Language Technologies for Government and Public Administration - LT4Gov

LT4Gov will be held next May in Marseille, France within LREC 2020, 12th Edition of its Language Resources and Evaluation Conference organized by the European Language Resources Association.

The Conference, Workshops and Tutorials will be held at the Palais du Pharo.

Marseille, France

16th May 2020.

• Extended 28th February 2020: Submission of papers
• 13th March 2020: Notification of acceptance
• 3rd April 2020: Submission of camera-ready version for the Proceedings

The sector of governmental bodies and public administration is an important sector representing a considerable percentage of expenditure of the GDP. Expenditure averages lie between 25%-57% in different countries according to reports from OECD, EU and World Bank. Moreover, this sector handles daily huge amounts of data in different formats.

Processing these huge amounts of information by HLT could provide valuable, data-driven and evidence-based insights that would highly impact the workflow for civil servants, the policy-making and the public services offered to citizens in different domains: Health, Tourism, Justice and Law, Culture.

LT4Gov aims at bringing together initiatives where Human Language Technologies (HLT) are used within the context of governmental bodies and public administration in the different domains (Health, Tourism, Justice, Culture, etc.). Governmental bodies and Public Administration Entities could be providers of data or could be users or beneficiaries of solutions in different sub-sectors. In addition, they could provide solutions to enhance services destined to the citizens.

Within LT4Gov and Public Administration, we consider the following three scenarios:

• PublicData4LRs (Public Data for Language Resources) - Public Administrations as providers of data
• LT4PolicyMaking (Language Technologies for Policy Making) - Public Administrations as users
• LT4Citizens (Language Technologies for Citizens) -Public Administrations as providers of services to the citizens

The workshop welcomes papers and demos showcasing the use of HLT in a governmental context either for Policy Makers, Civil Servants or Citizens.

According to the above main lines, papers or demos could describe:

• Language resources developed from open data of Public Administrations PublicData4LRs
• Solutions to process data from Public Administrations and Governmental bodies.LT4PolicyMaking/ LT4Citizens
• Solutions to improve/innovate the workflow within Public Administrations and Governmental bodies.LT4PolicyMaking
• Solutions to improve/innovate the policymaking and decision taking within Public Administrations and Governmental bodies based on knowledge inferred and insights from data.LT4PolicyMaking
• Solutions to improve/innovate the services offered to the citizen by Public Administrations and Governmental bodies. LT4Citizens

Papers and demos are welcome from Academia, Industry, SMEs or Public Administrations. A special attention will be given to the role of SMEs and innovative start-ups in this respect.

Regarding the thematic scope, LT4Gov and Public Administration includes sub sectors related to, but not restricted to the following:

• Health: HLT in public health services
• Legal and Justice
• RDI
• Tourism
• Cultural Heritage, etc.

Concerning the technical topics of interest, LT4Gov and Public Administration will invite contributions in the following HLT-related lines:

• Innovation in policymaking through data-driven and evidence-based approaches.
• Disruptive technology in governance such as Artificial Intelligence applications.
• Data interoperability among public administrations
• Effective and innovative approaches for citizens’ engagement

• Language Resources from Open Public Data and Governmental bodies (Development curation of corpora, annotation, interoperability, linked data, Knowledge Bases, Ontologies, Terminologies, Thesaurus, etc.)
• Modelling and Algorithms using public data or for developing solutions for Public Administration (Domain Specific-Language Models, Topic Models, Knowledge Graphs, etc.)
• Natural Language Processing Applications (Question Answering, Text Summarization, Information Extraction, Named Entities, Entity Linking, Indexing, Information Retrieval, Text Entailment, etc.)
• Machine Translation (MT engines, Translation Memories, Computer Aided Translation)
• Speech Technologies and Dialogue Systems (Speech-to-Text, Diaritization, Dialogue Systems, etc.)
• Multimodal data processing

All submissions should be sent through the START system in the following link: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/LT4Gov/

Submissions should be sent in compliance with the style sheet adopted for the LREC Proceedings. LT4Gov welcomes two types of submissions:

• Papers (Research Results). From 6-8 pages.
• Showcases (Project Demos or Process/Service innovation): 4 pages.

This could be real life solutions where introducing NLP transformed the traditional workflow or success stories of collaborations between different actors.

Review and Selection

• All submissions will be subject to peer review by at least two members of LT4Gov Scientific Committee.
• Selection criteria include accuracy, clarity and significance of results, and quality of presentation.
• For each accepted submission/demo/showcase, at least one author is required to attend the workshop to present the paper.

LT4Gov encourages authors of papers to join the LRE Map initiative "Share your LRs!" initiative and ISLRN number (www.islrn.org): Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!

Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.

LT4Gov as a workshop as part of LREC 2020, it will take into account gender equity and diversity.

Technical and Scientific Committee (To be confirmed)

• David Pérez Fernández - Coordinator of the Spanish Language Technologies Plan (Plan TL), Secretariat of State for Digital Advancement (SEAD), Ministry of Economy
• Doaa Samy - Instituto de Ingeniería del Conocimiento IIC and Member of the General Technical Office of Plan TL.
• Jerónimo Arena-García - Universidad Carlos III Madrid
• María José Del Olmo Toribio- Plan TL, SEAD.
• David Griol Barres - Universidad Universidad de Granada
• Maite Melero - Barcelona Super Computing Centre BSC
• Pablo Haya - Instituto de la Ingeniería del Conocimiento IIC
• Antonio Moreno Sandoval - Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
• Luis Fernando D' Haro - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Contact person: Doaa Samy. Email: doaa.samy@iic.uam.es

LT4Gov stems from the experience gained by the team of the Spanish Plan for Advancement of Language Technologies. This Plan is a reference model of initiatives from the Governmental bodies to promote the introduction and integration of HLT in the workflow of different public entities.

The scope and objectives of this workshop is in-line with European initiatives tackling different aspects such as:

LT4Gov takes into account the use of HLT in Public Administrations and Governmental bodies in the following three scenarios:

• Public Administrations as data providers, available open public datasets are a valuable input for boosting the development of language resources or for training models. Interoperable, well-curated and enriched developed Language Resources could take as a starting point the huge number of open public datasets available in open public data portals at the regional, national and international levels such as the European Data Portal (https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/home), the US Data Portal (https://www.data.gov/) or the United Nations (https://undatacatalog.org/). Access and use of these datasets is possible within legislative frameworks such as the European Directive on open data and the re-use of public sector information, also known as the ‘Open Data Directive’ (Directive (EU) 2019/1024) or other national legislations. A good example is how the available EU translation memory known as DGT-TM contributed in training new Translation Engines.
• Public Administrations as users, Public Administration could make use of HLT (NLP, Speech Technologies, Machine Translation) to process the huge amounts of data dealt with daily. In some cases, these amounts may be considered as “big” data given their volume and variability. In-house solutions or services that apply HLT would highly impact the workflow in different aspects and could increase the effectiveness of different process. Thus, introducing HLT is totally in line with the efforts of innovation and digital transformation in public sectors. HLT would play a very important role in evidence-based and data-driven policy-making.
• Public Administrations as service providers for citizens, governmental bodies and Public Administration could innovate their services to citizens and improve some workflows, which in turn, would benefit the citizen. In addition, they can use tools based on HLT to enhance citizen engagement in policy making through analysis of public consultations or public opinion.

Based on all the above, HLT could highly contribute in the innovation and the digital transformation of the public administration either in general or in domain-specific actions related to subsectors such as Education, Health, Culture, Tourism, etc. Thus, this workshop LT4Gov will invite contributions and results of work carried out by the HLT community in relation with public and governmental aspects in the line of language resources or in the line of solutions/tools destined either to these entities or to the citizen.