[apologies for cross-postings]

1st Call for Papers
RaPID 2018: "Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric impairments"
Half-day workshop at LREC2018 | Miyazaki, Japan | May 8th, 2018
Submission deadline: January 14th, 2018 (see also Important dates below)
RaPID website: <https://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/rapid-2018>

The RaPID 2018 Workshop will follow up on the successful RaPID Workshop @ LREC2016 (<https://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/rapid-2016>) 

CALL FOR PAPERS:
RaPID-2018 will be an interdisciplinary forum for researchers to share information, findings, and experience on the creation and processing of data acquired or produced by people with various forms of mental, cognitive, neuropsychiatric, or neurodegenerative impairments, such as aphasia, dementia, autism, Parkinsons or schizophrenia. Particularly, the workshop focus on the creation, annotation, description, processing and analysis of linguistic, paralinguistic and extra-linguistic resources (e.g., spontaneous spoken language; audio-recorded samples and transcripts; eye tracking measurements; wearable and in-situ sensor data etc.) from individuals at various stages of these impairments and with varying degrees of severity in order to identify, extract, process, correlate, evaluate and disseminate various linguistic phenotypes and measurements and thus aid the diagnosis, monitor the progression or predict individuals at risk.

A central aim is to facilitate the study of the relationships among various levels of linguistic, paralinguistic and extra-linguistic observations (e.g., acoustic measures; phonological, syntactic and semantic features; eye tracking measurements; sensors, signs and multimodal signals). Submission of papers are invited in all of the aforementioned areas, particularly emphasizing multidisciplinary aspects of processing such data and the interplay between clinical/nursing/medical sciences, language technology, computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP) and computer science. The workshop will act as a stimulus for the discussion of several ongoing research questions driving current and future research by bringing together researchers from various research communities.

 
TOPICS OF INTEREST:
The topics of interest for the workshop session include but are not limited to:
  • Building, adapting and availability of linguistic resources, data sets and tools
  • Data collection methodologies
  • Acquisition and combination of novel data samples
  • Guidelines, annotation schemas, annotation tools
  • Addressing the challenges of representation, including dealing with data sparsity and dimensionality issues, feature combination from different sources and modalities
  • Domain adaptation of NLP tools
  • Acoustic/phonologic/phonetic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of data; including modeling of perception (e.g. eye-movement measures of reading) and production processes (e.g. recording of the writing process by means of digital pens, keystroke logging etc.); use of gestures accompanying speech and non-linguistic behavior
  • Modeling and deep / machine learning approaches for early diagnostics, prediction, monitoring, classification etc. of various cognitive and psychiatric impairments
  • Information fusion
  • Evaluation of the significance of features in diagnostics
  • Evaluation of tools, systems, components, metrics, applications and technologies including methodologies making use of NLP
  • Evaluation, comparison and critical assessment of resources
  • Involvement of medical/clinical professionals and patients
  • Ethical and legal questions in research with human data in the domain, and how they can be handled
  • Deployment
  • Experiences, lessons learned and the future of NLP/AI in the area
SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Papers are invited in all of the areas outlined in the Topics of interest, particularly emphasizing multidisciplinary aspects of processing such data and the interplay between clinical/nursing/medical sciences, language technology, computational linguistics, NLP, and computer science. We welcome also papers discussing problems derived from the design of relevant data samples and populations, but also the exploitation of results and outcomes as well as legal and ethical questions on how to deal with such data and make it available. The workshop solicits papers describing original research. Papers may preferably describe substantial and completed work, but may also focus on a contribution, a negative result, an interesting application nugget, a software package, a small, focused contribution or work in progress. The workshop will act as a stimulus for the discussion of several ongoing research questions driving current and future research and challenges by bringing together researchers from various research communities.

RaPID-2018 will be a half-day LREC workshop to be held in the afternoon of Tuesday the 8th of May 2018. The oral presentations will be allocated 10-20 minutes (please see the program for details), possibly, followed by a common poster session (depending on the volume of received submissions). Submitted papers must be formatted according to the camera-ready style for LREC 2018 (style guidelines, templates etc. for the camera-ready papers are provided on LREC's main conference page/Submission), and submitted electronically in PDF format through the START conference manager page [to be announced soon]. Authorship does not have to be anonymous and papers should be 4-8 pages of content. Additional, unlimited pages containing the list of references and appendices are allowed. We will strive to have all submissions reviewed by at least three, or more, members of the program committee. Depending on the volume of contributions, papers that describe systems or tools will be invited to give a demo of their system during a poster session.

IMPORTANT DATES:
  • First call for papers: Monday, 6th of November, 2017
  • Submission deadline: Sunday 14th of January, 2018 
  • Notification of acceptance: Saturday 10th of February, 2018 
  • Early-bird registration for the main conference and workshops is the 15th of February, 2018
  • Camera-ready papers: Sunday 10th of March 2018
  • RaPID Workshop: Tuesday 8th of May, 2018
CONTACT:
Dimitrios Kokkinakis: dimitrios _DOT_ kokkinakis _AT_ gu _DOT_ se
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
  • Dimitrios Kokkinakis, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Kristina Lundholm Fors, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Kathleen Fraser, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Charalambos Themistocleous, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Alexandra König, Geriatric Hospital Nice and the University of Côte d'Azur, France
  • Frank Rudzicz, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and the University of Toronto, Canada
  • Arto Nordlund, the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
PROGRAMME  COMMITTEE:
  • Jan Alexandersson, DFKI GmbH, Germany
  • Eiji Aramaki, Kyoto University, Japan
  • Simon Dobnik, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Jens Edlund, KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  • Gerasimos Fergadiotis, Portland State University, USA
  • Kathleen Fraser, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Peter Garrard, St George's, University of London, UK
  • Lena Hartelius, the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Kristy Hollingshead, Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), USA
  • Richard Johansson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Masatomo Kobayashi, IBM Research - Tokyo, Japan
  • Dimitrios Kokkinakis, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Alexandra König, Geriatric Hospital Nice and the University of Côte d'Azur, France
  • Peter Ljunglöf, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
  • Kristina Lundholm Fors, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Arto Nordlund, the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Marcus Nyström, University of Lund, Sweden
  • Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, UK
  • Vassiliki Rentoumi, SKEL, NCSR Demokritos, Greece
  • Fabien Ringeval, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
  • Frank Rudzicz, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and the University of Toronto, Canada
  • Kairit Sirts, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Hironobu Takagi, IBM Research - Tokyo, Japan
  • Charalambos Themistocleous, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Athanasios Tsanas, University of Oxford, UK
  • Spyridoula Varlokosta, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
  • Åsa Wengelin, University of Gothenburg, Sweden