Parallel Corpora: Creation and Applications

International Symposium PaCor 2018

 

The Instituto Universitario de Lenguas Modernas y Traductores (IULMYT) and the Department of English Studies: Linguistics and Literature of Universidad Complutense of Madrid (UCM) are pleased to announce the 2nd edition of the International Symposium PACOR 2018 on Parallel Corpora at the Faculty of Filología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) on November 5-7, 2018.

Research on parallel corpora spans a number of topics from contrastive linguistics and translation studies, lexicography, language teaching and learning to computer-assisted and machine translation. In the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community, parallel corpora are a key resource as training data for statistical machine translation, and for building or extending bilingual lexicons and terminologies. However, high-quality parallel corpora that are large enough to produce statistically reliable results are scarce, despite the development of automated methods to mine them from the Web. In recent years this scarcity of parallel corpora has motivated research on comparable corpora –pairs of monolingual corpora compiled according to the same set of criteria in different languages– to mine information about possible translations.

After the successful celebration of the 1st PaCOR 2016 Symposium at the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2016, we decided to initiate a biannual series of events, with the aim of encouraging dialogue and contact among researchers and practitioners working on building parallel corpora and those exploring such resources for various purposes.  With this 2nd Symposium we would like continue with the exploration of these issues, but also to extend the range of topics to research on comparable corpora for a wide range of applications.

 

CONFERENCE THEMES

We welcome submissions on the following (but not limited to) research strands:

1. Design, analysis, annotation and visualization of parallel and comparable corpora for research and applications in the areas of contrastive linguistics, human translation and translation learning, computer-assisted and machine translation, language teaching and learning, lexicography and terminology. 

2. Tools and methods for the creation, annotation and exploitation of parallel/comparable corpora, such as: 

• Automatic and semi-automatic methods for building parallel/comparable corpora
• Methods to mine parallel and comparable corpora from the Web
• Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
• Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora 
• Multimedia/multi-modal parallel and comparable corpora

3. Presentation of existing bilingual parallel and comparable corpora, in which Spanish is included or multilingual corpora in which Spanish is the pivot language.

 

PUBLICATION

We have an agreement with the journal Languages to publish a Special Issue on the basis of a selection of the presentations at PACOR2018.

Languages (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages) is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal on interdisciplinary studies of languages and linguistics, indexed in ERIH Plus. We welcome contributions within any theoretical, expermental or applied approach.