Call for Papers

Second Workshop on Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities (ACRH-2)

The second edition of the workshop on "Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities" (ACRH-2) will be held on November 29, 2012 at the University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Submissions are invited for oral presentations and posters (with or without demonstrations) featuring high quality and previously unpublished research on the topics described below. Contributions should focus on results from completed as well as ongoing research, with an emphasis on novel approaches, methods, ideas, and perspectives, whether descriptive, theoretical, formal or computational. The workshop proceedings (with an ISBN) will printed by publisher Edições Colibri and will be made available online.
The workshop will be co-located with the Eleventh International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT-11), which will be held on November 30 - December 1, 2012 (TLT website).

MOTIVATION AND AIMS

Like in its first edition (held in Heidelberg on 5 January, 2012: proceedings available here), the ACRH workshop aims at building a tighter collaboration between people working in various areas of the Humanities (such as literature, philology, history etc.) and the research community involved in developing, using and making accessible annotated corpora.
Addressing topics related to annotated corpora for research in the Humanities is an interdisciplinary task, which involves corpus and computational linguists (mostly those working in literary computing), philologists, scholars in the Humanities and computer scientists. However, this interdisciplinarity is not fully realised yet. Indeed, philologists and scholars are not used to exploit NLP tools and language resources such as annotated corpora; in turn, computational linguists are more prone to develop language resources for NLP purposes only.
For instance, although many corpora that play a relevant role for research in Humanities are today available in digital format (theatrical plays, contemporary novels, critical literature, literary reviews etc.), only a few of them are linguistically tagged, while most still lack linguistic tagging at all. Historical corpora are also a case of special interest, since their creation demands a strong interplay between computational linguistics and more traditional scholarship. Over the past few years a number of historical annotated corpora have been started, among which are treebanks for Middle, Early Modern and Old English, Early New High German, Medieval Portuguese, Ugaritic, Latin, Ancient Greek and several translations of the New Testament into Indo-European languages. The experience of these ever-growing group of projects can provide many suggestions on the methodology as well as on the practice of interaction between literary studies, philology and corpus linguistics.
We believe that a tighter collaboration between people working in the Humanities and the research community involved in developing annotated corpora is now needed because, while annotating a corpus from scratch still remains a labor-intensive and time-consuming task, today this is simplified by intensively exploiting prior experience in the field. Indeed, such a collaboration is still quite far from being achieved, as a gap still holds between computational linguists (who sometimes do not involve humanists in developing and exploiting annotated corpora for the Humanities) and humanists (who sometimes just ignore that such corpora do exist and that automatic methods and standards to build them are today available).

TOPICS

To overcome the above mentioned issues, ACRH-2 aims at covering a wide range of topics related to the annotation of corpora for research in the Humanities.
The topics to be addressed in the workshop include (but are not limited to) the following:
- specific issues related to the annotation of corpora for research in the Humanities
- annotated corpora as a basis for research in the Humanities
- diachronic, historical and literary annotated corpora
- use of annotated corpora for stylometrics and authorship attribution
- philological issues, like different readings, textual variants, apparatus, non-standard orthography and spelling variation
- annotation principles and schemes of corpora for research in the Humanities
- adaptation of NLP tools for older language varieties. Specific features of tools for accessing and retrieving annotated corpora to address various research topics in the Humanities
- examples of fruitful collaboration between Computational Linguistics and Humanities in building and exploiting annotated corpora

INVITED SPEAKER

Martin Wynne (University of Oxford, UK)

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadlines: always midnight, UTC ('Coordinated Universal Time'), ignoring DST ('Daylight Saving Time'):

Workshop: November 29, 2012
Deadline for Paper submission: September 2, 2012
Notification of acceptance: October 7, 2012
Final version of paper for workshop proceedings: October 28, 2012
Conference Registration deadline: October 31, 2012

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION

We invite to submit full papers describing original, unpublished research related to the topics of the workshop. Papers should not exceed 12 pages. The language of the workshop is English. All papers must be submitted in well-checked English.
Papers should be submitted in PDF format only. Submissions have to be made via the EasyChair page of the workshop. Please, first register at EasyChair if you do not have an EasyChair account. The style guidelines follow the specifications required by TLT. They can be found here.
Please, note that as reviewing will be double-blind, the papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations or any references to web-sites, project names etc. revealing the authors' identity. Furthermore, any self-reference should be avoided. For instance, instead of "We previously showed (Brown, 2001)...", use citations such as "Brown previously showed (Brown, 2001)...". Each submitted paper will be reviewed by three members of the program committee.
Submitted papers can be for oral or poster presentations (with or without demo). There is no difference between the different kinds of presentation both in terms of reviewing process and publication in the proceedings (the limit of 12 pages holds for both oral and poster presentations).

ORAL PRESENTATION

The oral presentations at the workshop will be 30 minutes long (25 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for questions and discussion).

PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS

Francesco Mambrini, (University of Cologne, Germany)
Marco Passarotti, (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy)
Caroline Sporleder,Saarland University, Saarbrucken, German

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

David Bamman (USA)
Gabriel Bodard (UK)
Lars Borin (Sweden)
Antonio Branco (Portugal)
Milena Dobreva (Malta)
Anette Frank (Germany)
Dag Haug (Norway)
Erhard Hinrichs (Germany)
Beáta Megyesi (Sweden)
Petya Osenova (Bulgaria)
Martin Reynaert (the Netherlands)
Victoria Rosén (Norway)
Jeff Rydberg Cox (USA)
Melissa Terras (UK)
Manfred Thaller (Germany)
Martin Volk (Switzerland)

SUPPORT

ACRH-2 is endorsed by the AMICUS Network: Automatic Motif Discovery in Cultural Heritage and Scientific Communication texts.

LOCAL ORGANIZATION

University of Lisbon, CLUL, Portugal
Amalia Mendes
Iris Hendrickx
Sandra Antunes
Aida Cardoso
Sandra Pereira