THE LAW CHALLENGE

Winner's travel support is provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF)

LAW VI will include a special "challenge" session, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (IIS-0948101: Content of Linguistic Annotation: Standards and Practices (CLASP)) and the ACL Special Interest Group on Annotation (ACL SIGANN). The goals of the challenge are to promote the use and collaborative development of open, shared resources, and to identify and promote best practices for annotation interoperability.

Submissions to the session will be evaluated by members of the LAW program committee. Based on their recommendations, one paper will receive an award of up to US $2500 to cover the author's (or authors') travel expenses, including air fare, local ground transportation, hotel for one or two nights, and workshop registration. All papers accepted for the session will be presented and included in the LAW VI proceedings.

Evaluation criteria will include (but are not necessarily limited to) the following :

• demonstrable interoperability with at least one other annotation scheme or format developed by others
• quality of the annotated resource in terms of scheme design, documentation, tool support, etc.
• open availability of developed resources for community use
• usability and reusability of the annotation scheme, tools, or annotated resource
• outstanding contribution to the development of annotation best practices for interoperability
• innovative use of linguistic information from different annotation layers

We invite long paper submissions describing original, innovative projects involving linguistic annotations that reflect the state-of-the-art in best practice for annotation development, creation, and/or use. Papers must follow the deadlines and format for LAW submissions, described at http://faculty.washington.edu/fxia/LAWVI/. Where possible, submissions should describe projects that involve freely available, standard shared resources (e.g., MASC: http://www.anc.org/MASC/ for English). If appropriate, submitters should also register their annotation categories with ISOCat (http://www.isocat.org) or make similar efforts to provide detailed information for such categories that can be referenced by others. In the case of MASC, all new annotations or derived data should be subsequently contributed for free use by the entire community.

Important dates