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Deadline Extension: The Fourth Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2024)
by dghosh＠ets.org 11 Mar '24

11 Mar '24

Processing of figurative language is a rapidly growing area in NLP, including computational modeling of metaphors, idioms, puns, irony, sarcasm, simile, and other figures. Characteristic to all areas of human activity (from poetic, ordinary, scientific, social media) and, thus, to all types of discourse, figurative language becomes an important problem for NLP systems. Its ubiquity in language has been established in a number of corpus studies and the role it plays in human reasoning has been confirmed in psychological experiments. This makes figurative language an important research area for computational and cognitive linguistics, and its automatic identification, interpretation and generation indispensable for any semantics-oriented NLP application. The proposed workshop will be the fourth edition of the biennial Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, whose first editions were held at NAACL 2018, ACL 2020 and EMNLP 2022, respectively. The workshop builds upon a long series of related workshops that the current organizers have been involved with: “Metaphor in NLP” series (2013-2016) and “Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity” series (2009-2010). We expand the scope to incorporate various types of figurative language, with the aim of maintaining and nourishing a community of NLP researchers interested in this topic. The main focus will be on computational modeling of figurative language, however papers on cognitive, linguistic, social, rhetorical, and applied aspects are also of interest, provided that they are presented within a computational, formal, or a quantitative framework. Recent advancement in language models have led to several works on figurative language understanding (Chakrabarty et al 2022a; Chakrabarty et al 2022b; Liu et al 2022; Hu et al 2023) and generation (Stowe et al 2021; Chakrabarty et al 2021; Sun et al 2022; Tian et al 2021) At the same time large language models have opened up opportunities to utilize figurative language in scientific (Kim et al 2023) as well as creative writing (Chakrabarty et al 2022c; Tian et al 2022). Additionally there have also been recent work on multimodal figurative language generation (Chakrabarty et al 2023; Akula et al 2023), understanding (Hessel et al 2023; Yosef et al 2023) and interpretation (Hwang et al 2023; Desai et al 2022; Kumar et al 2022). We encourage submissions along these axes. Topics of Interest The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either oral or poster presentation. Topics will include, but will not be limited to, the following: Identification and interpretation of different types of figurative language: Linguistic, conceptual and extended metaphor; irony, sarcasm, puns, simile, metonymy, personification, synecdoche, hyperbole Generation of different types of figurative language: sarcasm, simile, metaphors, humor, hyperbole Multilingual and multimodal figurative language processing Resources and evaluation Annotation of figurative language in corpora Datasets for evaluation of tools Evaluation methodologies Figurative use in low-resource languages Processing of figurative language for NLP applications Figurative language in sentiment analysis; dialogue systems; computational social science; educational applications Figurative language and mental health Figurative language in digital humanities Figurative language in creative writing Figurative language and cognition Cognitive models of processing of figurative language by the human brain Human-AI collaboration for figurative language Shared Tasks Multilingual euphemisms detection: Euphemisms are a linguistic device used to soften or neutralize language that may otherwise be harsh or awkward to state directly (e.g. "between jobs" instead of "unemployed", "late" instead of "dead", "collateral damage" instead of "war-related civilian deaths"). By acting as alternative words or phrases, euphemisms are used in everyday language to maintain politeness, mitigate discomfort, or conceal the truth. While they are culturally-dependent, the need to discuss sensitive topics in a non-offensive way is universal, suggesting similarities in the way euphemisms are used across languages and cultures. We propose a shared task in which participants will need to disambiguate sentences in multiple languages as either euphemistic or not. The dataset will include English, Mandarin, Spanish, Yoruba, and possibly additional languages. https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1959/ Understanding of Figurative Language through Visual Entailment: One important modality that has gained interest recently is vision, namely the interpretation of figurative language in media such as memes, art, or comics. This task is challenging because it involves reasoning abstractly about images, and also involves understanding social commonsense and cultural context. We will frame this as a visual entailment task where a model not only has to predict if a caption entails the content in the image but also provide free text explanations justifying the label prediction. These tasks have proved difficult for state-of-the-art multimodal models in the past. We will have a paper and a baseline for the same. https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1970/ Important Dates Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Submission: March 10th, 2024 Long, Short & Demonstration Paper Notification: April 14th, 2024 Final Paper Submission: April 24th, 2024 Workshop: June 20/21, 2024 For more information, please check https://sites.google.com/view/figlang2024

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Last Chance: UCREL Summer School 2024!
by El-Haj, Mo 11 Mar '24

11 Mar '24

Dear all, We're down to our last 7 spots and this could be your last chance to register for our UCREL NLP Summer School 2024, which will be at Lancaster University, UK on 24-26 July 2024. If you are contemplating registering, please do so as soon as possible. Please note that registrations are processed on a first-come, first-served basis. https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/uss2024/ A reminder that the fee includes registration, two nights at Lancaster University's accommodation, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and refreshments. We're pleased to see that many of our registered attendees have opted to present posters of their work, for which we've allocated a dedicated session. We highly encourage you to consider doing the same, as it provides an excellent opportunity to receive comments and feedback from NLP experts on your research. We're also excited to announce our lineup of keynote speakers and NLP expert term who will lead the hands-on tutorials: - Prof. Udo Kruschwitz, University of Regensburg - Prof. Eric Atwell, University of Leeds - Prof. Ruslan Mitkov, Lancaster University - Dr Marcia Smith, PARIS-DE project, Lancaster University - Eng. Akraw Dweikat, Deliveroo - Dr Hansi Hettiarachchi, Birmingham City University - Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe, Aston University In addition, the summer school will be run by NLP experts from the UCREL NLP Group covering various core and trending NLP topics: - Prof. Paul Rayson - Dr Mo El-Haj - Dr Saad Ezzini - Dr Alistair Baron - Dr Nouran Khallaf - Dr John Vidler - Dr Ignatius Ezeani - Dr Daisy Lal - Isuri Anuradha - Damith Dola Mullage To register and for the full list of speakers and programme details, please visit: https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/uss2024/ Best wishes, Mo -------------------------------- Dr Mo El-Haj Senior Lecturer in NLP Director of Admissions (SCC) Co-Director of UCREL NLP Group Natural Language Engineering (NLE) Journal Editorial Board https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/natural-language-engineering Advisory Board of the Natural Language Processing Book Series https://benjamins.com/catalog/nlp School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/elhaj You may receive emails from me outside what are your typical office hours. I do not expect you to respond to my email outside your working hours.

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CfP - Deadline Extension: 6th International Workshop on Geospatial Linked Data at ESWC2024
by Beyza Yaman 11 Mar '24

11 Mar '24

Apologies for cross-posting! We'd like to announce that we have extended our submission deadline to *March 22, 2024*. We'll be happy to receive your contributions. Kind Regards, Beyza Yaman. GeoLD2024: 6th International Workshop on Geospatial Linked Data Hersonissos, Greece, May 26-27, 2024 Conference website https://i3mainz.github.io/GeoLD2024/ Submission link https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=geold2024 Submission deadline March 22, 2024 GeoLD2024 *6th International Workshop on Geospatial Linked Data* at ESWC 2024 <https://2024.eswc-conferences.org/> Geospatial data is vital for both traditional applications like navigation, logistics, and tourism and emerging areas like autonomous vehicles, smart buildings and GIS on demand. Spatial linked data has recently transitioned from experimental prototypes to national infrastructure. However the next generation of spatial knowledge graphs will integrate multiple spatial datasets with the large number of general datasets that contain some geospatial references (e.g., DBpedia, Wikidata). This integration, either on the public Web or within organizations has immense socio-economic as well as academic benefits. The upsurge in Linked data related presentations in the recent Eurogeographics data quality workshop shows the deep interest in Geospatial Linked Data (GLD) in national mapping agencies. GLD enables a web-based, interoperable geospatial infrastructure. This is especially relevant for delivering the INSPIRE directive in Europe. Moreover, geospatial information systems benefit from Linked Data principles in building the next generation of spatial data applications e.g., federated smart buildings, self-piloted vehicles, delivery drones or automated local authority services. This workshop invites papers covering the challenges and solutions for handling with GLD, especially for building high quality, adaptable, geospatial infrastructures and next-generation spatial applications. We aim to demonstrate the latest approaches and implementations and to discuss the solutions to challenges and issues arising from research and industrial organizations. The following topics of interest are covered by GeoLD2024. *Interoperability and Integration* - Geospatial Linked Data vocabularies and standards (GeoSPARQL, INSPIRE, W3C, OGC) - Extraction/transformation of Geospatial Linked Data from native geospatial data sources - Integration (schema mapping, interlinking, fusion) techniques for Geospatial RDF Data - Enrichment, quality and evolution of Linked Data with Geospatial information - Machine Learning improving Geospatial Linked Data processing - Natural Language Processing, especially Large Language Models for improving GLD processing *Big Geospatial Data Management* - Distributed solutions for Geospatial Linked Data management (storing, querying, mapping) - Algorithms and tools for large scale, scalable Geospatial Linked Data management - Efficient Indexing and Querying of Geospatial Linked Data - Geospatial-specific Reasoning on RDF Data - Ranking techniques on querying Geospatial RDF Data - Advanced querying capabilities on Geospatial RDF Data *Utilization of Geospatial Linked Data* - Benchmarking of Geospatial Linked Data applications - Geospatial Linked Data in social web platforms and applications - Geospatial linked data applications for indoor navigation - Visualization models/interfaces for browsing/authoring/querying Geospatial Linked Data - Real-world applications/use cases/paradigms using Geospatial Linked Data - Evaluation/comparison of tools/libraries/frameworks for Geospatial Linked Data - Data governance models for Geospatial Linked Data Submission Guidelines All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome: - *Long papers (up to 12 pages)*: Presenting novel scientific research pertaining to geospatial Linked Data. - *Short papers (up to 6 pages)*: Position papers, System, Library, API and Dataset descriptions, relevant to the topics of interest. - *Demo/Tutorial papers (up to 4 pages)*: Describe a demo or hands-on tutorial of a tool on the workshop topics CommitteesProgram Committee - Dr. Manolis Koubarakis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece - Dr. Sergio José Rodríguez Méndez, Australian National University, Australia - Dr. Milos Jovanovik, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, N. Macedonia - Dr. Mirko Spasić, OpenLink Software, UKNikolaos Karalis, DICE research group, University of Paderborn, Germany - Dr. Nicholas Car, Kurrawong AI, AustraliaDr. Erwin Folmer Kadaster, University of Twente, The Netherlands - Dr. Pasquale Di Donato, swisstopo/COGIS, Switzerland - Abdullah Fathi Ahmed, ETAS / Robert Bosch Group, Germany - Dr. Hamada Zahera, DICE research group, University of Paderborn, Germany - Johannes Lipp, RWTH Aachen University, Germany - Dr. Michael Röder, DICE research group, University of Paderborn, Germany - Daniel Vollmers, DICE research group, University of Paderborn, Germany Organizing committee - Timo Homburg (i3mainz -- Institute for Spatial Information Surveying Technology, Mainz University Of Applied Sciences, Germany) - Dr. Beyza Yaman (ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) - Dr. Mohamed Ahmed Sherif (University of Paderborn, Germany) - Prof. Dr. Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo (University Of Paderborn, Germany) Contact All questions about submissions should be emailed to Timo.Homburg(a)hs-mainz.de

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CfP: Extended Deadline: 9th Symposium on Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (LxGr2024)
by Costas Gabrielatos 10 Mar '24

10 Mar '24

9th Symposium on Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (LxGr2024) CALL FOR PAPERS Extended deadline for abstract submission: 7 April 2024 The symposium will take place online on Friday 5 and Saturday 6 July 2024. Invited Speakers Lise Fontaine<http://www.uqtr.ca/PagePerso/Lise.Fontaine> (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières): Reconciling (or not) lexis and grammar Ute Römer-Barron<http://alsl.gsu.edu/profile/ute-romer> (Georgia State University): Phraseology research in second language acquisition LxGr primarily welcomes papers reporting on corpus-based research on any aspect of the interaction of lexis and grammar - particularly studies that interrogate the system lexicogrammatically to get lexicogrammatical answers. However, position papers discussing theoretical or methodological issues are also welcome, as long as they are relevant to both lexicogrammar and corpus linguistics. If you would like to present, send an abstract of 500 words (excluding references) to lxgr(a)edgehill.ac.uk<mailto:lxgr@edgehill.ac.uk>. Abstracts for research papers should specify the research focus (research questions or hypotheses), the corpus, the methodology (techniques, metrics), the theoretical orientation, and the main findings. Abstracts for position papers should specify the theoretical orientation and the potential contribution to both lexicogrammar and corpus linguistics. Abstracts will be double-blind reviewed by members of the Programme Committee<https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/lxgr/committee>. Full papers will be allocated 35 minutes (including 10 minutes for discussion). Work-in-progress reports will be allocated 20 minutes (including 5 minutes for discussion). There will be no parallel sessions. Participation is free. For details, visit the LxGr website: https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/lxgr/lxgr2024 If you have any questions, contact lxgr(a)edgehill.ac.uk<mailto:lxgr@edgehill.ac.uk>. ________________________________ 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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Last & final call and deadline extended: [Deadline extension & Final CFP] The Fourth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results (co-located with NAACL 2024)
by Shabnam Tafreshi 09 Mar '24

09 Mar '24

Dear colleagues, The Fifth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP Co-located with NAACL, June 16-21 2024 First Call for Participation Insights Website: <https://insights-workshop.github.io/ <https://insights-workshop.github.io/index>> Contact email: insights-workshop-organizers(a)googlegroups.com *Overview Publication of negative results is difficult in most fields, but in NLP the problem is exacerbated by the near-universal focus on improvements in benchmarks. This situation implicitly discourages hypothesis-driven research, and it turns the creation and fine-tuning of NLP models into art rather than science. Furthermore, it increases the time, effort, and carbon emissions spent on developing and tuning models, as the researchers have no opportunity to learn what has already been tried and failed. This workshop invites both practical and theoretical unexpected or negative results that have important implications for future research, highlight methodological issues with existing approaches, and/or point out pervasive misunderstandings or bad practices. In particular, the most successful NLP models currently rely on Transformer-based large language models (LLMs). To complement all the success stories, it would be insightful to see where and possibly why they fail. Any NLP tasks are welcome: sequence labeling, question answering, inference, dialogue, machine translation - you name it. A successful negative results paper would contribute one of the following: ** broadly applicable recommendations for training/fine-tuning/prompting, especially if X that didn’t work is something that many practitioners would think reasonable to try, and if the demonstration of X’s failure is accompanied by some explanation/hypothesis; ** ablation studies of components in previously proposed models, showing that their contributions are different from what was initially reported; ** datasets or probing tasks showing that previous approaches do not generalize to other domains or language phenomena; ** trivial baselines that work suspiciously well for a given task/dataset; ** Cross-lingual studies showing that technique X is only successful for a certain language or language family; ** experiments on (in)stability of the previously published results due to hardware, random initializations, preprocessing pipeline components, etc; ** theoretical arguments and/or proofs for why X should not be expected to work; ** demonstration of issues with data processing/collection/annotation pipelines, especially if they are widely used; ** demonstration of issues with evaluation metrics (e.g. accuracy, F1, or BLEU), which prevent their usage for fair comparison of methods; ** Demonstration of issues with under-reporting of training details of pre-trained models, including test data contamination and invalid comparisons In 2024, we will invite the authors of accepted negative results papers to nominate the specific work reporting the original positive results. The goal is to organize joint discussion sessions so that the community can learn the most from the specific insightful failure. * Important Dates ** Submission due March 17, 2024 ** Submission due for papers reviewed through ACL Rolling Review: April 7, 2024 ** Notification of acceptance: April 20, 2024 ** Camera-ready papers due: April 30, 2024 ** Workshop: TBA, between June 21-22, 2024 * Submission Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system. Submission link: <https://softconf.com/naacl2024/insights2024/> The workshop will accept short papers (up to 4 pages, excluding references), as well as 1-2 page non-archival abstract submissions for papers published elsewhere (e.g. in one of the main conferences or in non-NLP venues). The goal of this event is to stimulate a meaningful community-wide discussion of the deep issues in NLP methodology, and the authors of both types of submissions will be welcome to take part in our get-togethers. The workshop will run its review process, and papers can be submitted directly to the workshop by March 17, 2024. It is also possible to submit a paper accompanied with reviews from the ACL Rolling Review system by April 7, 2024. The submission deadline for ARR papers follows the ACL RR calendar. Both research papers and abstracts must follow the ACL two-column format. Official style sheets: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files Please do not modify these style files, nor should you use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. Please follow the formatting guidelines outlined here: https://acl-org.github.io/ACLPUB/formatting.html * Multiple Submission Policy The workshop cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere and that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications whose review periods overlap with that of Insights. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to insights-workshop-organizers(a)googlegroups.com. If the paper has been rejected from another venue, the authors will have the option to provide the original reviews and the author's response. The new reviewers will not have access to this information, but the organizers will be able to take into account the fact that the paper has already been revised and improved. * Anonymity Period The workshop will follow the new ACL policy: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/ACL_Anonymity_Policy * Presentation All accepted papers must be presented at the workshop to appear in the proceedings. Authors of accepted papers must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline if they wish to withdraw the paper. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop. Previous presentations of the work (e.g. preprints on arXiv.org) should be noted in a footnote in the camera-ready version (but not in the anonymized version of the paper). The workshop will take place during NAACL 2024 (June 16-21 2024). It will be hybrid, allowing for both in-person and virtual presentations. * Organization Committee ** Shabnam Tafreshi, inQbator AI at eviCore Healthcare ** Arjun Reddy Akula, Google Research ** João Sedoc, New York University ** Anna Rogers, IT University of Copenhagen ** Aleksandr Drozd, RIKEN ** Anna Rumshisky, University of Massachusetts Lowell / Amazon Alexa * Contact info Any questions regarding the workshop can be sent to insights-workshop-organizers(a)googlegroups.com. Please continue reading about: Authorship, Citation and Comparison, Ethics Policy, Reproducibility, and Presentation in the call for paper page on our website: https://insights-workshop.github.io/2024/cfp/ Regards, Insights 2024 Organizers -- *Shabnam Tafreshi, PhD* *Machine Learning Senior Advisor - NLP Researcher* *Computational Linguistics, NLP* *inQbator AI at eviCore Healthcare* *"All the problems of the world could be settled easily, if people only willing to think."* *-Thomas J. Watson*

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First Call for Participation - EXIST 2024: sEXism Identification in Social neTworks @ CLEF
by JORGE AMANDO CARRILLO DE ALBORNOZ CUADRADO 08 Mar '24

08 Mar '24

Please consider contributing and/or forwarding to appropriate colleagues and groups. ****We apologize for the multiple copies of this e-mail**** ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Call for Participation ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First Call for Participation: EXIST 2024 at CLEF 2024: Task: EXIST 2024: sEXism Identification in Social neTworks Website: http://nlp.uned.es/exist2024/ EXIST is a series of scientific events and shared tasks on sEXism Identification in Social neTworks (EXIST 2021, EXIST 2022, EXIST 2023). EXIST aims to capture sexism in a broad sense, from explicit misogyny to other subtle expressions that involve implicit sexist behaviors. The fourth edition of the EXIST shared task will be held as a Lab in CLEF 2024, on September 9-12, 2024, at the University of Grenoble Alpes, France. Since 2021, the primary objective of EXIST campaigns has been the identification of sexism in tweets. Three corpora of annotated tweets have been collected for different EXIST tasks. Likewise, the focus of EXIST 2024 is to detect sexism in text, using the EXIST 2023 dataset, but we also extend the focus to memes. Memes are images, usually with text captions, that typically carry humor and spread through social media, forums, or other digital platforms. They can be used to spread false information, perpetuate stereotypes or humiliate people. As in the 2023 edition, this edition will also embrace the Learning With Disagreement (LeWiDi) paradigm for both the development of the dataset and the evaluation of the systems. The LeWiDi paradigm does not rely on a single “correct” label for each example. Instead, the model is trained to handle and learn from conflicting or diverse annotations. This enables the system to consider various annotators’ perspectives, biases, or interpretations, resulting in a fairer learning process. Participants will be asked to classify tweets and memes (in English and Spanish) according to the following six tasks: TASK 1 - Sexism Identification in Tweets: The first subtask is a binary classification. The systems have to decide whether or not a given text (tweet) contains sexist expressions or behaviors (i.e., it is sexist itself, describes a sexist situation or criticizes a sexist behavior). TASK 2 - Source Intention in Tweets: For the tweets that have been classified as sexist, the second task aims to classify each tweet according to the intention of the person who wrote it. We propose a ternary classification task: (i) DIRECT sexist message, (ii) REPORTED sexist message and (iii) JUDGEMENTAL message. TASK 3 - Sexism Categorization in Tweets: Once a message has been classified as sexist, the third task aims to categorize the message in different types of sexism (according to a categorization proposed by experts and that takes into account the different facets of women that are undermined). In particular, each sexist tweet must be categorized in one or more of the following categories: (i) IDEOLOGICAL AND INEQUALITY, (ii) STEREOTYPING AND DOMINANCE, (iii) OBJECTIFICATION, (iv) SEXUAL VIOLENCE and (v) MISOGYNY AND NON-SEXUAL VIOLENCE. TASK 4 - Sexism Identification in Memes: This is a binary classification task consisting of deciding whether or not a given meme is sexist. Task 5: Source Intention in Memes: As in Task 2, this task aims to categorize the sexists memes according to the intention of the author. Due to the characteristics of the memes, the REPORTED label is virtually null, so in this task systems should only classify sexist memes in DIRECT or JUDGEMENTAL. Task 6: Sexism Categorization in Memes: This task aims to classify sexist memes according to the categorization provided for Task 3: (i) IDEOLOGICAL AND INEQUALITY, (ii) STEREOTYPING AND DOMINANCE, (iii) OBJECTIFICATION, (iv) SEXUAL VIOLENCE and (v) MISOGYNY AND NON-SEXUAL VIOLENCE. Although we recommend to participate in all subtasks, participants are allowed to participate just in one of them (e.g., subtask 1). During the training phase, the task organizers will provide to the participants the manually-annotated EXIST 2024 dataset. For the evaluation of the teams, the unlabelled test data will be released. We encourage participation from both academic institutions and industrial organizations. We invite the participants to register for the lab at CLEF 2024 Labs Registration site (https://clef2024-labs-registration.dei.unipd.it/). You will receive information about how to join the Google Group for the EXIST 2024 shared task. Important Dates: * 13 November 2023 - Registration open. * 4 March 2024 - Training and development sets available. * 15 April 2024 - Test set available. * 22 April 2024 - Registration closes. * 6 May 2024 - Runs submission due to organizers. * 20 May 2024 - Results notification to participants. * 3 June 2024 - Submission of Working Notes by participants. * 19 June 2024 - Notification of acceptance (peer-reviews). * 3 July 2024 - Camera-ready participant papers due to organizers. * 9-12 September 2024 - EXIST 2024 at CLEF Conference. ** Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth") ** Organizers: Laura Plaza, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Enrique Amigó, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Julio Gonzalo, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Roser Morante, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Víctor Ruiz García, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) Damiano Spina, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) Berta Chulvi, Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) Alba Maeso Olmos, Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) Contact: Contact the organizers by writing to: jcalbornoz(a)lsi.uned.es Website: http://nlp.uned.es/exist2024/ AVISO LEGAL. 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En cualquier momento podrá ejercer sus derechos de acceso, rectificación, supresión, oposición, limitación al tratamiento o portabilidad de los datos, ante la UNED, Departamento de Política Jurídica de Seguridad de la Información<https://www.uned.es/dpj>, o a través de la Sede electrónica<https://sede.uned.es/> de la Universidad. Para más información visite nuestra Política de Privacidad<https://descargas.uned.es/publico/pdf/Politica_privacidad_UNED.pdf>.

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9th Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference
by Brett Hashimoto 08 Mar '24

08 Mar '24

Hi All, We are excited to announce that our 9th Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference will be held on October 24-25, 2024, at the law school at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Keynote addresses will be delivered by Edward Finegan, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Law at the University of Southern California, and Lawrence Solum, the William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. Proposals are invited for individual papers and panels. We are open to submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to: - applications of corpus linguistics to constitutional, statutory, contract, patent, trademark, probate, administrative, and criminal law in any state or nation; - philosophical, normative, and pragmatic commentary on the use of corpus linguistics in the law; triangulation between corpus linguistics and other empirical methods in legal interpretation; - corpus-based analysis of legal discourse or topics; - best practices in corpus design and corpus linguistic methods in legal settings. The proposal deadline is May 15, 2024. Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 750 words and complete contact information for presenters. Please send proposals to byulawcorpus(a)law.byu.edu<mailto:byulawcorpus@law.byu.edu>. Best, The Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference Organizing Committee

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PhD position in NLP for Law
by Spanakis, Jerry (DACS) 08 Mar '24

08 Mar '24

At Maastricht Law & Tech lab we are looking for a PhD candidate to work on NLP in Law. We are explicitly looking for candidates that have proven experience working on NLP and Machine Learning. Deadline is March 21st. The full text of the position is here<https://vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastricht-PhD-candidate-posi…> and attached below. If you have questions, you can (also) reach out (informally) to me. —— Job Description The law affects us all, but technology is not equally available for everyone. In practice, technology often benefits the wealthy the most. In this project, you will seek to contribute to a better understanding of how NLP and/or LLMs can assist in making the law more accessible to those with no or limited legal expertise. You will use NLP to analyze legal data and possibly create synthetic data to create annotated datasets or fine-tune LLMs. The work builds on previous work, which includes (but is not limited to) https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.203/, https://aclanthology.org/2023.nllp-1.15/<https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.203/,%20https://aclanthology.org/20…>, and https://ebooks.iospress.nl/volumearticle/53654. Your work is expected to have a tangible real-world impact. The ability to find innovative technical solutions to legal challenges could become a key skill of your future career, be it as a researcher, entrepreneur, or engineer. You will undertake PhD research at the intersection of law and computer science under the supervision of professors of the Maastricht Law & Tech Lab. Your primary task is conducting the research for your PhD project. Your exact project will be determined in consultation with you and according to your interests and skills. As such, you will be expected to develop your own independent research agenda with the support of our experienced researchers in the Law & Tech Lab. A small proportion of the appointment may be devoted to teaching activities, which commonly amount to teaching activities in eight weeks per year. You will be allowed to collaborate with researchers from different disciplines, including machine learning, data science, and law. You will be part of an exciting, vibrant, and quickly growing community where researchers from different disciplines meet and form interdisciplinary teams that conduct academically and societally relevant research. You will be offered the opportunity to gain insights not only on applying computational techniques but also on law, regulation, and ethics. For this, you will be encouraged, coached, and allowed to attend courses, conferences, and workshops that will add social and legal knowledge to your skill set. PhD researchers participate in the Maastricht University Graduate School of Law. Requirements * MSc degree in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or Data Science (or equivalent); * Proven experience with applying natural language processing. Affinity with law is a plus; * Interest in learning about other disciplines, law in particular; * Community-friendly team player; * Excellent oral and written English communication; * Knowledge of Dutch language is a plus; * Optional: geek-friendly. What we offer As PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law, you will be employed by the most international university in the Netherlands, located in the beautiful city of Maastricht. In addition, we offer you: * Good employment conditions. The position is graded in scale P according to UFO profile PhD, with corresponding salary based on experience ranging from €2770,00 in year 1 and €3539,00 gross per month in year 4 (based on a full-time employment of 38 hours per week). In addition to the monthly salary, an 8.0% holiday allowance and an 8.3% year-end bonus apply. * An employment contract for a period of 12 months with a scope of 1,0 FTE. Upon a positive evaluation, an extension of 3 years will follow. * At Maastricht University, the well-being of our employees is of utmost importance, we offer flexible working hours and the possibility to work partly from home if the nature of your position allows it. You will receive a monthly commuting and internet allowance for this. If you work full-time, you will be entitled to 29 vacation days and 4 additional public holidays per year, namely carnival Monday, carnival Tuesday, Good Friday, and Liberation Day. If you choose to accumulate compensation hours, an additional 12 days will be added. Furthermore, you can personalize your employment conditions through a collective labor agreement (CAO) choice model. * As Maastricht University, we offer various other excellent secondary employment conditions. These include a good pension scheme with the ABP and the opportunity for UM employees to participate in company fitness and make use of the extensive sports facilities that we also offer to our students. * Last but certainly not least, we provide the space and facilities for your personal and professional development. We facilitate this by offering a wide range of training programs and supporting various well-established initiatives such as 'acknowledge and appreciate'. The terms of employment at Maastricht University are largely set out in the collective labor agreement of Dutch Universities. In addition, local provisions specific to UM apply. For more information, click here<https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/working-um>. Maastricht University Why work at Maastricht University? At Maastricht University (UM), everything revolves around the future. The future of our students, as we work to equip them with a solid, broad-based foundation for the rest of their lives. And the future of society, as we seek solutions through our research to issues from all around the world. Our six faculties combined provide a comprehensive package of study programmes and research. In our teaching, we use the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) method. Students work in small groups, looking for solutions to problems themselves. By discussing issues and working together to draw conclusions, formulate answers and present them to their peers, students develop essential skills for their future careers. With over 22,300 students and more than 5,000 employees from all over the world, UM is home to a vibrant and inspiring international community. Are you drawn to an international setting focused on education, science and scholarship? Are you keen to contribute however your skills and qualities allow? Our door is open to you! As a young European university, we value your talent and look forward to creating the future together. Click here<http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/> for more information about UM. Faculty of Law The Faculty of Law at Maastricht University is a top-quality provider of challenging and rewarding Dutch and European legal education at bachelor’s, masters and PhD-level. A true pioneer in small-scale education and the teaching of legal skills for a broad range of future legal professionals.  The clear research focus on European and international aspects of law and technology. On the empirical dimension of law provides both students and staff with a stimulating work environment. The faculty values its open and inclusive community, which contributes to creating a productive and pleasant place for work and study.  The Faculty of Law offers a wide range of bachelor and master's programs. Would you like to learn more about our programs? Visit our website for more information on the courses, career perspectives, and admission requirements of our programs.  Curious? Are you interested in this exciting position but still have questions? Feel free to contact professor Gijs van Dijck via gijs.vandijck(a)maastrichtuniversity.nl<mailto:gijs.vandijck@maastrichtuniversity.nl> or via +31 43 388 1396 for more information. Applying? Or are you already convinced and ready to become our new PhD candidate? Apply now, no later than 21 March 2024, for this position. The interviews will be held in April. 2024. Applications should include: * a letter of motivation; * a curriculum vitae; * representative work (e.g. a master thesis). The vacancy is open for internal and external candidates. In case of equal qualifications, internal candidates will be prioritized. Maastricht University is committed to promoting and nurturing a diverse and inclusive community. We believe that diversity in our staff and student population contributes to the quality of research and education at UM, and strive to enable this through inclusive policies and innovative projects led by teams of staff and students. We encourage you to apply for this position.

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3-year postdoctoral position in NLP - University of Oslo, Norway
by Andrey Kutuzov 08 Mar '24

08 Mar '24

(Apologies for cross-posting) A postdoctoral position in NLP (large language models in particular) is available at the University of Oslo, Norway. This position is funded jointly by the Integreat research center (https://www.integreat.no/) and the DSTrain program (https://www.uio.no/dscience/english/dstrain/). We offer 3 year contracts. The deadline for the applications is April 14, 2024; the applicants should come up with a short project description and get in touch with the contact person beforehand to discuss this description. Please apply here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/255679/dstrain-msca-postdoct… The contact person is myself, and the project should roughly fall within the topic of "Separation of Linguistic and Factual Knowledge in Large Language Models". See the description below: During the training, modern large language models learn both the language structure and the knowledge about the world as one indivisible whole. Decoupling these two components is a challenging, but extremely promising field of research. Having more control over what is stored in the model weights should allow to optimize the model better. In particular, it might be possible not to learn world knowledge every time from scratch, when training a model for a particular language. The question is whether it is possible to develop an architecture where a neural network is limited to learning the linguistic structure, while the knowledge about the world is stored in and retrieved from an external knowledge graph. Will such a model focus on learning language-specific linguistic skills without spending its parameters on time-dependent and language-agnostic factual knowledge? Is it also true that such language models will be less prone to hallucinations and bias? The selected applicants will start their postdoctoral projects no later than October 1, 2024. The Postdoctoral Research Fellows will be employed at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. The appointments will be full-time positions lasting for three years, with 10% of the time dedicated to mandatory duties, typically teaching. It is not possible to be appointed for more than one Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Oslo. References: [1] Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W.-t., Rocktäschel, T., et al. (2020). Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 33, pages 9459–9474. [2] Borgeaud, S., Mensch, A., Hoffmann, J., Cai, T., Rutherford, E., Millican, K., Van Den Driessche, G. B., Lespiau, J.-B., Damoc, B., Clark, A., et al. (2022). Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens. In International conference on machine learning, pages 2206–2240. PMLR. [3] Pan, S., Luo, L., Wang, Y., Chen, C., Wang, J., and Wu, X. (2023). Unifying large language models and knowledge graphs: A roadmap. -- Andrey Language Technology Group (LTG) University of Oslo

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Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference -- CALL
by Michael Barlow 08 Mar '24

08 Mar '24

Dear list members, The Fifth Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC2024) will be held at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China from October 25 to 27, 2024. Plenary speakers Michael Barlow (University of Auckland, New Zealand) Vaclav Brezina (Lancaster University, UK) Dagmar Divjak (University of Birmingham, UK) Martin Hilpert (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) Wenzhong Li (Zhejiang Gongshang University, China) Naixing Wei (Beihang University, China) Co-hosts Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Association Corpus Linguistics Society of China The School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Important dates March 31, 2024: Deadline for abstract submission. Submit here: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/31556/submitter<https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/31556/submitter> April 30, 2024: Notification of acceptance of abstracts May 31, 2024: End of early bird registration (Details provided later) July 31, 2024: End of main registration October 25, 2024: Preconference workshops October 26-27, 2024: Main conference Please save the dates and visit our APCLC2024 official site (https://apclc2024.org<https://apclc2024.org>) for future updates. Best wishes, Jiajin On behalf of APCLA Jiajin XU, Ph.D., Professor National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China --- Michael Barlow. www.michaelbarlow.com<http://www.michaelbarlow.com/> Assoc. Prof. Applied Linguistics, University of Auckland Recent publications M. Barlow. 2023. Writing with an AI Assistant.<https://writingwithanaiassistant.com/> Athelstan. M. Barlow 2023. Ten Lectures on Corpora and Cognitive Linguistics<https://brill.com/display/title/61682>. Brill Le, Pham & Barlow 2023. The Academic Discourse of Mechanical Engineering<https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.107>. Benjamins

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