Resources and Methods for Semantic Processing of Digital Works/Texts

Workshop held in conjunction with Digital Humanities 2016

http://dh2016.adho.org/

July 11, 2016, Krakow

Motivation

One of the consequences of the digital revolution is the gradual, but inexorable availability of all kinds of text in a machine-readable format. Libraries around the world scan their collections. Newspapers offer their articles on the web. Governments put their archives and laws online. A large part of what the human mind has produced: Literature, essays, encyclopedias, biographies, etc., is, or will be, accessible in a computerized form in a wide variety of languages. Within a few years, we can predict that (nearly) all text ever produced by humanity will be available in digital form: Either born digital or digitized from books, newspapers, archives, etc.

While digitization is well underway, turning the information contained in these texts into exploitable knowledge in the information society has become a major challenge as well as a major opportunity. IBM Watson and Google’s knowledge graph are recent and spectacular achievements that show the significance of knowledge extraction from text. IBM Watson is a system that can answer questions in the US Jeopardy quiz show better than any human being. One of its core components is the PRISMATIC knowledge base consisting of one billion semantic propositions extracted from the English version of Wikipedia and the New York Times, while Google’s knowledge graph is based on a systematic extraction of millions of entities from a variety of sources. Such technologies are defining the information age, and they have the potential to bring a much higher degree of sophistication to “distant-reading” methodology in digital humanities, enabling large-scale access to text content.

Keynote Speakers

1. Olivier Hamon, Syllabs, The RetroNews project
2. Alexander Mehler, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, The TextImager project

Organizing Committee

• Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg,
• Nathalie Fargier, Persée (Université de Lyon, ENS de Lyon, CNRS),
• Richard Johansson, University of Gothenburg,
• Marcus Klang, Lund University,
• Pierre Nugues, Lund University,
• Nils Reiter, Universität Stuttgart,
• Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Program Committee

• Lars Borin, Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg,
• Nathalie Fargier, Persée (Université de Lyon, ENS de Lyon, CNRS),
• Richard Johansson, University of Gothenburg,
• Stefano Menini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, University of Trento,
• Pierre Nugues, Department of Computer Science, Lund University,
• Nils Reiter, Institute of Natural Language Processing, Stuttgart University,
• Rachele Sprugnoli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, University of Trento,
• Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Workshop Description at DH 2016

Visit http://dh2016.adho.org/workshops/ and look for workshop number PreL07.

Alternatively, you can visit the conference program: https://www.conftool.pro/dh2016/sessions.php

Contact

D2K 2016: d2k@cs.lth.se