributing to the CLARIN infrastructure, and receive feedback on their work from CLARIN experts.

Submissions are welcomed by PhD students (i) who already benefit from using the CLARIN infrastructure in their research, (ii) whose envisaged project results could contribute to the enrichment of the CLARIN infrastructure (new corpora; new showcases; support for new languages, new formats, etc.), and/or (iii) who can demonstrate the added value of methodological frameworks for the analysis of language data that CLARIN could support.

Students are invited to submit a 500-word abstract with a description of their PhD project. Submitted abstracts should clearly articulate how the PhD work is making use of the CLARIN infrastructure or how the results will contribute to CLARIN. Accepted abstracts will be published on the conference website. After the conference, authors of an accepted abstract may submit a full paper to be reviewed for the post-conference proceedings.

ATTENDANCE

In case the dynamics of the pandemic would allow the conference to take place in traditional format, for each accepted abstract one author will be granted reimbursement of travel costs (up to 220 Euros), free accommodation and meals. Otherwise, all authors of accepted contributions will be provided with a possibility to present and discuss their work in the virtual format.

PROCEEDINGS

Accepted submissions will be published in the conference Book of Abstracts. After the conference, the author(s) of accepted submissions will be invited to submit full papers (max. 12 pages) to be reviewed according to the same criteria as the abstracts. Accepted full papers will be published in a digital conference proceedings volume after the conference: Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings (peer reviewed) ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online) https://ep.liu.se/en/conferences.aspx
 

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

The Programme Committee for the conference consists of the following members:
  • Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • António Branco, University of Lisbon, Portugal
  • Tomaž Erjavec, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
  • Eva Hajičová, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic
  • Erhard Hinrichs, University of Tübingen, Germany
  • Marinos Ioannides, Digital Heritage Research Laboratory at the Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
  • Langa Khumalo, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources, South Africa
  • Nicolas Larrousse, Huma-Num, France
  • Krister Lindén, University of Helsinki, Finland
  • Monica Monachini, Institute of Computational Linguistics «A. Zampolli», Italy (Chair)
  • Karlheinz Mörth, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
  • Costanza Navarretta, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Jan Odijk, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
  • Maciej Piasecki, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland
  • Stelios Piperidis, ILSP, Athena Research Center, Greece
  • Eirikur Rögnvaldsson, Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Iceland
  • Kiril Simov, IICT, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
  • Inguna Skadiņa, Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, Latvia
  • Koenraad De Smedt, University of Bergen, Norway
  • Marko Tadić, University of Zagreb, Croatia
  • Jurgita Vaičenonienė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
  • Tamás Váradi, Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
  • Kadri Vider, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Martin Wynne, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

LINKS