SIGHUM Workshop at COLING 2020: Submissions open!

LaTeCH-CLfL 2020:
The 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

to be held in conjunction with COLING 2020 in Barcelona as a virtual event

https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2020/

Renewed Second, and Last, Call for Papers (with apologies for cross-posting)

Organisers: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz

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COLING will be run virtually, and so will our workshop.  Look for more details on the workshop Web site.

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LaTeCH-CLfL 2020 is the fourth joint meeting of two communities with overlapping research goals and a similar research focus. The SIGHUM Workshops on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH) have been a forum for researchers who develop new technologies for improved information access to data from the broadly understood humanities and social sciences. The ACL Workshops on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLfL) have focussed on applications of NLP to a wide variety of literary data. The first three joint workshop (LaTeCH-CLfL 2017, 2018 and 2019) brought together people from both communities. We count on this workshop to broaden the scope of our work even further, and to encourage new common research initiatives.

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TOPICS AND CONTENT

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In the Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Heritage and literary communities, there is increasing interest in, and demand for, NLP methods for semantic and structural annotation, intelligent linking, discovery, querying, cleaning and visualization of both primary and secondary data. This is even true of primarily non-textual collections, given that text is also the pervasive medium for metadata. Such applications pose new challenges for NLP research: noisy, non-standard textual or multi-modal input, historical languages, vague research concepts, multilingual parts within one document, and so no. Digital resources often have insufficient coverage; resource-intensive methods require (semi-)automatic processing tools and domain adaptation, or intense manual effort (e.g., annotation).
Literary texts bring their own problems, because navigating this form of creative expression requires more than the typical information-seeking tools. Examples of advanced tasks include the study of literature of a certain period, author or sub-genre, recognition of certain literary devices, or quantitative analysis of poetry.

NLP methods applied in this context not only need to achieve high performance, but are often applied as a first step in research or scholarly workflow. That is why it is crucial to interpret model results properly; model interpretability might be more important than raw performance scores, depending on the context.

More generally, there is a growing interest in computational models whose results can be used or interpreted in meaningful ways. It is, therefore, of mutual benefit that NLP experts, data specialists and Digital Humanities researchers who work in and across their domains get involved in the Computational Linguistics community and present their fundamental or applied research results. It has already been demonstrated how cross-disciplinary exchange not only supports work in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage communities but also promotes work in the Computational Linguistics community to build richer and more effective tools and models.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

•    adaptation of NLP tools to Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and literature;
•    automatic error detection and cleaning of textual data;
•    complex annotation schemas, tools and interfaces;
•    creation (fully- or semi-automatic) of semantic resources;
•    creation and analysis of social networks of literary characters;
•    discourse and narrative analysis/modelling, notably in literature;
•    emotion analysis for the humanities and for literature;
•    generation of literary narrative, dialogue or poetry;
•    identification and analysis of literary genres;
•    linking and retrieving information from different sources, media, and domains;
•    modelling dialogue literary style for generation;
•    modelling of information and knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage;
•    profiling and authorship attribution;
•    search for scientific and/or scholarly literature;
•    work with linguistic variation and non-standard or historical use of language.

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INVITED SPEAKER

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The workshop will feature an invited talk, as usual. The speaker will be Professor Elke Teich. See the relevant workshop Web page for her profile.

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INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

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We invite papers on original, unpublished work in the topic areas of the workshop. In addition to long papers, we will consider short papers and system descriptions (demos). We also welcome position papers.

•    Long papers, presenting completed work, may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of references; final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
•    A short paper / demo can present work in progress, or the description of a system, and may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus additional pages of references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings.
•    A position paper — clearly marked as such — should not exceed six (6) pages including references.

All submissions must adhere to the COLING stylesheets (for LaTeX and MS Word) posted at https://coling2020.org/coling2020.zip. Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF, at https://www.softconf.com/coling2020/LaTeCH-CLfL/.

Reviewing will be double-blind. Please do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, or any references to Web sites, project names, acknowledgements and so on — anything that immediately reveals the authors’ identity. Self-references should be kept to a reasonable minimum, and anonymous citations cannot be used.

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and later available in the ACL Anthology.

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IMPORTANT DATES

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Paper submission deadline: September 25, 2020
Notification of acceptance: October 26, 2020
Camera-ready papers due: November 1, 2020 (if possible, we will push the deadline several days forward)
Workshop date: December 12, 2020

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MORE ON THE ORGANISERS

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Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
Anna Kazantseva, National Research Council of Canada
Nils Reiter, Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), Stuttgart University
Stan Szpakowicz, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa

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CONTACT

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latech-clfl@googlegroups.com

C3: Two successful PhD defenses!

We’re thrilled to announce that two members of Project C3 were awarded their PhD theses in July!

Elli Tourtouri defended her thesis “Rational Redundancy in Situated Communication” on July 2nd, and has now taken up a post-doc at the MPI in Nijmegen.

Torsten Jachmann defended his thesis “The Immediate Influence of Speaker Gaze on Situated Speech Comprehension: Evidence from Multiple ERP Components” on June 24th, and will be staying on as a post-doc in Matt Crocker’s group.

Congratulations to them both!

Conference presentation by project C4 @ SLS 2020!

At the 15th annual meeting of Slavic Linguistics Society, a presentation on ‚Phonetic distance in cross-lingual priming: Evidence from Bulgarian, Czech, Polish and Russian‘ is held by Jacek Kudera and Philip Georgis (Project C4).

Published article by Vera Demberg in DFG magazine!

Check out the new article by Vera Demberg and Tim Schröder on smart voice assistants published in the latest issue of DFG magazine „forschung“.

Read the full article here.

Joint paper by projects B6 & B7 accepted!

A joint paper by members of Projects B6 and B7 has been accepted for publication and will be presented at the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation @ACL 2020!

Bizzoni, Yuri; Juzek, Tom S; España-Bonet, Cristina; Chowdhury, Koel Dutta; van Genabith, Josef; Teich, Elke
How Human is Machine Translationese? Comparing Human and Machine Translations of Text and Speech
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation ACL (IWSLT 2020)

C4: Two papers accepted for publication

Two papers by members of Project C4 have been accepted for publication and will be available soon:

„Visual vs. auditory perception of Bulgarian stimuli by Russian native speakers“ (26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies Dialogue 2020) by Irina Stenger and Tania Avgustinova

„The INCOMSLAV Platform: Experimental Website with Integrated Methods for Measuring Linguistic Distances and Asymmetries in Receptive Multilingualism“ (Citizen Linguistics in Language Resource Development Workshop (CLLRD 2020) at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020)) by Irina Stenger, Klára Jágrová and Tania Avgustinova

LANTERN workshop 2020 sponsored by Hugging Face

Hugging Face – whose mission is to advance and democratize NLP for everyone will be sponsoring the Best Paper awards in the LANTERN Workshop collocated with COLING 2020. More information on the workshop organised by Aditya Mogadala (Project B4) coming soon.

Take part in our web-based intercomprehension experiments

About 2000 respondents have already taken part in our web-based intercomprehension experiments (http://intercomprehension.coli.uni-saarland.de/en/). Thank you all for participating and/or forwarding the link to as many people as possible!
We still need many, many participants from various (Slavic) language backgrounds. Furthermore, we have NEW audio experiments with Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian stimuli!

New Research Topic in Frontiers: Rational Approaches in Language Science

Submission is now open for a new topic in Frontiers – Rational Approaches in Language Science – with topic editors Matthew Crocker, Gerhard Jäger, Gina Kuperberg, Hannah Rohde, Elke Teich and Rory Turnbull.

We invite manuscripts on rational explanations of

  • Language use: behavioural or neurophysiological evidence — whether production or comprehension — for rational processes of speech and language production and perception, as exemplified by expectation-based theories, Bayesian, and noisy-channel models of communication;
  • Language development: evidence for rational strategies in the acquisition of all levels of linguistic structure, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics;
  • Language change and language evolution: Corpus-based, typological, or simulation-based evidence regarding the emergent structure of human languages;
  • Situated language use: the influence of visual context and communicative goals. Examples include evidence for expectation-based mechanisms, pragmatic inference, as well as rational encoding strategies.

Keywords: rationality, information theory, bayesian modeling, surprisal theory, entropy, language evolution, psycholinguistics, language change, language production, language development

Find more information here.

ANNIS Workshop (postponed) – Places available!

In linguistics we often need to reconcile diverse kinds of language data comprising annotation on different linguistic levels. A tool to search and visualize such data is ANNIS, „a web browser-based search and visualization architecture for complex multilayer linguistic corpora with diverse types of annotation“. To gain an insight into the complex architecture of ANNIS we will offer a one-day workshop.

The workshop will start with a general introduction to the public ANNIS installation explaining the surface, different possible types of annotations and ways of querying different corpora. In a second block we will also get familiar with the local ANNIS version (ANNIS kickstarter) and the pepper framework in order to use ANNIS on our own laptops and how to import our own corpora into ANNIS. In hands-on exercises there will be time to practice the query language on your own data.

Some places are still available! If you would like to register, please get in touch with Pauline Krielke: mariepauline.krielke@uni-saarland.de

Time: Postponed until further notice
Place: UdS Campus, Building A2.2, Konferenzsaal

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