Turkic languages (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazakh, Tatar, Uzbek and many others) are spoken as native languages by more than 150 million people all around the world. Turkic languages have complex agglutinative morphology with very productive inflectional and derivational processes leading to a very large vocabulary size. They also have a very free constituent order with almost no formal constraints. Furthermore, due to various historical and social reasons these languages have employed a wide-variety of writing systems and still do so. These aspects bring numerous challenges to computational processing of these languages in tasks such as language modeling, parsing, statistical machine translation, speech-to-speech translation, etc. Time is now ripe to focus on the development of language resources and computational processing techniques for these languages to bring their status up to par with more studied languages in the context of speech and language processing.

We are pleased to invite you to the "First Workshop on Language Resources and Technologies for Turkic Languages" to be held during LREC 2012 in Istanbul. This half-day workshop will be the first attempt to bring together the researchers, commercial interests and other stakeholders actively involved in developing and using speech and language technologies for Turkic languages. The workshop invites submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all aspects of speech and language technologies for Turkic languages. Selected contributions will be presented as short-oral presentations or posters. Topics include but are not limited to: