Wokshops are small group meetings that bring together researchers, students and/or professionals to share information, experience and skills on technological or professional advances that suggest promising directions for future research.

The Scientific Committee of the Conference of the SEPLN has decided to accept the proposals to celebrate, on 7th. September evening, in parallel, the next Workshops:

DDIExtraction2011: First Challenge Task: Drug-Drug Interaction Extraction

http://labda.inf.uc3m.es/DDIExtraction2011/

Organisers (Co-chairs):

• Isabel Segura-Bedmar, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

• Paloma Martínez , Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

• Daniel Sánchez-Cisneros , Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Summary: In the last decade, Information Extraction techniques have received an increasing interest as suitable solution to extract and analyse the huge volume of published documents in the biological domain. The BioCreAtIvE (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction systems in Biology) challenges have played a key role in improving the Information Extraction techniques applied to the biological domain by providing a common benchmark for evaluating these techniques. Recently, medical and pharmacological domain also benefit from the application of such technology. However, there is no forum to allow the comparison among the various techniques.

Likewise the BioCreative challenge evaluation has devoted to provide a common frameworks for evaluation of text mining driving progress in text mining techniques applied to the biological domain, our purpose is to create a benchmark dataset and evaluation task that will enable researchers to compare their algorithms applied to the extraction of drug-drug interactions. The challenge task is intended to provide a benchmark forum for comparing the latest advances of Information Extraction techniques applied to the extraction of drug-drug interactions. We will create a benchmark dataset and evaluation task that will enable researchers to compare their algorithms.

Participants are encouraged to submit a paper to the workshop in order to describe their systems to the audience in a regular workshop session together with special invited speakers. Submitted papers will be reviewed by the program committee.

Important Dates

• Training dataset: April 1st

• Test dataset and Evaluation starts: May 30th

• Evaluation ends: June 6th

• Task coordinators send evaluation: June 15th

• Paper submission: June 24th

• Notification of acceptance for papers: July 5th

• Final Camera Ready paper due: July 15th

• Worshop day: September, 7th afternoon 2011

ICL: Workshop on Iberian Cross-Language NLP tasks

http://www.dsic.upv.es/grupos/nle/sepln-workshop-icl.html

Organisers (Co-chairs):

• Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Jorge Civera, Paolo Rosso - Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

• Marta Vila - Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

• Anabela Barreiro - Universidade do Porto, Portugal

• Iñaki Alegria - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain

Summary: In the Iberian Peninsula, five official languages co-exist: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. Fostering the multi-linguality and establishing strong links among the resources developed in the different languages of the region is mandatory. Additionally, a lack of published resources in some of these languages exists. Such lack propitiates a strong interrelation between them and higher resourced languages, such as English and Spanish.

In order to favour the intra-relation among the peninsular languages as well as the interrelation between them and foreign languages, different multilingual NLP tools should be developed. The following are some of the cross-language / multilingual NLP tasks we have identified as key factors for these purposes:

- text categorisation
- information retrieval
- question answering
- patent retrieval
- word sense disambiguation
- opinion mining
- lexical substitution
- co-derivative text analysis
- text re-use analysis
- plagiarism detection
- paraphrasing for MT
- text similarity estimation
- similarity of Wikipedia across languages

These tasks are often based on different approaches, such as statistical, linguistic and hybrids among them. Machine translation, cognates exploitation or semantic relatedness are examples of the multiple resources available for the development of such tools.

The workshop addresses researchers from different fields. Among them, we identify: text mining, machine learning, natural language processing, pattern recognition, computacional linguistics, information retrieval and machine translation.

Important Dates:

• June 1, 2011      Submission of paper (LNCS format, 6 pages maximum)

• July 1, 2011        Notification of acceptance

• July 20, 2011      Camera ready due

• Sept. 7, 2011      Workshop day