CFP: SIGIR 2008 Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND)

SIGIR-08 Workshop 

2nd Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data 
24 July 2008 , Singapore

http://and2008workshop.googlepages.com/
 
Call for Papers 


Workshop Description and Objectives 
Noise is an unavoidable fact of life. It can manifest itself at the
earliest stages of processing in the form of degraded inputs that our
systems must be prepared to handle. People are adept when it comes to
pattern recognition tasks involving typeset or handwritten documents
or recorded speech, machines less-so. From the perspective of
down-stream processes that take as their inputs the outputs of
recognition systems, including document analysis and OCR, noise can be
viewed as the errors made by earlier stages of processing, which are
rarely perfect and sometimes quite brittle.   
Noisy unstructured text data is also found in informal settings such
as online chat, SMS, email, message board and newsgroup postings,
blogs, wikis and web pages. In addition to the aforementioned
recognition errors, such text may contain spelling errors,
abbreviations, non-standard terminology, missing punctuation,
misleading case information, as well as false starts, repetitions, and
pause-filling sounds such as "um" and "uh" in the case of speech. 
By its very nature, noisy text warrants moving beyond traditional text
analytics techniques. Noise introduces challenges that need special
handling, either through new methods or improved versions of existing
ones. We invite you to submit your own unique perspectives on this
important topic.
 
Topics of Interest (not limited to) 
Information Retrieval and Information Extraction on noisy texts 
IR-related tasks (classification, clustering, genre recognition,
document summarization, keyword search) on noisy texts 
Formal models for noise, characterization and classification of noise 
Treatment of noisy data in special application fields
        - Historical Texts 
        - Multilingual Texts 
        - Blogs 
        - Chat logs/SMS 
        - Social Network Analysis 
        - Patent Search 
        - Optical Character Recognition 
        - Automated Speech Recognition 
        - Machine Translation 
Data sets, benchmarks and evaluation techniques for analysis of noisy
texts

Participation 
We hope that the workshop will allow researchers working in areas
related to unstructured data analytics, Natural Language Processing,
Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, etc., to focus on the
needs of users extracting useful information from noisy text. The
target audience is a mixture of academia and industry researchers
working with noisy text. We believe this work is of direct relevance
to domains such as call centers, the world-wide web, and government
organizations that need to analyze huge amounts of noisy data. 

Important Dates 
Paper Submission: May 16th, 2008 
Notification of Acceptance: Jun 6th, 2008 
Camera-Ready papers due: Jun 20th, 2008 
Workshop at SIGIR 2008: Jul 24th, 2008
  
Submission Requirements 
We invite papers up to 8 pages in length in the style specified at
http://and2008workshop.googlepages.com/submission There will also be a
Best Student Paper Award. Papers with a student as the primary
author/presenter will be eligible for this award.   

Publication 
We are currently in negotiation with a leading publisher for the
proceedings to be available onsite. We have also received tentative
approval for a special issue of a journal for post-workshop
publication of selected papers. 
 
Workshop Chairs  
 Daniel Lopresti 
Lehigh University 
 Shourya Roy 
IBM Research, India Research Lab 
  Klaus U Schulz 
University of Munich
 L. Venkata Subramaniam 
IBM Research, India Research Lab 
 
Workshop contacts 
* L. V. Subramaniam [email protected] 
* Shourya Roy [email protected] 


Please visit the workshop website 
***** http://and2008workshop.googlepages.com/  ***** 
for information about participation and submitting papers. 

For general information, please visit the SIGIR website 
***** http://www.sigir2008.org/ *****