Workshop on Cross-Platform Text Mining and Natural Language Processing Interoperability at LREC 2016

We are pleased to announce the workshop on Cross-Platform Text Mining and Natural Language Processing Interoperability at LREC 2016 co-organized by Richard Eckart de Castilho from the UKP Lab.

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge in the quantity of available digital research data, offering new insights and opportunities for improved understanding. Following advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text and data mining (TDM) is emerging as an invaluable tool for harnessing the power of structured and unstructured content and data. Hidden and new knowledge can be discovered by using TDM at multiple levels and in multiple dimensions. However, text mining and NLP solutions are not easy to discover and use, nor are they easy to combine for end users.

Multiple efforts are being undertaken world-wide to create TDM and NLP platforms. These platforms are targeted at specific research communities, typically researchers in a particular location, e.g. OpenMinTeD, CLARIN (Europe), ALVEO (Australia), or LAPPS (USA). All of these platforms face similar problems in the following areas: discovery of content and analytics capabilities, integration of knowledge resources, legal and licensing aspects, data representation, and analytics workflow specification and execution.

The goal of cross-platform interoperability raises many problems. At the level of content, metadata, language resources, and text annotations, we use different data representations and vocabularies. At the level of workflows, there is no uniform process model that allows platforms to smoothly interact. The licensing status of content, resources, analytics, and of the output created by a combination of such licenses is difficult to determine and there is currently no way to reliably exchange such information between platforms. User identity management is often tightly coupled to the licensing requirements and likewise an impediment for cross-platform interoperability.