Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Asian Language Resources

Abstract

This volume contains the papers presented at the Seventh Workshop on Asian Language Resources, held on August 6-7, 2009 in conjunction with the joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2009). Language resources have played an essential role in empirical approaches to natural language processing (NLP) for the last two decades. Previous concerted efforts on construction of language resources, particularly in the US and European countries, have laid a solid foundation for the pioneering NLP research in these two communities. In comparison, the availability and accessibility of many Asian language resources are still very limited except for a few languages. Moreover, there is a greater diversity in Asian languages with respect to character sets, grammatical properties and the cultural background. Motivated by such a context, we have organized a series of workshops on Asian language resources since 2001. This workshop series has contributed to the activation of the NLP research in Asia particularly of building and utilizing corpora of various types and languages. In this seventh workshop, we had 37 submissions encompassing the research from NLP community as well as the speech processing community thanks to the contributions from Oriental COCOSDA. The paper selection was highly competitive compared with the last six workshops. The program committee selected 21 papers for regular presentation, 5 papers for short presentation, and one panel discussion to enlightening the information exchange between ALR and FLaReNet initiatives.