March 2025 - Corpora

Registration open for Corpus Linguistics 2025
by Robbie Love 28 Mar '25

28 Mar '25

Dear colleagues I am pleased to confirm that registration is now open for the international Corpus Linguistics conference 2025 (CL2025). CL2025 is co-organised by Aston University, Birmingham City University, and the University of Birmingham and will take place from Monday 30th June - Thursday 3rd July 2025 at Aston University. Information about fees and registration instructions can be found on the conference website: https://www.cl2025.co.uk/registration Registration is also open for the pre-conference workshop day, to be held on Sunday 29th June at the University of Birmingham. We are pleased to confirm a programme of six workshops - details available here: https://www.cl2025.co.uk/programme/workshops KEY DATES * Registration opens: 28th March 2025 * Early bird registration deadline: 9th May 2025 * Final registration deadline: 13th June 2025 * Conference dates: 30th June - 3rd July 2025 PLENARY SPEAKERS * Laurence Anthony (Waseda University, Japan) * Gavin Brookes (Lancaster University, UK) * Elizabeth Hanks (Northern Arizona University, USA) * Pascual Pérez-Paredes (University of Murcia, Spain) * Anna Marchi (University of Bologna, Italy) & Charlotte Taylor (University of Sussex, UK) For further information, please visit the conference website at www.cl2025.co.uk<http://www.cl2025.co.uk> or write to the CL2025 organising committee at corpuslinguistics2025(a)gmail.com<mailto:corpuslinguistics2025@gmail.com>. Best wishes Robbie Love On behalf of the CL2025 Organising Committee: Matt Gee (Birmingham City University), Andrew Kehoe (Birmingham City University), Joyce Lim (Aston University), Robbie Love (Aston University), Mark McGlashan (University of Liverpool), Akira Murakami (University of Birmingham), Paul Thompson (University of Birmingham) Dr Robbie Love (he/him) BA (Hons), ma, phd, cdls, fhea Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics Programme Development Lead Department of Communication and Culture, School of Law and Social Sciences Aston University, Birmingham, UK [Aston University] Newsletter Editor, British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL)<https://www.baal.org.uk/> Convenor, BAAL Corpus Linguistics Special Interest Group<https://baal-clsig.weebly.com/> Organising Committee, Corpus Linguistics Conference 2025<https://www.cl2025.co.uk/> Research profile: research.aston.ac.uk/en/persons/robbie-love<https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/persons/robbie-love> Website: robbielove.org/<https://robbielove.org/> See me in Les Misérables<https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/bmos-presents-les-miserables-let-the-peopl…> at the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, 10th-14th June!

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ArabicNLP 2025 - First Call For Papers
by Salam Khalifa 28 Mar '25

28 Mar '25

Hello all, *** Apologies for cross-posting *** *The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2025) * *Co-located with EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou, China, November, 2025. (Hybrid Mode).* *Conference URL*: https://arabicnlp2025.sigarab.org/ We invite long (up to 8 pages), short (up to 4 pages), and demo paper (up to 4 pages) submissions. Long and short papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee; presentation mode does not reflect the quality of the work. Theme: Bridging Modalities: Advancing Arabic NLP Submissions may include work in progress or completed research, with a clear focus on Arabic NLP, covering standard Arabic, dialectal, or classical. This year, we focus on advancing the three key modalities: text, speech, and vision. We encourage research that explores modeling, novel applications, and new resources. Papers on related languages, such as Semitic languages or those using Arabic script, are welcome if they offer insights relevant to Arabic NLP. Work using Arabic resources for other languages is also encouraged. We welcome descriptions of commercial systems, position papers, and surveys on the above topics, with detailed information on technical contributions and added value to the community. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Enabling Technologies: - Text: Language models, diacritization, morphological analysis, lemmatization, tokenization, POS tagging, syntactic and semantic parsing, named entity recognition, disambiguation, sentiment analysis, Arabic dialect modeling, etc. - Speech & Vision: Speech recognition, speech synthesis, dialect identification, optical character recognition, image/video understanding, image/video generation, etc. Applications: Assistive technologies, human-computer interaction, social media analytics, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic applications.Resources: Multimodal corpora (text, speech, vision), annotation tools, lexical and dictionaries, etc. Conference Paper Submission URL: <https://softconf.com/emnlp2022/WANLP2022> TBA Important Dates for Conference Papers - June 22, 2025: Abstract submission for conference papers due date - June 29, 2025: Conference paper due date - August 03, 2025: Reviews submission deadline - August 24, 2025: Rebuttal period ends - August 31, 2025: Notification of acceptance - September 21, 2025: Camera-ready papers due - November, 2025: ArabicNLP conference All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC -12h <https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/timezone/utc-12> (“Anywhere on Earth”). If you have any questions, please contact us at: arabicnlp-pc-chairs(a)sigarab.org The ArabicNLP 2025 Organizing Committee Best, -- Salam Khalifa

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Call for Special Issue Proposals - Journal Natural Language Processing
by Ranasinghe, Tharindu 28 Mar '25

28 Mar '25

Journal Natural Language Processing (formerly Journal of Natural Language Engineering) *** Call for Special Issue Proposals *** In recent years the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has enjoyed unprecedented developments since the emergence of Deep Learning and, lately, Large Language Models. At the same time, NLP is following the trend of many other areas in becoming highly specialised, with a number of application-orientated and narrow-domain topics emerging or growing in importance. These developments, often coinciding with a lack of related literature, necessitate and warrant the publication of specialised volumes focusing on a specific topic of interest to the NLP research community. The Journal Natural Language Processing (formerly Journal of Natural Language Engineering), which features six 160-page issues per year and has had its impact factor increase yearly, invites proposals for special issues on a competitive basis covering any topics in applied NLP which have emerged as important recent developments and have attracted the attention of a number of researchers. The Journal Calls for Proposals for special issues have resulted in high-quality outputs and this year we look forward to another successful competition. Proposals on topics covering a variety of methods, tasks, resources and applications from Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Speech and Language Processing, Text Analytics and related areas are eligible. Special issues on timely NLP topics such as latest language models including Large Language Models/Generative AI, are welcome. Special issue proposals may be based on a successful workshop or a body of work associated with a particular group or section of the community. In the case of papers previously submitted to workshops, the Guest Editors will not be able to re-use previous workshop reviews. In addition, the call for papers of the accepted proposals must be open to all interested parties and all authors will be given equal treatment; in the case of proposals based on previous workshops, submissions cannot be limited to workshop participants only. Prospective proposers are also encouraged to consult the successful Journal columns "Industry Watch" and "Emerging Trends" for additional inspiration. Interested parties have the option of preliminary feedback by emailing expressions of interest accompanied by a brief description of the intended special issue to the Executive Editor (Ruslan.Mitkov(a)ua.es). He will give a brief indication of whether the topic is appropriate to the Journal. In the case of initial positive feedback, the prospective Guest Editors will be asked to submit a proposal for a special issue that will be reviewed by the Editors of the Journal and by other members of the Journal Editorial Board. The proposal for a special issue should include a brief outline of the field and rationale as to why it is important to launch a special issue on the particular topic of interest at the current time. It should include a relevant literature survey (related previous special issues, volumes, workshop and conference proceedings) and should explain the added value of the proposed special issue against the background of other relevant or competing publications and volumes (if applicable). It is desirable that evidence for the estimate of expected submissions to the special issue be provided and justified. The proposals should also include a tentative Guest Editorial Board. It is desirable that at least one (preferably two) of the members of the Guest Editorial Board is on the Editorial Board of the Journal Natural Language Processing. The proposal should also include a tentative time-scale for the production of the special issue (the time-scale committed to in the proposal should be adhered to, if the proposal is accepted), and information about the prospective Guest Editors such as relevant experience, publications etc. Time-scale - Deadline for submission of special issue proposals: 28 April 2025 (proposals to be emailed to Ruslan.Mitkov(a)ua.es with a copy to NLP(a)cambridge.org) - Notification of acceptance/rejection: 19 May 2025 - Calls for papers related to the successful proposals (at least 2 calls are recommended): 7 June 2025 first call July-September 2025 second (and third call, if applicable) Once the special issue is approved and launched, Guest Editors are expected to adhere to the same reviewing and acceptance standards as regular issues of the Journal. In particular, each submission needs to be reviewed by three members of the Guest Editorial Board or other experts in the field. To ensure geographical diversity and balance, and to avoid over-reliance on the same reviewers, each submission must not be reviewed by three experts from the same country, and no single reviewer should evaluate more than two submissions. If the Executive Editor is not satisfied with the review process for a special issue paper, he may either reject the paper or send it for additional review. As a last resort, the Executive Editor has the discretion to reject the entire special issue if the reviewing practices are found to be flawed. All special issues are required to include a survey of the field (at least 15 pages) as its first article, which can be written either by the Guest Editors or experts in the field commissioned by the Guest Editors. This is in addition to a 1-2 page preface by the Guest Editors. Best Regards Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe | Lecturer in Security and Protection Science School of Computing and Communications | Lancaster University Contact me on Teams<https://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/0?users=t.ranasinghe@lancaster.ac.uk> www.lancaster.ac.uk<https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/>

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Workshop "Studying the Language of Young Learners" - submission deadline extended
by Valentin Werner 28 Mar '25

28 Mar '25

Dear colleagues, Due to multiple requests, we're happy to extend the submission deadline of the following event to 20 April: Studying the Language of Young Learners Workshop at the University of Bamberg, Germany, 17 to 18 September 2025, organized by Anna Rosen (University of Freiburg), Robert Fuchs (University of Bonn) & Valentin Werner (University of Bamberg) as part of the projectYoung German Learner English <https://www.ygle.de/>(funded by the German Research Foundation). In research on Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and in the domain of Learner Corpus Research (LCR) specifically, there has been a tendency to rely on material from advanced learners, often university students, given their comparatively easy accessibility for researchers (Gilquin, 2015; Plonsky, 2017). In consequence, young(er) second language (L2) learners, typically found within institutional (secondary school) contexts, are severely underrepresented (Tracy-Ventura et al., 2021). However, this underrepresented group is of great theoreticalsignificance (Myles, 2015, 2021), as these learners exemplify foundational learning stages. They are also of appliedinterest in language education, as vastly more monetary and personnel resources are devoted to teaching languages in schools than at universities. As a consequence, improvements in teacher education and teaching practices drawing on insights from SLA and LCR could yield substantial benefits to society. In the broader context of calls for more diversity in LCR and SLA (e.g. Paquot, 2024), this workshop is intended as a meeting ground for researchers who engage with young learner (inter-)language to share insights from their current projects. We invite single- or multiple-authored papers on relevant empirical research and encourage contributions that, for instance, * analyze and interpret patterns found in young learner (inter-)language; * illustrate (young) learner trajectories; * compare and contrast data from L1 and L2 learners; * work with innovative tasks for data elicitation; * triangulate approaches (e.g. corpus-based and experimental or questionnaire-based ones). The workshop will feature two keynotes by * Shin’ichiro Ishikawa <http://language.sakura.ne.jp/s/eng.html>(University of Kobe, Japan), leader of the ICNALE <https://language.sakura.ne.jp/icnale/>project * Olga Lopopolo <https://www.eurac.edu/en/people/olga-lopopolo>(Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy), co-compiler of the LEONIDE <https://www.porta.eurac.edu/lci/leonide/>corpus Moreover, all participants will be invited to interact in a collaborative breakout sessionon future challenges and trends in research on young learners. We encourage submissions by emerging (non-tenured) researchers and will award a best paper prizeamong those eligible.This workshop is co-located with the summer school Methods and Developments in Learner Corpus Research. The working languageof the event is English, and we are open to contributions on all target languages. The workshop is primarily an in-person event, but we may accept a limited number of online contributions. The focus of papers should lie primarily on empirical results and their interpretation. Specific methodological issues, which may be at stake in research on young learner language, will be addressed in a second workshop, planned for 2026. Please submit your abstracts (in the range of 400–500 words + potentially a data table or figure for illustration + references; please use APA style) before *20 April 2025* at https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/SLYL/ <https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/SLYL/>. You will receive feedback on acceptance in May 2025. References Gilquin, G. (2015). From design to collection of learner corpora. In S. Granger, G. Gilquin & F. Meunier (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research(pp. 9–34). Cambridge University Press. Myles, F. (2015). SLA theory and Learner Corpus Research. In S. Granger, G. Gilquin & F. Meunier (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research(pp. 309–331). Cambridge University Press. Myles, F. (2021). Commentary: An SLA perspective on Learner Corpus Research. In B. Le Bruyn & M. Paquot (Eds.), Learner Corpus Research Meets Second Language Acquisition(pp. 258–273). Cambridge University Press. Paquot, M. (2024). Learner corpus research: A critical appraisal and roadmap for contributing (more) to SLA research agendas. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 20(3), 567–590. Plonsky, L. (2017). Quantitative research methods in instructed SLA. In S. Loewen & M. Sato (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Instructed Second Language Acquisition(pp. 505–521). Routledge. Tracy-Ventura, N., Paquot, M. & Myles, F. (2021). The future of corpora in SLA. In N. Tracy-Ventura & M. Paquot (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Corpora(pp. 409–424). Routledge. -- Prof. Dr. Valentin Werner Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg Englische Sprachwissenschaft einschl. Sprachgeschichte D-96045 Bamberg +49 951 863 2277 www.uni-bamberg.de/eng-ling

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EURALEX Talks - Mark Davies
by Iztok Kosem 28 Mar '25

28 Mar '25

Dear colleagues, The next instalment of EURALEX Talks will take place on Tuesday 16 April at 16.00 (CET). In this video lecture, Mark Davies, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA, will talk about his recent large-scale investigation of how the predictions on linguistic variation from two Large Language Models match actual corpus data. He will also present and demo his current work on integrating LLMs into his interface for English-Corpora.org. Further details are available at https://euralex.org/euralex-talks/. A Zoom link to access the talk will be provided closer to the date. Iztok Kosem EURALEX President

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Complete self-learning package for English-Corpora.org: KorPLUS available as OER
by Schlüter, Julia 28 Mar '25

28 Mar '25

Dear colleagues, We're excited to launch and share the free and interactive "KorPLUS" OER self-learning package, tailored to the needs of advanced students and teachers of English as well as anyone interested in the English language. It is based on the widely-used www.English-Corpora.org<http://www.English-Corpora.org> interface and endorsed by the platform's host, Mark Davies (https://www.English-Corpora.org/thirdPartyMaterials.asp). https://www.uni-bamberg.de/KorPLUS/ Make your students corpus-literate (https://youtu.be/72ZQiluCbgA), recommend the resource to (future) teachers (https://youtu.be/Hkw3l9SF-R4), or enhance your own corpus skills with hands-on corpus searches dealing with everyday language problems (choice of words, prepositions, collocations, syntactic constructions, formal/informal language, British/American/other Englishes, etc.). - Use the flexible, AI-supported material in parts or as a whole, as a standalone online course or integrated into blended-learning settings. - Click along with demo videos, do interactive exercises at different levels, and receive suggestions for stimulating classroom discussions. - Complete the corpus basics in only 2 to 3 hours and the entire package in 10 to 20 hours. - Earn a certificate after the successful completion of the course. - Apply the takeaways to typical language challenges in advanced writing and transfer your skills easily to corpus-based linguistic research. Julia Schlüter and Katharina Deckert (University of Bamberg, Germany), in collaboration with Jürgen Handke (Virtual Linguistics Campus Team, University of Marburg, Germany) Funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre (https://stiftung-hochschullehre.de/). P.S.: Corpora in the hands of experts are - for the time being - more reliable than AI tools in cases of doubtful acceptability (e.g. in text correction/proofreading); see the playlist "Corpora vs. AI Tools", https://youtu.be/32tb7Xs7fFw?si=mhiaSyH9oG-1TjxM. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof. Dr. Julia Schlüter Englische Sprachwissenschaft einschl. Sprachgeschichte Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg An der Universität 9, Raum U9/01.03 96045 Bamberg Tel. ++49-(0)951-863-2168 (Sekr. -2225) https://www.uni-bamberg.de/eng-ling/personen/schlueter<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uni-ba…> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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European Summer University in Digital Humanities "Culture and Technology" 2025 - Applications are open
by Elisabeth Burr 27 Mar '25

27 Mar '25

Dear all, We are very happy to let you know that applications to the European Summer University in Digital Humanities "Culture and Technology" 2025 <https://esudh.github.io/> to be held at the university Marie and Louis Pasteur in Besançon (France) from July 21 to August 2 are open from 24 of March up to May 18 via Conftool <https://www.conftool.org/esudh2025/>. The Summer University will last for 11 full days with an intensive programme consisting of workshops, teaser sessions, public lectures, regular project presentations, a poster session, and a panel discussion. Each workshop <https://esudh.github.io/WorkshopsandLectures/#workshops> consists of a total of 18 sessions or 36 teaching hours. Building on the spirit of previous editions in Leipzig and Cluj, the ESU in Besançon aims at being a space for interdisciplinary collaboration and opportunities for scholars and students in Humanities and therefore strengthening the community of practice already established in past years. The ESU is sponsored by DARIAH with 12 scholarships <https://esudh.github.io/application/#dariah-scholarships> of 450 Euros each to partially cover the costs of registration and staying in Besançon as well as by CLARIN for the organization of a workshop and of a conference. Besançon, a lively city of around 120 000 inhabitants and more than 25 000 students from all over the world, has a long tradition of teaching French to non-native speakers. Following the two weeks of the ESU, in the month of August, we will offer the possibility to attend for two to four weeks classes of French within the framework of our “French for DH <https://esudh.github.io/esubesancon/#french-for-dh>” programme. For all relevant information please consult ourwebsite <https://esudh.github.io/> which will be continually updated and integrated with more information as soon as it becomes available. To get some insight into what you can expect from the European Summer University please consult the archive section on our website. Looking forward to meeting you in Besançon, The organizers

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Deadline Extension: Call for Shared Tasks Proposals - ArabicNLP 2025 (co-located with EMNLP 2025)
by Wajdi Zaghouani 27 Mar '25

27 Mar '25

The proposal submission deadline has been extended to April 14th, 2025. The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2025) Co-located with EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou, China, November 5-9, 2025. We invite proposals for shared tasks related to Arabic NLP to be included in the ArabicNLP 2025 conference. Proposals should include the following details: 1. Overview of the proposed task 2. Motivation for the task 3. Data/Resource Collection and Creation (please specify the current status of the data: planned, in progress, or ready) 4. Task Description 5. Pilot Run Details (if available) 6. Tentative Timeline 7. Task Organizers (name, email, and affiliation) Proposals should be submitted in PDF format and can be up to 4 pages long. Shared Task Proposal Submission Link: https://forms.gle/3bWWBFV42cYNYaUP9 Selection Process The proposals will be reviewed by the organizing committee and selected based on multiple factors such as the novelty of the task, the expected interest from the community, how convincing the data collection plans are, the soundness of the evaluation method, and the expected impact of the task. Task Organization Upon acceptance, the task organizers are expected to verify that the task organization and data delivery to participants are happening in a timely manner, provide the participants with all needed resources related to the task, create a mailing list, and maintain communication and support to participants, create and manage CodaLab or similar competition website, manage submissions to CodaLab, write a task description paper, manage participants submissions of system description papers, and review and maintain the quality of submitted system description papers. Shared Task Proposal Submission All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC -12h <https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/timezone/utc-12> (“Anywhere on Earth”). April 14th, 2025: Shared task proposals due *April 28th, 2025**: Notification of shared task proposal acceptance* Important Dates for Shared Task Proposals: Proposals should target the following dates when planning their calls June 1, 2025: Release of training, dev and dev-test data, and evaluation scripts July 20, 2025: Registration deadline and release of test data July 25, 2025: End of evaluation cycle (test set submission closes) July 30, 2025: Final results released August 15, 2025: System description paper submissions due August 25, 2025: Notification of acceptance September 5, 2025: Camera-ready versions due November 5-9, 2025: Main Conference For any questions, please contact the Shared Task Chairs: arabicnlp-shared-task-chair(a)sigarab.org Wajdi Zaghouani and Sakhar Alkhereyf ArabicNLP 2025 Shared Tasks Chairs ---- Wajdi Zaghouani, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Communication Program Northwestern Qatar | Education City T +974 4454 5232 | M +974 3345 4992

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Final Call: Annual Workshop in Experimental Methods in Language (acquisition) Research (EMLaR) XXI
by laiacolina＠gmail.com 27 Mar '25

27 Mar '25

*** REGISTER NOW: Hybrid conference on Experimental Methods in Language (acquisition) Research (EMLaR), April 15-17, 2025 - Utrecht University (The Netherlands) *** The Institute for Language Sciences (ILS) of Utrecht University is pleased to announce the 21st edition of EMLaR. This three-day conference will take place from April 15th – 17th 2025 (Tuesday to Thursday) in a hybrid format. The physical location is Utrecht University, in the city center of Utrecht, The Netherlands. EMLaR aims at training PhD students and advanced MA students in experimental methods of language (acquisition) research. Experts in various domains of linguistic research will give lectures and hands-on tutorials, and speakers will give method-oriented talks during plenary sessions. We also provide the opportunity to present your (ongoing) research at the poster session. **Program** Keynote speaker: • Sonja Kotz (Maastricht University) Invited speakers: • Bram van Dijk (Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science) • Michael Franke (University of Tübingen) • Mieke Slim (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) • Roberta D’Alessandro (Utrecht University) • Rowena Garcia (Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, University of the Philippines) Tutorials: • Automatic Speech Recognition • (non-)Bayesian Informative Hypothesis Evaluation Using JASP and R • Coloring Book – a tool for testing language comprehension with young children • Computational Methods • Event-related Brain Potentials (Introduction) • Event-related Brain Potentials and EEG (Advanced*) • Ethics and Privacy • Eye-tracking • Online experiments for language scientists • Open (your) Science Using the Statistical Package JASP • PRAAT • Probabilistic Models of Pragmatic Reasoning • Research with infants: Tips and tricks • Statistics with R (Introduction) • Statistics with R (Advanced*) • Visual World Paradigm For registration and more details, please visit our website: https://emlar.wp.hum.uu.nl/. If you have any questions, please send an email to EMLAR2025(a)uu.nl. We hope to see you there! Kind regards, EMLaR 2025 organization

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Extension of Submission Deadline for NTCIR-19 Task Proposals (New Deadline: April 7th)
by CHUNG-CHI CHEN 27 Mar '25

27 Mar '25

Dear colleagues, Apologies for sending multiple messages in a short period of time. After the 2nd Call for NTCIR-19 Task Proposals was sent out two days ago, we received several messages inquiring about the possibility of extending the submission deadline. In order to allow more participants to join and contribute, we have decided to extend the submission deadline by one week — *the new deadline is April 7 (AoE).* We look forward to receiving your proposals. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. Best regards, NTCIR-19 Program Co-Chairs Qingyao Ai, Chung-Chi Chen, Shoko Wakamiya * IMPORTANT DATES: *April 7, 2025 (Extended): Task Proposal Submission Due (Anywhere on Earth)*May 15, 2025: Acceptance Notification of Task Proposals June 10-13, 2025: NTCIR-18 Conference (Organizers of accepted tasks have a chance to present their proposed tasks) * SUBMISSION LINK: *https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ntcir19proposal <https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ntcir19proposal>* * NTCIR-19 TENTATIVE SCHEDULE: January 2026: Dataset release* January-June 2026: Dry run* March-July 2026: Formal run* August 1, 2026: Evaluation results return August 1, 2026: Task overview release (draft) September 1, 2026: Submission due of participant papers (draft) November 1, 2026: Camera-ready participant paper due December 2026: NTCIR-19 Conference at NII, Tokyo, Japan (* indicates that the schedule can be different for different tasks) * WHO SHOULD SUBMIT NTCIR-19 TASK PROPOSALS? We invite new task proposals within the expansive field of information access. Organizing an evaluation task entails pinpointing significant research challenges, strategically addressing them through collaboration with fellow researchers (including co-organizers and participants), developing the requisite evaluation framework to propel advancements in the state of the art, and generating a meaningful impact on both the research community and future developments. Prospective applicants are urged to underscore the real-world applicability of their proposed tasks by utilizing authentic data, focusing on practical tasks, and solving tangible problems. Additionally, they should confront challenges in evaluating information access technology, such as the extensive number of assessments needed for evaluation, ensuring privacy while using proprietary data, and conducting live tests with actual users. In the era of large language models (LLMs), these models are anticipated to significantly influence daily human activities. Nonetheless, the content produced by LLMs often exhibits issues, such as hallucinations. NTCIR-19 encourages tasks that focus on the evaluation of the quality of content generated by LLMs continued from NTCIR-18 as well as information access exploiting LLMs, including generative information retrieval (IR), IR using generative queries, conversational search using generated utterances, evaluation using LLM (relevance judgements or language annotation using LLM), and RAG. * PROPOSAL TYPES: We will accept two types of task proposals: - Proposal of a Core task: This is for fostering research on a particular information access problem by providing researchers with a common ground for evaluation. New test collections and evaluation methods may be developed through the collaboration between task organizers (proposers) and task participants. At NTCIR-18, the core tasks are AEOLLM, FairWeb-2, FinArg-2, Lifelog-6, MedNLP-CHAT, RadNLP, and Transfer-2. Details can be found at http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/NTCIR-18/tasks.html. - Proposal of a Pilot task: This is recommended for organizers who propose to focus on a novel information access problem, and there are uncertainties either in task design or organization. It may focus on a sub-problem of an information access problem and attract a smaller group of participating teams than core tasks. However, it may grow into a core challenging task in the next round of NTCIR. At NTCIR-18, the pilot tasks are HIDDEN-RAD, SUSHI, and U4. Details can be found at http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/NTCIR-18/tasks.html. Organizers are expected to run their tasks mainly with their own funding and to make the task as self-sustaining as possible. A part of the fund can be supported by NTCIR, which is called "seed funding." It is usually used for some limited purposes such as hiring relevance assessors. The seed funding allocated to each task varies depending on requirements and the number of accepted tasks. Typical cases would be around 1M JPY for a core task and around 0.5M JPY for a pilot task (note that the amount is subject to change). Please submit your task proposal as a PDF file via EasyChair by March 31, 2025 (Anywhere on Earth). https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ntcir19proposal * TASK PROPOSAL FORMAT: The proposal should not exceed four pages in A4 single-column format. The first three pages should contain the main part and appendix, and the last page should contain only a description of the data to be used in the task. Please describe the data in as much detail as possible so that we can help your data release process after the proposal is accepted. In the past NTCIRs, it took much time to create memorandums for data release, which sometimes slowed down the task organization. Main part - Task name and short name - Task type (core or pilot) - Abstract - Motivation - Methodology - Expected results Appendix - Names and contact information of the organizers - Prospective participants - Data to be used and/or constructed - Budget planning - Schedule - Other notes Data (to be used in your task) - Details (Please describe the details of the data, which should include the source of the data, methods to collect the data, range of the data, etc.) - License (Please make sure that you have a license to distribute the data, and details of the license should be provided. If you do not have permission to release the data yet, please describe your plan to get the permission.) - Distribution (Please describe how you plan to distribute the data to participants. There are mainly three choices: distributed by the data provider, distributed by organizers, and distributed by NII.) - Legal / Ethical issues (If the data can cause legal or ethical problems, please describe how you propose to address them. e.g., some medical data may need approval from an ethical committee. e.g., some Web data may need filtering for excluding discriminative messages.) If you want NII to distribute your data to task participants on your behalf, please email ntc-admin(a)nii.ac.jp before your task proposal submission attaching the task proposal. * REVIEW CRITERIA: - Importance of the task to the information access community and the society - Timeliness of the task - Organizers’ commitment in ensuring a successful task - Financial sustainability (self-sustainable tasks are encouraged) - Soundness of the evaluation methodology - Detailed description about the data to be used - Language scope * NTCIR-19 PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS: Qingyao Ai (Tsinghua University, China) Chung-Chi Chen (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan) Shoko Wakamiya (Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan) * NTCIR-19 GENERAL CHAIRS: Charles Clarke (University of Waterloo, Canada) Noriko Kando (National Institute of Informatics, Japan) Makoto P. Kato (University of Tsukuba, Japan) Yiqun Liu (Tsinghua University, China)

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Corpora March 2025