[Sigwac] First CfP: The 11th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-XI), 24 July 2017 at Corpus Linguistics, Birmingham (UK)

[Roland Schäfer]

WAC-XI: The 11th Web as Corpus Workshop: first call for papers
co-located with Corpus Linguistics 2017, Birmingham, 24 July 2017

featuring the First CleanerEval Shared Task panel discussion
endorsed by the Special Interest Group of the ACL on Web as Corpus

Website: https://www.sigwac.org.uk/wiki/WAC-XI
Contact: wacxi2017 at gmail.com


== Workshop Description ==

For almost a decade, the ACL SIGWAC, and most notably the Web as Corpus
(WAC) workshops, have served as a platform for researchers interested in
the com­pilation, processing and use of web-derived corpora as well as
computer-mediated communication. Past workshops were co-located with
major conferences on corpus linguistics and/or computational
linguis­tics (such as ACL, EACL, Corpus Linguistics, LREC, NAACL, WWW).
The eleventh Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-XI) emphasises the linguistic
aspects of web corpus research more than the technological aspects while
keeping in mind that the two are inseparable.
The World Wide Web has become increasingly popular as a source of
linguistic evidence, not only within the computational linguistics
community, but also with theoretical linguists facing problems such as
data sparseness or the lack of variation in traditional corpora of
written language. Accordingly, web corpora continue to gain relevance,
given their size and diversity in terms of genres and text types. In
lexicography, web data have become a major and well-established resource
with dedicated research data and specialised tools such as the
SketchEngine. In other areas of linguistics, the adoption rate of web
corpora has been slower but steady. Furthermore, some completely new
areas of research dealing exclusively with web (or similar) data have
emerged, such as the con­struction and utilisation of corpora based on
short messages. Another example is the (manual or auto­matic)
classification of web texts by genre, register, or – more generally
speaking – text type, as well as topic area. Similarly, the areas of
corpus evaluation and corpus comparison have been advanced greatly
through the rise of web cor­pora, mostly because web cor­pora
(especially larger ones in the region of several billions of tokens) are
often created by download­ing texts from the web unselectively with
respect to their text type or content. While the composition (or
strati­fication) of such corpora cannot be determined before their
construction, it is desirable to evaluate it afterwards, at least. Also,
comparing web corpora to corpora that have been compiled in a more
traditional way is key in determining the quality of web corpora with
respect to a given research question.


== Call for Papers ==

The eleventh Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-XI) takes a (corpus) linguistic
look at the state of the art in all these areas. More specifically, in
linguistic publications presenting case studies based on web data, some
authors explicitly discuss and/or defend the validity of web corpus data
for a specific type of research question – while others simply take web
corpora as a new or complementary source of data without discussing
fundamental questions of data quality and appropriateness of web data
for a given research question. We think it is vital to discuss such
fundamental questions, and therefore ask researchers to present and discuss:

– case studies in corpus or computational linguistics where web data
have been used

– research specifically related to the validity of web data in corpus,
computational, and theoretical linguistics,

– research on the technical aspects web corpus construction which have a
strong influence on theo­retical aspects of corpus design

For example, presentations could address questions (either as part of a
case study or in the form of primary research):

– Are there substantial differences in theoretical inferences when web
data are used instead of data from traditionally compiled corpora? If
so: Why? Are they expected?

– Do findings from traditionally compiled corpora and web corpora
converge when compared with evidence from other sources (such as
psycholinguistic experiments)? If not: Which type of data matches the
external findings better?

– Is it possible to analyse lectal variation with web corpora, given the
frequent lack of relevant meta data?

– How good is the quality of the (automatic) linguistic annotation of
web data compared to tradi­tionally compiled corpora? How does this
affect empirical linguistic research with web corpora? What could corpus
designers do to improve it?

– Are there differences with regard to the dispersion of linguistic
entities in web corpora com­pared to traditionally compiled corpora? If
so: Why? Does it matter? How can we deal with it or even profit from it?

– How do very large web corpora compare to smaller, more intentionally
stratified web corpora created for a specific task? How can it be
decided which type of corpus is better for a given research question?


== Important dates ==

16 February 2017: First call for workshop papers
13 March 2017: Second call for workshop papers
16 April 2017: Abstract due date (23:59 GMT)
5 June 2017: Notification of acceptance
24 July 2017: Workshop day


=== Submission format ===

We call for *anonymous* extended abstracts of 1,000 – 1,500 words length
(excluding references, tables, and figures). Submissions must be in PDF
format. Authors of accepted papers will receive minimal formatting
instructions for the publication of the abstracts on the WAC-XI website
in due time. There will be no proceedings volume, but a successful
workshop might lead to a special issue/edited volume on web (and
similar) data in linguistics (with a new round of peer reviewing), for
which a separate call for (full) papers would be published after the
workshop.


=== Submission website ===

Please use our EasyChair installation exclusively:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wac11


== Organizers ==

Adrien Barbaresi (BBAW Berlin/ÖAW Vienna)
  http://adrien.barbaresi.eu/
Felix Bildhauer (IDS Mannheim)
  http://www1.ids-mannheim.de/gra/personal/bildhauer.html
Roland Schäfer (Freie Universität Berlin (DFG))
  http://rolandschaefer.net


== Programme committee ==

Masayuki Asahara, Nat. Inst. for Jap. Lang. and Ling., JP
Piotr Bánski, IDS Mannheim, DE
Silvia Bernardini, U of Bologna, IT
Niels Brügger, University of Aarhus, DK
Sascha Diwersy, Université Montpellier 3, FR
Stefan Evert, FAU Erlangen, DE
Susanne Flach, Freie Universität Berlin, DE
Cédrick Fairon, UC Louvain, BE
William H. Fletcher, U.S. Naval Academy, US
Jack Grieve, Aston University, UK
Aurelie Herbelot, University of Trento, IT
Matthias Hüning, FU Berlin, DE
Detmar Meurers, Universität Tübingen, DE
Miloš Jakubíček, Masaryk University Brno, CZ
Iztok Kosem, Trojina, Institute for Applied Slovene Studies, SI
Anne Krause, Universität Leipzig, DE
Simon Krek, Jožef Stefan Institute, SI
Lothar Lemnitzer, BBAW, DE
Nikola Ljubešić, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, SI
Steffen Remus, TU Darmstadt, DE
Antonio Ruiz Tinoco, Sophia University, JP
Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis U, US
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds, UK
Barbara Schlücker, Universität Bonn, DE
Sabine Schulte im Walde, IMS Stuttgart, DE
Klaus Schulz, LMU München, DE
Egon Stemle, EURAC Bozen/Bolzano, IT
Peter Uhrig, FAU Erlangen, DE
Marieke van Erp, VU Amsterdam, NL
Wajdi Zaghouani, CMU Qatar, QA
Amir Zeldes, Georgetown University, Washington, US
Arne Zeschel, IDS Mannheim, DE



== CleanerEval: First Panel Discussion ==

As part of the workshop and consistent with its general theme, we plan
to organise a panel discussion as the first meeting of the CleanerEval
shared task on combined paragraph and document quality detec­tion for
(web) documents. The CleanerEval shared task follows the successful
CleanEval shared task organised by SIGWAC in 2006. While CleanEval
focused specifically on boilerplate re­moval (the removal of
automatically inserted and frequently repeated non-corpus material from
web pages), CleanerEval goes beyond this basic task. Participating
systems should be able to determine the linguistic quality of
para­graphs and whole documents in an automatic fashion, such that
corpus designers and/or users can decide whether to include them in
their corpus or not. In the CleanerEval setting, boilerplate paragraphs
are paragraphs with low quality, but there might be other,
non-boilerplate paragraphs with low quality as well. CleanerEval was
proposed by the organisers of WAC-XI during the final discussion of
WAC-X, where the proposal was met with great interest. The WAC-XI panel
discussion is intended to serve as a platform for the development of the
operationalisation of the notions of paragraph and document quality, the
an­notation guidelines, and the final schedule for the shared task.
There can be no doubt that corpus lin­guists should define what counts
as good corpus material and what does not. It would be misguided to
threat this ques­tion as a purely technical one. The final meeting of
the shared task is planned for to be part of WAC-XII in 2018.