LDC hosted a workshop to celebrate its 20th Anniversary on September 6-7, 2012 at the University of Pennsylvania's Houston Hall. Conference proceedings will soon be available in this space. Please stay tuned.

• Overview
• Submissions
• Program
• Confirmed Speakers
• Registration
• Venue and Accommodation

Overview

A little more than two decades ago, progress in human language technology (HLT) research and development was hampered by the dearth of available language resources. The application of machine learning to several HLT problems had showed promise but such approaches were data hungry. To the extent that relevant corpora existed, they were typically privately held and generally unknown except to the closest colleagues of the creators. Those who were willing to share their data had to contend with the lack of infrastructure to support their philanthropy.

In 1992, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) was founded to fill the need for a repository and distribution point for large data sets used in HLT R&D. The idea of a cooperative membership-based, consortium of academic, research, government and commercial organizations sharing language resources was enthusiastically supported by potential hosts and members alike. While there were many suggestions in those early days about what such a consortium could accomplish, it was generally agreed that its principal objective would be to facilitate ways in which large scale data collection efforts could be used more effectively in support of realistic applications. Read more

Submissions

Final presentations (pdf) can be found on the Program page.

Confirmed Speakers

• M. Keith Chen, Yale University
• Lyle Ungar, University of Pennsylvania
• Jack Godfrey, Johns Hopkins University, Center of Excellence
• Judith Klavans
• Edouard Geoffrois, DGA & ANR (France)
• Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI (France)
• Jiahong Yuan, University of Pennsylvania
• Chris Callison-Burch, Johns Hopkins University
• Dean Foster, University of Pennsylvania
• Khalid Choukri, ELRA/ELDA (France)
• Brian MacWhinney, Carnegie Mellon University
• Steven Krauwer, CLARIN ERIC, Utrecht University (Netherlands)
• John Coleman, University of Oxford (United Kingdom)
• Steven Bird, University of Melbourne (Australia), University of Pennsylvania
• Salim Roukos, IBM
• Katie Drager, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
• Jerry Goldman, Chicago-Kent College of Law, oyez.org
• Joseph Picone, Temple University
• Brian Carver, University of California, Berkeley
• Keelan Evanini, Educational Testing Service
• Bonnie Dorr, DARPA
• Mary Harper, IARPA
• Jan Hajic, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic)

Registration

Online registration is now closed. Please email Marian Reed for any questions - mreed @ ldc . upenn . edu

Venue and Accommodation

Venue

The Workshop will be held on the University of Pennsylvania's campus in Philadelphia, PA. Workshop sessions will take place in the Class of 1949 Auditorium in Houston Hall and coffee breaks will take place in Houston Hall's Hall of Flags or in Claudia Cohen Hall's Terrace Room. Walking directions from either hotel to the workshop venues are available. Breakfasts are provided but lunch is on your own. A list of restaurants and lunch trucks near the venue is available.

Accommodation

LDC has negotiated a group rate for a block of rooms at the University City Sheraton for the nights of September 5th through 7th. Please book your accommodation before August 6, 2012 as all unreserved rooms will be released on that date. Please reference the Linguistic Data Consortium when you are booking to receive the discounted rate.

University City Sheraton

The Hilton's Inn at Penn is also within walking distance to the conference venue. Both hotels are .3 miles, approximately a ten-minute walk, from Houston Hall.

Inn at Penn

Workshop Organizing Committee

• Mark Liberman, Linguistic Data Consortium
• Christopher Cieri, Linguistic Data Consortium
• Denise DiPersio, Linguistic Data Consortium
• Marian Reed, Linguistic Data Consortium
• Marisa Lantieri, Linguistic Data Consortium