Call for Abstracts: CLARIN Annual Conference 2024

CLARIN ERIC is pleased to announce the CLARIN Annual Conference 2024 and calls for the submission of extended abstracts. CLARIN is the European research infrastructure that makes digital language resources available to scholars, researchers, students and citizen scientists from a wide range of disciplines, coordinates the collection of language resources and tools, and offers advanced tools to explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine such datasets, regardless of their location.

New in this year’s call is the topic of Education and Training with CLARIN Tools.

Submission deadline: 12 April 2024

CLARIN ERIC is pleased to announce the CLARIN Annual Conference 2024 and calls for the submission of extended abstracts. CLARIN is the European research infrastructure that makes digital language resources available to scholars, researchers, students and citizen scientists from a wide range of disciplines, coordinates the collection of language resources and tools, and offers advanced tools to explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine such datasets, regardless of their location.

New in this year’s call is the topic of Education and Training with CLARIN Tools.

Submission deadline: 12 April 2024

Important Dates

  • 23 January 2024: First call published on CLARIN website, disseminated, and submission system open
  • 12 February 2024: Second call for abstracts disseminated
  • End of March 2024: Third call for abstracts disseminated
  • 12 April 2024: Submission deadline
  • 17 June 2024: Notification of acceptance
  • 2 September 2024: Camera-ready version deadline
  • 15-17 October 2024: CLARIN Annual Conference

Location

After the successful hybrid editions of 2022 and 2023, we plan to repeat the same format in 2024. The CLARIN Conference 2024 will be a face-to-face event that will be fully accessible virtually. The conference will take place in Barcelona, Spain. The event will be hosted and organised by CLARIN ERIC in collaboration with CLARIAH-ES and the Basque Center for Language Technology (HiTZ).

Conference Aims

The CLARIN Annual Conference is organised for the wider Humanities and Social Sciences (SSH) community in order to exchange experiences and best practices in working with the CLARIN infrastructure and to share plans for future developments. The programme will cover a range of topics, including the design, construction and operation of the CLARIN infrastructure, the data, tools and services that it contains or should contain, its actual use by researchers, teachers or interested parties, its relation to other infrastructures and projects, and the CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure.

Conference Topics

We invite submissions describing CLARIN-related work addressing the following aspects:

Use of the CLARIN Infrastructure:

  • Use of the CLARIN infrastructure in SSH research and beyond
  • Usability studies and evaluations of CLARIN services
  • Analysis of the CLARIN infrastructure usage and impact studies/use cases
  • Identification and analysis of user audiences and developer communities, including digital humanities, libraries, computer science, information science, cognitive science and human-centred AI
  • Showcases, demonstrations and research projects that are relevant to CLARIN.

Design and Construction of the CLARIN Infrastructure:

  • Recent tools and resources added to the CLARIN infrastructure
  • Metadata and concept registries, cataloguing and browsing
  • Persistent identifiers and citation mechanisms
  • Access, including  authentication and authorisation
  • Search functions, including Federated Content Search
  • Web applications, web services and workflows
  • Standards and solutions for interoperability of language resources, tools and services
  • Models for the sustainability of the infrastructure, including curation, migration financing and cooperation
  • Legal and ethical issues in operating the infrastructure.

CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure and Dissemination:

  • User assistance (help desks, user manuals, FAQs)
  • CLARIN portals and outreach to users
  • Videos, screencasts, recorded lectures
  • Knowledge centres.

CLARIN vis-à-vis other Infrastructures and Initiatives:

Education and Training:

  • Using CLARIN language resources and services in teaching and training activities targeting audiences from different sectors (academia, , industry) and lessons learnt
  • The impact of the DH Course Registry (e.g. development of the DH curricula, student exchange programmes)
  • Guidelines and best practices for using CLARIN in the university curricula
  • Developing new courses reusing existing materials from the CLARIN Learning Hub (e.g. UPSKILLS).

Format of the Programme Sessions

The programme of the conference will include oral presentations and posters, and may also include demos. Due to limits in the time schedule, the number of oral presentations is limited. Authors can select if they prefer a poster presentation. If not, papers are allocated a presentation format based on the suitability of the paper for a session as decided by the programme committee. Authors of accepted submissions will be offered the opportunity to demo their work in addition to their presentation. 

Submissions

The language of the conference is English and presentations will be made in English. Proposals for oral, poster or demo presentations must be submitted as extended abstracts (length: 3 to 4 pages A4, including references) in PDF format, in accordance with the template (ZIP-archive, Overleaf template). Authors can choose whether to submit on an anonymous or non-anonymous basis. 

Extended abstracts should address one or more topics that are relevant to CLARIN’s activities, resources, tools or services. This relevance should be explicitly articulated in the submission, as well as in the presentation at the conference. Contributions addressing desiderata for the CLARIN infrastructure that are currently not in place are also eligible. Authors are not required to be or have been directly involved in national or cross-national CLARIN projects.

Extended abstracts must be submitted through the EasyChair submission system and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. All proposals will be reviewed on the basis of the following criteria:

  • Appropriateness: The contribution must pertain to the CLARIN infrastructure or be relevant for it (e.g. its use, design, construction, operation, exploitation, illustration of possible applications, etc.), and this relevance should be explicitly articulated in the submission.
  • Soundness and correctness: The content must be technically and factually correct and methods must be scientifically sound, according to best practice, and preferably evaluated.
  • Meaningful comparison: The abstract must indicate that the author is aware of alternative approaches, if any, and highlight relevant differences.
  • Substance: Concrete work and experiences will be given preference over ideas and plans.
  • Impact: Contributions with a higher impact on the research community and society more broadly will be given preference over papers with lower impact.
  • Clarity: The abstract should be clearly written and well structured.
  • Timeliness and novelty: The work must convey relevant new knowledge to the audience at this event.

Attendance

For each accepted abstract, CLARIN ERIC offers one author free access, free accommodation and meals. Travelling costs are not covered by CLARIN ERIC. Authors are encouraged to reach out to their national consortium, to their home institution or to third-party funds to cover travel costs.

More details can be found on the CLARIN Website.

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