Named Entities (NE) play a crucial role in many monolingual and multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, such as document search, clustering, information extraction, etc. The phenomenal growth of the Internet data and the dramatic changes in the user demographics especially among the non-English speaking parts of the world, has made identification, association and transformation Named Entities across languages a critical path problem for most NLP and IR Tasks.
The Sixth Workshop on Named Entities (NEWS 2016) together with a Shared Task on Transliteration is a continuous effort on top of the success of NEWS 2009 (ACL-IJCNLP 2009), NEWS 2010 (ACL 2010), NEWS 2011(IJCNLP 2011), NEWS 2012 (ACL 2012) and NEWS 2015 (ACL 2015). NEWS 2016 will continue the tradition to run a Shared Task on Transliteration, which aims to provide a common platform for benchmarking the transliteration approaches and systems across many languages. The details of Shared Task are described in the Shared Task Whitepaper.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in various aspects of NEs in natural language text. The shared task in this workshop will cover more language pairs and more scopes of evaluation tasks.
This workshop invites original research contributions on all aspects of Named Entities (NEs), including identification, analysis, extraction, mining, transformation and applications to NLP and IR systems. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
* NE Analysis - Distributional characteristics of NEs in mono- and multi-lingual text corpus - Orthographic/phonetic characteristics of NE
* NE Annotated Data - Annotated data sets in specific languages & Creation experiences
* Monolingual and Multilingual NE Identification & processing - Named Entity Recognition (approaches & evaluation) - Monolingual NE set expansion - Cross-lingual NE data identification & mapping - Cross-lingual NE data mining - Social Network Analysis and Entity Resolution
* Machine Transliteration - Statistical transliteration approaches & evaluation
* NE for IR - NE for Monolingual IR - NE Translation/Transliteration for CLIR
* NE in Social Media - Fuzzy matching of Named Entities - Multilingual matching of Named Entities - De-duplication of entities across social media
The details of Shared Task are described in the Shared Task Whitepaper. Data license agreements and registration forms for participating in the Shared Task will be available from February 29 onwards.
Paper submissions to NEWS 2016 should follow the ACL 2016 paper submission policy, including paper format, blind review policy and title and author format convention. Full papers (research paper) are in two-column format without exceeding eight (8) pages of content plus two (2) extra page for references and short papers (task paper) are also in two-column format without exceeding four (4) pages of content plus two (2) extra page for references. Submission must conform to the official ACL 2016 style guidelines. For details, please refer to http://acl2016.org/index.php?article_id=9.
Papers are to be submitted in pdf format at the ACL2016/NEWS submission page.