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Shared Task on Fine-Tuning LLMs for Ukrainian (UNLP @ LREC-Coling 2024)
by Mariana Romanyshyn 13 Feb '24

13 Feb '24

*The Third Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Workshop (UNLP 2024)* <https://unlp.org.ua/> UNLP 2024 features the first *Shared Task on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Ukrainian*. This Shared Task aims to challenge and assess LLMs' capabilities to understand and generate Ukrainian, paving the way for LLM development in Slavic languages. *News: *The training data was released today. *Task Description* In this shared task, your goal is to instruction-tune a large language model that can answer questions and perform tasks in Ukrainian. The model should possess knowledge of Ukrainian history, language, and literature, as well as common knowledge, and should be capable of generating fluent and factually accurate responses. The evaluation will be two-fold: accuracy of answers to multiple-choice questions and human evaluation on a selection of text generation tasks. You can find the instructions, sample data, and scripts at https://github.com/unlp-workshop/unlp-2024-shared-task. *Registration* Teams that intend to participate should register by filling in this form <https://forms.gle/MiC7pWsWbwBdSmoX9>. *Publication* Participants in the shared task are invited to submit a paper to the UNLP 2024 <https://unlp.org.ua/call-for-papers/> workshop. Submitting a paper is *not mandatory* for participating in the Shared Task. Papers must follow the workshop submission instructions and will undergo regular peer review. Their acceptance will not depend on the results obtained in the shared task, but on the quality of the paper. Accepted papers will appear in the ACL anthology and will be presented at a session of UNLP 2023 specially dedicated to the Shared Task. *Important Dates* February 12, 2024 — Release of train data February 16, 2024 — Release of test data to registered participants February 24, 2024 — Registration deadline; release of open questions February 26, 2024 — Submission of system responses March 4, 2024 — Results of the Shared Task announced March 6, 2024 — Shared Task paper due March 27, 2024 — Notification of acceptance April 5, 2024 — Camera-ready papers due May 25, 2024 — Workshop *Contact* Discord for the shared task: https://discord.gg/kCc6xgWbCJ Email: info(a)unlp.org.ua Website: https://unlp.org.ua/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/UNLP_workshop Telegram: https://t.me/UNLP_workshop Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UNLPworkshop

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Ukrainian NLP Workshop @ LREC-Coling 2024: Second CFP
by Mariana Romanyshyn 13 Feb '24

13 Feb '24

*The Third Ukrainian Natural Language Processing Workshop (UNLP 2024)* <https://unlp.org.ua/> *Call For Papers* UNLP 2024 <https://unlp.org.ua/> will be held *online* on May 25, 2024, in conjunction with LREC-COLING 2024. The workshop will bring together academics, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of NLP and Computational Linguistics who work with the Ukrainian language or do cross-Slavic research that can be applied to the Ukrainian language. The workshop will accept research papers for the Crimean Tatar language with the aim of supporting this severely endangered language of the indigenous people of Ukraine. The workshop will also accept papers with negative results. *Shared Task* The Third UNLP organizes the first Shared Task on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for Ukrainian. The aim is to challenge and assess LLMs’ capabilities to understand and generate Ukrainian, paving the way for LLM development in Slavic languages. In this shared task, your goal is to instruction-tune a large language model that can answer questions and perform tasks in Ukrainian. The model should possess knowledge of Ukrainian history, language, and literature, as well as common knowledge, and should be capable of generating fluent and factually accurate responses. You can find the detailed instructions, limitations, baseline, and evaluation sample at https://github.com/unlp-workshop/unlp-2024-shared-task. *Important dates* March 4, 2024 — Workshop paper due March 27, 2024 — Notification of acceptance April 5, 2024 — Camera-ready papers due May 25, 2024 — Workshop *Submissions* UNLP invites submissions of completed and ongoing projects. Submissions describing resources or solutions that have been made available to the broader public are strongly encouraged. We invite two types of submissions: long and short papers. Long papers should describe original, unpublished, and completed work. The short papers may describe work in progress, small focused contributions, system demonstrations, new linguistic resources, or experiments based on existing software and resources. The workshop will provide *Grammarly Premium* to all authors. To request Grammarly Premium, please submit the form provided on the website home page <https://unlp.org.ua/>. Learn more at https://unlp.org.ua/call-for-papers/. Link for paper submission: https://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/unlp2024/. *Share your LRs!* When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC-COLING authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones). *Workshop Organizers* Andrii Hlybovets, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine Mariana Romanyshyn, Grammarly, Ukraine Nataliia Romanyshyn, Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukraine Oleksii Ignatenko, Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukraine Find our program committee members at https://unlp.org.ua/committees/. *Follow us* Website: https://unlp.org.ua/. Twitter: https://twitter.com/UNLP_workshop. Telegram: https://t.me/UNLP_workshop. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UNLPworkshop. Email: info(a)unlp.org.ua.

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Fw: Patrick Hanks' Funeral 23rd February
by Eric Atwell 12 Feb '24

12 Feb '24

I am very sad to relay the death of Patrick Wynham Hanks, lexicographer and corpus linguist. https://www.patrickwhanks.com/ Patrick's funeral will be in Havant, UK, on Friday 23 February, 15:15. and online: https://www.wesleymedia.co.uk/webcast-view Webcast Viewing Instructions are available here<https://clientportal.wesleymedia.co.uk/email-template/webcast_viewing_instr…>. Use the PIN number below to access your webcast Webcast Login PIN 590-4304 If you can come in person, please RSVP: Judith_hanks(a)hotmail.com<mailto:Judith_hanks@hotmail.com> Eric Atwell, pp Judith Hanks, University of Leeds

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1st CFP: The First Annual Meeting of SIGTURK at ACL, August 15-16 2024, Bangkok
by Duygu Ataman 12 Feb '24

12 Feb '24

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS --------------------- The First Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Turkic Languages (SIGTURK) August 15-16 2024, Bangkok (Co-located with ACL) INTRODUCTION We present the first edition of the SIGTURK Workshop representing the annual meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group on Turkic Languages, which aims to provide a new venue that will promote studies on computational linguistics in Turkic languages. Our main objective is to bring together an interdisciplinary community of researchers working on different aspects of natural language processing (NLP) models and corpora in Turkic languages, providing the recently growing number of researchers working on the topic with a means of communication and an opportunity to present their work and exchange ideas. TOPICS OF INTEREST We welcome submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics: * Computational linguistics: models of all aspects of linguistics in Turkic languages (e.g., semantics, syntax, lexicon, morphology) * Systems: Case studies on the construction of NLP systems for Turkic languages * Evaluation: Understanding the applicability of current NLP methods in Turkic languages * Metrics: New metrics and measures for evaluating NLP systems suitable to Turkic languages * Learning from sparse data: Novel methods for learning from small or sparse data in Turkic languages * Resources: Datasets, benchmarks, and software libraries for NLP models in Turkic languages IMPORTANT DATES * First call for papers: February 9, 2024 (Friday) * Paper submission deadline: May 31, 2024 (Friday) * Notification of acceptance: June 16, 2024 (Monday) * Camera-ready submission deadline: July 1, 2024 (Monday) * Workshop dates: August 15-16 (Thursday - Friday) Note: All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC -12h (“anywhere on Earth”). CONTACT INFORMATION * Email: workshop(a)sigturk.com * Submission Portal: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2024/Workshop/SIGTURK * Official Website: https://sigturk.com/workshop SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Research papers We invite all potential participants to submit their novel research contributions in the related fields as long papers following the ACL 2024 long paper format (anonymized with 8 pages excluding the references, and an additional page for the camera-ready versions for the accepted papers). All accepted research papers will be published as part of our workshop proceedings and will be presented either through oral presentations or poster sessions. Our research paper track will accept submissions through our own submission system available at https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2024/Workshop/SIGTURK. Extended abstracts Besides long paper submissions, we also invite previously published or ongoing and incomplete research contributions to our non-archival extended abstract track. All extended abstracts can use the same EMNLP template with a 2-page limit, excluding the bibliography. Extended abstracts can be submitted to the workshop submission system using the link: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2024/Workshop/SIGTURK. "HACK TOGETHER" PROGRAMMING EVENT In addition to the workshop itself, the second day will be devoted to a full-day collaborative hybrid programming event "Hack Together". Our goal is to demonstrate the SIGTURK NLP library and interested parties can contribute to the integration of new NLP methods and models into the SIGTURK pipeline. The SIGTURK infrastructure can be found at https://github.com/sigturk. Findings of the event will be combined into a system demonstration paper. INVITED SPEAKERS Kemal Oflazer, Carnegie Mellon University MORE INFORMATION For further details and updates, please visit our workshop website: https://sigturk.com/workshop ORGANIZERS Duygu Ataman, New York University Deniz Zeyrek Bozşahin, Middle East Technical University Mehmet Oguz Derin Sardana Ivanova, University of Helsinki Abdullatif Köksal, LMU Munich Jonne Sälevä, Brandeis University

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2nd CFP: Bridging Neurons and Symbols for NLP & Knowledge Graphs Reasoning @ LREC-COLING 2024
by Erhard Hinrichs 12 Feb '24

12 Feb '24

[apologies for potential cross-posting] ================================================================================================== Workshop: Bridging Neurons and Symbols for Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs Reasoning @ LREC-COLING 2024 ===================================== Co-located with LREC-COLING in Turin, Italy 21st May 2024 Workshop webpage:https://neusymbridge.github.io/ Call for Papers -------------------- The 1st Workshop on Bridging Neurons and Symbols for Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graphs Reasoning — to be held at LREC-COLING 2024 — will promote two directions for exploring neural reasoning: starting from existing neural networks to enhance the reasoning performance with the target of symbolic-level reasoning, and starting from symbolic reasoning to explore its novel neural implementation. These two directions will ideally meet somewhere in the middle and will lead to representations that can act as a bridge for novel neural computing, which qualitatively differs from traditional neural networks, and for novel symbolic computing, which inherits the good features of neural computing. Hence the name of our workshop, with a focus on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graph reasoning. Topics (include, but are not limited to) -------------------------------------------------- • Proposing novel knowledge representations that are derived from transdisciplinary research • Using knowledge graphs or other types of symbolic Knowledge to improve the quality of LLMs • Exploring the reasoning mechanism of LLMs • Distilling symbolic knowledge from LLMs • Proposing benchmark datasets and evaluation matrices for neuro-symbolic approaches to NLP tasks • Proposing novel NLP tasks for neuro-symbolic approaches • NLP applications in classification, sense-disambiguation, sentiment analysis, question-answering, knowledge graph reasoning • Critical analysis of traditional deep learning or LLMs • Analysing spatial reasoning of LLMs • Proposing novel neural computing that may reach symbolic-level reasoning • Proposing benchmark datasets and matrices to evaluate the gap between neural reasoning and symbolic reasoning • Addressing efficiency issues in neuro-symbolic systems • Identifying challenges and opportunities of neuro-symbolic systems • Developing retrieval augmented models for combining KG and LLMs • Applying neuro-symbolic approaches to humor generation and other real-life applications Submissions: ------------------ • The papers should be submitted as a PDF document, conforming to the formatting guidelines provided in the call for papers of LREC-COLING conference (https://lrec-coling-2024.org/authors-kit/) • Submissions via Softconf/START Conference Manager athttps://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/neusymbridge2024/ Important Dates --------------------- • Submission Deadline: March 03, 2024 • Notification of Acceptance: March 27, 2024 • Submission of final, camera-ready paper (latex version preferred): April 03, 2024 • Workshop: May 21st

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Nineteenth century World English corpora/other resources
by claire.etty＠oup.com 12 Feb '24

12 Feb '24

Hello all, Does anyone know of any World English corpora (or other resources) for the nineteenth century? I'm looking for anything other than standard British/American English from this period, as we're hoping to enhance the historical depth of our WE coverage. Many thanks! Claire

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PhD positions in Designing Responsible NLP at U Edinburgh
by Ivan Titov 12 Feb '24

12 Feb '24

*Four-year funded PhD studentships in Designing Responsible Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh* The UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Responsible and Trustworthy in-the-world Natural Language Processing (NLP) is inviting applications for fully-funded PhD studentships starting in September 2024 for our new Designing Responsible NLP integrated PhD training programme. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of AI operating at the intersections of computer science, linguistics, and interaction design that has rapidly jumped from the research lab to routine deployment in-the-world. Mature NLP systems offer powerful capabilities to create new products, services, and interactive experiences grounded in natural language, and underpin much of the current excitement around generative AI. However, they also bring significant challenges to responsible and trustworthy design, adoption and deployment. Our students will gain the skills, knowledge and experience to study and design real-world applications of NLP that are responsible and trustworthy by design, in a highly interdisciplinary training environment hosted by the new Edinburgh Futures Institute. The training programme brings together world leading researchers at the University of Edinburgh in informatics, design, linguistics, speech science, psychology, law, philosophy, information science, and digital humanities, who will supervise students and guide them in their training and learning. The CDT will be seeking to fund up to 12 studentships to start next academic year. We are looking for applicants with background in or related to: • Computer science, informatics and artificial intelligence • Design, human computer interaction and human centred computing • Language, linguistics and speech sciences • Law, governance and regulation • Digital Humanities and Information Science These are just indicative, and we are interested in applicants who come from any background or discipline with relevant skills and expertise that connect to our five Training Areas. Our ambition is to recruit a diverse cohort of students coming from different disciplines and backgrounds, who are excited by the prospects of working with each-other and on real-world applications of NLP. The deadline for applications is midnight (GMT) *11th March 2024.* To find out more information on the programme, funding available and its benefits take a look at the CDT website here: https://www.responsiblenlp.org/ <https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.respo…> Detail on how to apply can be found here: https://www.responsiblenlp.org/application-documents/ <https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.respo…>

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CfP: CLIRAI Computational Linguistics, Information, Reasoning, and AI
by Roussanka Loukanova 12 Feb '24

12 Feb '24

CfP: CLIRAI Computational Linguistics, Information, Reasoning, and AI ================================================ CALL FOR PAPERS ================================================ Special Session: Computational Linguistics, Information, Reasoning, and AI (CLIRAI) (previously: CompLingInfoReasAI) at 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence (DCAI) 2024 University of Salamanca (Spain) 26th-28th June, 2024 https://www.dcai-conference.net/tracks/special-sessions/clirai ==== SCOPE: Computational and technological developments that incorporate natural language and reasoning methods are proliferating. Adequate coverage encounters difficult problems related to the phenomena of partiality, underspecification, perspectives of agents, and context dependency. These phenomena are signature features of information in nature, natural languages, and reasoning. The session covers theoretical work, applications, approaches, and techniques for computational models of information, language (artificial, human, or natural in other ways), reasoning. The goal is to promote computational systems and related models of language, thought, reasoning, and other related processes. TOPICS: We invite contributions relevant to the following topics, without being limited to them, across approaches, methods, theories, implementations, and applications: - Theorem Provers and Assistants - Model Checkers - Theories of Computation - Theories of Information - Computational Methods of Inferences in Natural Language - Computational Theories and Systems of Reasoning in Natural Language - Transfer of reasoning in natural language to theorem provers, or vice versa - Transfer of reasoning between natural language, theorem provers, model checkers, and various computational assistants - Translations between natural language of mathematics and formal languages of proof and verification systems - Controlled Languages of Mathematics == - Computational approaches of Computational Linguistics, e.g., in domain specific areas - Theories for applications to language, information processing, reasoning - Type Theories for applications to language, information processing, reasoning - Computational Grammar - Computational Syntax - Computational Semantics of Natural Language - Computational Syntax-Semantics Interface - Interfaces between morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, speech, text, pragmatics - Parsing - Multilingual Processing - Large-Scale Grammars of Natural Languages - Models of computation and algorithms for linguistics, natural language processing, argumentation - Computational Models of Partiality, Underspecification, and Context-Dependency - Models of Situations, Contexts, and Agents, for Applications to Computational Linguistics - Information about Space and Time in Language Models and Processing == - Interdisciplinary Methods - Integration of formal, computational, model theoretic, graphical, diagrammatic, statistical, and other related methods - Logic for information extraction or expression in written, spoken, and other modes of language - Logic for information integrations of diagrams with language == - Computational Models of Argumentations - Large Language Models (LLM) - Data Science in Language Processing - Machine Learning of Language and Reasoning == - Interactive Computation, Reasoning, Argumentation - Computation with heterogeneous information - Reasoning with heterogeneous and/or inconsistent information - Dialog and other Interactions - Interdisciplinary approaches to language, computation, reasoning, memory - Computational processing of information and languages in various specific areas and domains, e.g., in forensics, medical sciences, healthcare, jurisdiction, law, etc. - Applications, e.g., to governing, education, business, economy, justice, health, medical sciences, etc. == - Computational processing language based on natural fundamentals of information and languages - Computational neuroscience of language - etc. IMPORTANT DATES Deadline 15th March, 2024 Notification of acceptance 26th April, 2024 Camera-Ready papers 17th May, 2024 Conference 26th-28th June, 2024 PAPER SUBMISSION at EasyChair of DCAI https://www.dcai-conference.net/tracks/special-sessions The papers must consist of original, relevant, and previously unpublished, sound research results related to any of the topics of the Special Session CLIRAI. SUBMITTING PAPERS and PAPER FORMAT DCAI Special Session papers must be formatted according to the Template of Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems (LNNS), Springer, with a maximum length of 10 pages in length, including figures and references. All papers must be formatted according to the Springer LNNS template, with a maximum length of 10 pages, including figures and references. All proposed papers must be submitted in electronic form (PDF format) using the Paper Submission Page: https://www.dcai-conference.net/tracks/special-sessions PUBLICATION All accepted, registered, and presented papers will be published by the series Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems (LNNS), Springer. At least one of the authors of an accepted paper will be required to register and attend the symposium to present the paper in order to include it in the conference proceedings. CHAIRS Roussanka Loukanova Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria Sara Rodríguez University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain CONTACT: Roussanka Loukanova <rloukanova(a)gmail.com> ====

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2nd CFP Workshop - Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources @LREC-COLING 2024 in Turin (Italy)
by Francesca Frontini 12 Feb '24

12 Feb '24

Second call for papers for the LREC-COLING2024 pre-conference workshop: Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources Date: 21 May 2024 (full day) Venue: Lingotto Conference Centre, Turin, Italy Webpage: https://www.clarin.eu/HTRes2024 <https://url6.mailanyone.net/scanner?m=1rX22L-0002ym-4R&d=4%7Cmail%2F90%2F17…> Submission Deadline: 21 February 2024 Submission Portal: https://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/htres2024/ *Workshop description* Holocaust testimonies serve as a bridge between survivors and history’s darkest chapters, providing a connection to the profound experiences of the past. Testimonies stand as the primary source of information that describe the Holocaust, offering first-hand accounts and personal narratives of those who experienced it. The majority of testimonies are captured in an oral format, as survivors vividly explain and share their personal experiences and observations from that time period. Transforming Holocaust testimonies into a machine-processable digital format can be a difficult task owing to the unstructured nature of the text. The creation of accessible, comprehensive, and well-annotated Holocaust testimony collections is of paramount importance to our society. These collections empower researchers and historians to validate the accuracy of socially and historically significant information, enabling them to share critical insights and trends derived from these data. This workshop will investigate a number of ways in which techniques and tools from natural language processing and corpus linguistics can contribute to the exploration, analysis, dissemination and preservation of Holocaust testimonies. The workshop is supported by CLARIN and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). We expect contributions related to the following topics: Creation of datasets and development of tools for the study of Holocaust testimonies: - Creation of language corpora of Holocaust testimonies - Digitization and enhancement of oral and written testimonies (including automatic speech recognition, alignment of text and speech, format conversion, OCR, handwriting recognition, machine translation) - Named entity recognition for identifying people, places, and events in testimonies - Standards, representation formats, and guidelines for annotations and vocabularies relevant to the Holocaust testimonies - Creation, adaptation and tuning of software applications for the creation, annotation, enhancement and use of Holocaust testimonies as language resources - Research using and Holocaust testimonies - Applications of NLP in analysing Holocaust survivor testimonies - Sentiment analysis and emotional content extraction from survivor narratives. - Data Visualisation, Knowledge Representation and Information Extraction: - Visualising complex data structures from Holocaust testimonies - Building knowledge graphs and networks to represent historical relationships - Interactive data visualisations for education and research - Extracting biographical and temporal information relevant to the Holocaust - Deep learning and large language models - Digital Archiving and Long-Term Preservation: - Methods and tools for digitising and preserving Holocaust testimonies - Best practices for metadata standards and cataloguing - Ensuring long-term accessibility and data integrity - Ethical Considerations and Privacy - Ethical challenges in digitising and sharing sensitive testimonies - Anonymisation and privacy protection in Holocaust data - Community engagement and consent in digital projects - User and application aspects - Development of tools and interfaces for the search, analysis and exploration of Holocaust testimonies - Other relevant use cases and application scenarios All papers must clearly state and explain their relevance to the topic of 'Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources'. *Submission & Publication* All papers must represent original and unpublished work that is not currently under review. Papers will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content, style, clarity, and relevance to the workshop. We welcome the following types of contributions: - Standard research papers (up to 8 pages, plus more pages for references if needed); - Short research papers (from 4 to 6 pages, plus more pages for references if needed). Submissions must be anonymous and strictly follow the LREC2024 stylesheet formatting <https://url6.mailanyone.net/scanner?m=1rX22L-0002ym-4R&d=4%7Cmail%2F90%2F17…>guidelines. All papers should be electronically submitted in PDF format via the main conference platform via START <https://url6.mailanyone.net/scanner?m=1rX22L-0002ym-4R&d=4%7Cmail%2F90%2F17…> . *Important Dates* - *Paper submission deadline:* 21 February 2024 - *Notification of acceptance:* 20 March 2024 - *Camera-ready paper: *15 April 2024 - *Workshop date: *21 May 2024 *Organising Committee* - Isuri Anuradha, University of Wolverhampton, UK - Ingo Frommholz, University of Wolverhampton, UK - Francesca Frontini, CNR-ILC, Italy & CLARIN, Italy - Martin Wynne, Oxford University, UK - Ruslan Mitkov, Lancaster University, UK - Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, UK - Alistair Plum, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg *Programme Committee* - Le An Ha, Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Information Technology, Vietnam - Federico Boschetti, CNR-Istituto di, Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, Italy - Estelle Bunout, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg - Martin Bulin, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic - Tim Cole, University of Bristol, UK - Angelo Mario Del Grosso, CNR-Istituto di, Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, Italy - Maria Dermentzi, King’s College London, UK - Robert Ehrenreich, USHMM, USA - Ignatius Ezeani, Lancaster University, UK - Ian Gregory, Lancaster University, UK - Arjan van Hessen, Radboud University - Henk van den Heuvel, Radboud University & CLARIN ERIC - Renana Keydar, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel - William J.B. Mattingly, USHMM, USA - Patricia Murrieta-Flores, Lancaster, University, UK - Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Institute of Computer, Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland - Maciej Piasecki, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland - Rachel Pistol, King’s College London, UK - Johannes-Dieter Steinert, University of Wolverhampton, UK - Jan Svec, University of West Bohemia - Gabor Toth, University of Luxembourg,Luxembourg - Eveline Wandl-Vogt, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna

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Edge Hill Corpus Research Group, Thursday 29 February 2024, 2:00-3:30 pm (GMT)
by Costas Gabrielatos 10 Feb '24

10 Feb '24

The next meeting of the Edge Hill Corpus Research Group will take place online (via MS Teams) on Thursday 29 February 2024, 2:00-3:30 pm (GMT). Attendance is free. You can register here: https://store.edgehill.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/conferences/events/edge… Registration closes on Wednesday 28 February, 11 am (GMT) Topic: Corpus Methodology Speaker: Matteo Di Cristofaro<https://infogrep.it/site/> (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy) Title: One dataset, many corpora: Problems of scientific validity in corpora and corpus-derived results Abstract Corpus linguistics has, since its inception, recognised the relevance of digital technologies as a major driving force behind corpus techniques and their (r)evolution in the study of language (cf. Tognini-Bonelli 2012). And yet, while both corpus linguistics and digital technologies have frequently benefited from each other (the case of NLP/NLU is one such macro example), their pathways have often diverged. The result is a disconnect between corpus linguistics and digital data processing whose effects directly impinge on the ability to analyse language through software tools. A disconnect becoming more and more relevant as corpus linguistics is being applied to vast amounts of data obtained from manifold sources – including a wide array of social media platforms, each one with its unique linguistic and technical peculiarities. As the ground-truth of an ever-increasing number of language studies, corpora must be able to correctly treat and represent such peculiarities: e.g. the dialogic dimension of comments or forum posts; the presence (and potential subsequent normalisation) of spelling variations; the use of hashtags and emojis. Failing to do so, the corpus-derived results will likely present researchers with a falsified view of the language under scrutiny. What is at stake is not the ability to “count” what is in a corpus, but rather whether what is being counted is or is not a feature present in the original data – of which the corpus should be a faithful representation. The presentation is consequently devoted to tackling digital technicalities, i.e. “those notions and mechanisms that – while not classically associated with natural language – are i) foundational of the digital environments in which language production and exchanges occur and ii) at the core of the techniques that are used to produce, collect, and process the focus of investigation, that is, digital textual data.” (Di Cristofaro 2023:5). One such example is represented by character encodings: although at the “core” of the whole corpus linguistics enterprise (cf. McEnery and Xiao 2005; Gries 2016:39,111) – since they allow written language to be processed by a computer and understood by humans -, these are often overlooked at all stages of corpus compilation and analysis, potentially leading linguists to involuntarily tampering with the data and its linguistic contents. Starting from practical examples, the presentation discusses the implications that digital technicalities have on corpora and their analyses – or rather, what happens when they are not properly treated – while outlining (also in the form of Python scripts and practical tools) potential new pathways that a “digital-aware” perspective of corpus linguistics can open up. References Di Cristofaro, Matteo. Corpus Approaches to Language in Social Media. Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. New York: Routledge, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003225218<https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003225218>. Gries, Stefan Th. Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R: A Practical Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315746210<https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315746210>. McEnery, Tony, and Richard Xiao. ‘Character Encoding in Corpus Construction’. In Developing Linguistic Corpora: A Guide to Good Practice, edited by Martin Wynne, 47–58. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2005. https://users.ox.ac.uk/~martinw/dlc/index.htm<https://users.ox.ac.uk/~martinw/dlc/index.htm>. Tognini Bonelli, Elena. ‘Theoretical Overview of the Evolution of Corpus Linguistics’. In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, edited by Anne O’Keeffe and Michael McCarthy, 14–27. Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2012. ________________________________ Edge Hill University<http://ehu.ac.uk/home/emailfooter> Modern University of the Year, The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2022<http://ehu.ac.uk/tef/emailfooter> University of the Year, Educate North 2021/21 ________________________________ This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and remove it from your system. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Edge Hill or associated companies. Edge Hill University may monitor email traffic data and also the content of email for the purposes of security and business communications during staff absence.<http://ehu.ac.uk/itspolicies/emailfooter>

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2025

2024

2023

2022