Proceedings of LREC'2012 Workshop LRE-Rel: Language Resources and Evaluation for Religious Texts

Welcome to the first LRE-Rel Workshop on Language Resources and Evaluation for Religious Texts erence in Istanbul, Turkey. The focus of this workshop is the application of computer-supported and Text Analytics techniques to religious texts ranging from: the faith-defining religious canon; authoritative interpretations and commentary; sermons; liturgy; prayers; poetry; and lyrics. We see this as an inclusive and crossdisciplinary topic, and the workshop aims to bring together researchers with a generic interest in religious texts to raise awareness of different perspectives and practices, and to identify some common themes. We therefore welcomed submissions on a range of topics, including but not limited to: analysis of ceremonial, liturgical, and ritual speech; recitation styles; speech decorum; discourse analysis for religious texts; formulaic language and multi-word expressions in religious texts; suitability of modal and other logic types for knowledge representation and inference in religious texts; issues in, and evaluation of, machine translation in religious texts; text-mining, stylometry, and authorship attribution for religious texts; corpus query languages and tools for exploring religious corpora; dictionaries, thesaurai, Wordnet, and ontologies for religious texts; measuring semantic relatedness between multiple religious texts; (new) corpora and rich and novel annotation schemes for religious texts; annotation and analysis of religious metaphor; genre analysis for religious texts; application in other disciplines (e.g. theology, classics, philosophy, literature) of computersupported methods for analysing religious texts. Our own research has focussed on the Quran (e.g. see Proceedings of the main Conference, LREC'2012; but we were pleased to receive papers dealing with a range of other religious texts, including Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Sikh holy books, as well as religious writings from the 17th and 20th centuries. Many of the papers present an analysis technique applied to a specific religious text, which could also be relevant to analysis of other texts; these include text classification, detecting similarities and correspondences between texts, authorship attribution, extracting collocations or multi-word expressions, stylistic analysis, Named Entity recognition, advanced search capabilities for religious texts, developing translations and dictionaries. This LRE-Rel Workshop demonstrates that religious texts are interesting and challenging for Language Resources and Evaluation researchers. It also shows LRE researchers a way to reach beyond our research community to the billions of readers of these holy books; LRE research can have a major impact on society, helping the general public to access and understand religious texts.