Nicoletta Calzolari (@dblp) has invited me again to serve on the scientific committee for the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation in 2010.

LREC 2010 will be held in Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta, Malta, on May 17-23, 2010. The committee will consist of experts like yourself, spanning all interests within the LREC 2010 community.  Members will review papers, and help in other conference activities, such as by encouraging submissions, circulating information, etc.

LREC2010 Malta

I was not too sure to accept the invitation this year, because it takes time and normally one is short of it. However, it is a praise and it is normally not good to say no to such a thing. Once I said no to a similar invitation from SEPLN, and, after more than ten years serving at the scientific committee, was never asked again.

But peer-evaluation also gives the opportunity to keep up to date with research in the field, or at least it helps trying to. I had to check the topics in which I feel more confident… It has not been easy! Machine translation used to be one of my strong matters, however, since 1990 it is mainly carried out through probabilities and machine learning techniques, which I’m very weak at. As a compensation, there are new symbolic realms in which an old rocker from the eighties, trained in unification based grammars and semantic networks, feels much more confortable, such as metadata, ontologies, digital libraries, controlled languages.

Every course I ask my students to visit conference sites as LREC to monitor the evolution of the topics in the call for papers. And this of 2010 is a very comprehensive list that includes many aspects connected with our Modern Languages syllabus. Students, please, take a look:

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