Language Technology
for Cultural Heritage Data
(LaTeCH 2008)

The 2nd Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage Data will be held in conjunction with the 6th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, which will take place May 26 - June 1, 2008, in Marrakech, Morocco. The workshop is a follow-up to last year's ACL workshop on the same topic (LaTeCH 2007).

About the Workshop

Museums, archives, and libraries around the world maintain large collections of cultural heritage objects, such as archaeological artefacts, sound recordings, historic manuscripts, or preserved animal specimens. Large scale digitisation projects are currently underway to make these collections more accessible. Of equal importance, however, is the development of powerful tools to search, link, enrich, and mine the digitised data. Language technology has an important role to play in this, even for collections which are primarily non-textual, since text is the pervasive medium used for metadata. At the same time, the cultural heritage domain poses special challenges for the NLP community, including the use of historic or non-standard language, the presence of OCR or transcription errors in the data, and the necessity to deal with data from various media. The cultural heritage domain is therefore also an interesting and challenging testbed for the robustness of existing language technology.

The full day workshop aims to bring together researchers working on all aspects of applying language technology to the cultural heritage domain.