Preface to the special issue: LREC 2012: state of the art in resource development and evaluation

This special issue of LRE includes extended versions of selected papers from the Eighth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), held in Istanbul in May 2012. Paper selection was based on recommendations from members of the LREC Scientific Committee, who were asked to identify potential ‘‘best papers’’ during the reviewing process. The final selection was made by the LRE co-editorsin-chief, with the aim of putting together a special issue that represents the trends and topics of focus in the field. Several of the issue’s nine papers focus on multi-lingual resources, and in particular parallel resources, which are increasingly used in the field to improve tool performance and bootstrap resources for under-resourced languages. Evaluation and replicability, which have come to the forefront of the community’s interest over the past two or three years, are also among the special issue’s topics. Finally, several papers demonstrate the use of the ‘‘human-in-the-loop’’ for annotation and evaluation, another strategy that has gained recent attention as the benefits of merging fully automated and human-assisted methods become increasingly apparent. Although these do not exhaust the range of topics that were presented at LREC 2012, they provide a representative sample of current interests and methods in the field. The creation and use of language resources has come of age over the past sixteen years since the first LREC in 1998 and the past nine years since the journal Computers and the Humanities was recast to become LRE. Every major conference in the field now either officially or unofficially recognizes the importance of this activity, which was not the case until as recently as 5–7 years ago. In contrast,