We are offering a postdoctoral fellowship with the Graduate Program in
Applied Linguistics and Language Studies, the Pontifical Catholic
University of São Paulo , Brazil, funded by the São Paulo Research
Foundation (FAPESP), Grant #2022/05848-7.
Successful applicants will contribute research to at least one of the
following topics: 1.Development and refinement of methodologies and
innovative resources for MD Analysis; 2. MD description of register
variation across different languages and domains; 3. MD identification of
discourse surrounding socially relevant issues in the contemporary world. A
full-time commitment of 40 hours per week is required. Applicants must have
obtained a doctoral degree less than seven years ago. The fellowship duration
is between 12 and 24 months. Interested applicants should complete the
online form at: https://form.jotform.com/230804143618956 by May 31. 2025. The
fellowship provides a monthly stipend of 12,000 BRL (
https://fapesp.br/valores/bolsasnopais). Project proposals and corpus data
may be in either English or Portuguese.
Questions, please email tnnycorpuslg(a)gmail.com
*[Apologies for cross-posting]*
Dear Researchers,
We are pleased to invite you to participate in the *PolyHope-M Shared Task
at RANLP 2025*, an exciting challenge aimed at advancing the computational
understanding of *hope* across multiple languages. Hope is a crucial human
emotion that influences decision-making, resilience, and social
interactions. This shared task focuses on detecting and categorizing
hope-related expressions in *English, German, Spanish, and Urdu social
media texts*.
Unlike traditional binary sentiment classification, *PolyHope-M* introduces
a *nuanced multiclass classification approach* to distinguish between:
- *Generalized Hope:* A broad sense of optimism not tied to specific
outcomes.
- *Realistic Hope:* Expectations grounded in achievable goals.
- *Unrealistic Hope:* Desires for outcomes that are unlikely or
impossible.
- *Not Hope:* Texts that do not express hope.
*Task Description*
Participants will develop NLP models for classifying hope-related
expressions through two main subtasks:
1. *Binary Hope Speech Detection* (Subtask 1 - separate for each
language): Classifying texts as *Hope* or *Not Hope*.
2. *Multiclass Hope Speech Detection* (Subtask 2 - separate for each
language): Distinguishing between different types of hope expressions.
*Important Dates*
- *Training data release:* February 20, 2025
- *Evaluation data release & evaluation start:* February 25, 2025
- *Evaluation end:* March 25, 2025
- *Publication of official results:* March 26, 2025
- *Paper submission deadline:* April 26, 2025
- *Author notifications:* May 10, 2025
- *Camera-ready submission:* June 10, 2025
- *Shared task presentation at RANLP 2025:* September 11-12, 2025
*Organizing Committee*
- *Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi*, Independent Researcher, Mexico
- *Sabur Butt*, Institute for the Future of Education (IFE), Tecnológico
de Monterrey, Mexico
- *Maaz Amjad*, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
- *Luis Jose Gonzalez-Gomez*, IFE, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
- *Abdul Gafar Manuel Meque*, Centro de Investigación en Computación,
Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico
- *Helena Gómez-Adorno*, IIMAS, UNAM, Mexico
- *Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi*, University of Galway, Ireland
- *Grigori Sidorov*, Centro de Investigación en Computación, Instituto
Politécnico Nacional, Mexico
- *Thomas Mandl*, University of Hildesheim, Germany
- *Hector G Ceballos*, IFE, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
- *Ruba Priyadharshini*, Gandhigram Rural Institute, India
- *Saranya Rajiakodi*, Central University of Tamilnadu, India
*Contact Information*
For any inquiries, please contact the organizing team:
- *Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi:* fbalouchzahi2021(a)cic.ipn.mx
- *Sabur Butt:* saburb(a)tec.mx
- *Helena Gómez-Adorno:* helena.gomez(a)iimas.unam.mx
For more details and participation guidelines, visit:
*PolyHope-M Competition Page*: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/5635/
*RANLP Website*: https://ranlp.org/ranlp2025/
We look forward to your participation in *PolyHope-M at RANLP 2025* and
your contributions toward enhancing hope speech detection across multiple
languages!
Best regards,
Sabur Butt
*Sabur Butt, Ph.D. *(He/Him)
Institute for the Future of Education (IFE)
*Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico*
Address: Av. Eugenio Garza Sada 2501 Sur Tecnológico, 64849 Monterrey, N.L.
LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/saburb> - GitHub
<https://github.com/saburbutt> - Scholar
<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=re7md-0AAAAJ&hl=en> - Website
<https://saburbutt.github.io/>
The content of this data transmission must not be considered an offer,
proposal, understanding or agreement unless it is confirmed in a document
signed by a legal representative of ITESM. The content of this data
transmission is confidential and is intended to be delivered only to the
addressees. Therefore, it shall not be distributed and/or disclosed through
any means without the authorization of the original sender. If you are not
the addressee, you are forbidden from using it, either totally or
partially, for any purpose.
*[Apologies for cross-posting]*
Dear Researchers,
We are excited to invite you to participate in the *PolyHope Shared Task at
IberLEF 2025*, a unique challenge focused on analyzing the expression of
hope in social media texts. Hope is a fundamental human emotion
influencing decision-making,
yet its nuanced nature—especially when masked by sarcasm—presents significant
challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. This year, the
task expands its scope to Spanish texts, emphasizing hope as an expectation
alongside its existing English counterpart.
*Task Description*
The goal of PolyHope is to classify social media texts based on their
expression of hope, with two subtasks available:
1. *Binary Hope Speech Detection (Subtask 1.a: English, Subtask 1.b:
Spanish)*
- *Hope:* Texts conveying hope, expectation, or desire.
- *Not Hope:* Texts that do not express any hopeful sentiment.
2. *Multiclass Hope Speech Detection (Subtask 2.a: English, Subtask 2.b:
Spanish)*
- *Generalized Hope:* Broad optimism without specific targets.
- *Realistic Hope:* Hope grounded in plausible outcomes.
- *Unrealistic Hope:* Expressions of hope for unlikely outcomes.
- *Not Hope:* Texts without hopeful sentiment.
- *Sarcasm:* Texts that mimic hope but are sarcastic in nature.
This task aims to promote research in *inclusive language technologies*,
enhance the *psychological and linguistic understanding* of hope, and
develop *multilingual NLP models* capable of detecting nuanced sentiment
and sarcasm.
*Important Dates*
- *Release of training data:* February 13, 2025
- *Release of test corpora & evaluation campaign start:* March 13, 2025
- *End of evaluation campaign (submission deadline):* March 28, 2025
- *Publication of official results:* March 30, 2025
- *Paper submission:* April 25, 2025
- *Review notification:* May 20, 2025
- *Camera-ready submission:* June 3, 2025
- *IberLEF Workshop:* September 2025
- *Publication of proceedings:* September 2025
*Organizing Committee*
- *Sabur Butt*, Institute for the Future of Education (IFE), Tecnológico
de Monterrey, Mexico
- *Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi*, Independent Researcher, Mexico
- *Maaz Amjad*, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
- *Salud María Jiménez-Zafra*, SINAI, Universidad de Jaén, Spain
- *Hector G Ceballos*, IFE, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
- *Grigori Sidorov*, Centro de Investigación en Computación, Instituto
Politécnico Nacional, Mexico
*Contact Information*
For inquiries, feel free to reach out to the organizing team:
- *General Inquiries:* polyhopeatiberlef(a)gmail.com
- *Sabur Butt:* saburb(a)tec.mx
- *Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi:* fbalouchzahi2021(a)cic.ipn.mx
- *Salud María Jiménez-Zafra:* sjzafra(a)ujaen.es
For more details and participation guidelines, visit:
PolyHope Competition Page: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/5509/
<https://www.codabench.org/competitions/5509/>
IberLEF Website: https://sites.google.com/view/iberlef-2025/home?authuser=0
We look forward to your participation in advancing research on hope speech
detection!
Best regards,
Sabur Butt
*Sabur Butt, Ph.D. *(He/Him)
Institute for the Future of Education (IFE)
*Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico*
Address: Av. Eugenio Garza Sada 2501 Sur Tecnológico, 64849 Monterrey, N.L.
LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/saburb> - GitHub
<https://github.com/saburbutt> - Scholar
<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=re7md-0AAAAJ&hl=en> - Website
<https://saburbutt.github.io/>
The content of this data transmission must not be considered an offer,
proposal, understanding or agreement unless it is confirmed in a document
signed by a legal representative of ITESM. The content of this data
transmission is confidential and is intended to be delivered only to the
addressees. Therefore, it shall not be distributed and/or disclosed through
any means without the authorization of the original sender. If you are not
the addressee, you are forbidden from using it, either totally or
partially, for any purpose.
[Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this extended deadline CFP]
---------- LAST EXTENSION: Canadian AI 2025 - Final Deadline Extension ----------
---------- May 26-29, 2025, in Calgary, Alberta ----------
---------- FINAL Deadline Extension: Thursday, Feb 20, 2025 (11:59 p.m. AoE) ----------
Dear Colleagues,
We want to thank all those who have submitted papers so far to our conference. In response to ongoing requests, we are granting one FINAL extension. The new and final submission deadline is **Thursday, Feb 20, 2025, by 11:59 p.m. AoE**.
We invite submissions in all areas of Artificial Intelligence, either theoretical or applied, to the 38th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, taking place in Calgary on May 26-29. We also welcome position papers, which present evidence-based arguments for a particular point of view without necessarily introducing a new system.
Conference proceedings will be published in PubPub open-access online format and submitted to be indexed/abstracted in leading indexing services such as DBLP, ACM, and Google Scholar.
---------- Submission Details ----------
Canadian AI is accepting submissions of both long and short papers:
Long papers: Maximum 12 pages (including references)
Short papers: Maximum 6 pages (including references)
Formats: LaTeX and Word submissions are accepted
**NEW: Each submission may include an Appendix (PDF) as supplementary material.**
More information and submission templates are available under Submission Details here:
https://www.caiac.ca/en/conferences/canadianai-2025/call-papers
**The portal for submission can be found here:**
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CANADIANAI2025/
All submissions must be original, anonymized for double-blind review, and not under review elsewhere (preprints are acceptable if the title differs).
---------- Topics of Interest Include ----------
- Agent Systems
- AI Applications
- Automated Reasoning
- Case‐based Reasoning
- Cognitive Models
- Constraint Satisfaction
- Data Mining
- Deep Learning and Neural Models
- E‐Commerce
- Ethics in AI, AI for social good
- Evolutionary Computation
- Explainable AI
- Fair, Secure, Private, and Trusted AI
- Games
- Information Retrieval and Search
- Knowledge Management
- Knowledge Representation
- Large Language Models
- Machine Learning
- Multimedia Processing
- Natural Language Processing
- Planning
- Robotics
- Uncertainty
- User Modeling
- Web Mining and Applications
Authors of accepted long papers will be allotted time for an oral presentation during the conference. Accepted short papers will also be allotted time for a 5-minute oral presentation, followed by a poster session presentation. It is mandatory for at least one author of each accepted paper to attend the conference in person to present their work. Authors are expected to agree to this requirement before submitting their paper for review.
Furthermore, the corresponding author of each paper must complete and sign a copyright form on behalf of all authors associated with the paper. It is important that the corresponding author who signs the copyright form matches the corresponding author listed on the paper.
---------- Important Dates ----------
- FINAL Submission Deadline: **Thursday, Feb 20, 2025 (11:59 p.m. AoE)**
- Author Notification: Tuesday, April 1, 2025
- Camera-Ready Copy Due: Tuesday, April 15, 2025
- Conference Dates: May 26-29, 2025
---------- Awards ----------
Best Paper Award and Best Student Paper Award will be given at the conference. To qualify for the student award, the first author must be a registered student at submission.
---------- Program Chairs ----------
Paula Branco
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa
pbranco(a)uottawa.ca
https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/view/profile/members/4218?lang=en
Amine Trabelsi
Département d'informatique, Université de Sherbrooke
Amine.Trabelsi(a)USherbrooke.ca
https://www.usherbrooke.ca/informatique/trabelsi
We look forward to your participation in Canadian AI 2025!
In this newsletter:
LDC at LT4ALL 2025
LDC membership discounts expire March 3
Spring 2025 data scholarship recipients
New publications:
AIDA Scenario 3 Practice Topic Source Data and Annotation<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2025T02>
MATERIAL Georgian-English Language Pack<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2025S01>
________________________________
LDC at LT4All 2025
LDC is pleased to be a sponsor of The 2nd International Conference on Language Technologies for All (LT4All 2025)<https://www.lt4all2025.eu/overview/>, February 24-26, 2025, organized by ELRA and SIGUL, the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages, and in partnership with UNESCO as part of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032). The conference theme, "Advancing Humanism through Language Technologies," focuses on community empowerment within the larger discussion on the many ways technology impacts language communities. The conference will also commemorate the Silver Jubilee of International Mother Language Day (February 21).
LDC membership discounts expire March 3
Time is running out to save on 2025 membership fees. Renew your LDC membership, rejoin the Consortium, or become a new member by March 3 to receive a discount of up to 10%. For more information on membership benefits and options, visit Join LDC<https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/members/join-ldc>.
Spring 2025 data scholarship recipients
Congratulations to the recipients of LDC's Spring 2025 data scholarships:
Sair Buckle: Charles Sturt University (Australia): PhD student, AI and Cyber Futures Institute. Sair is awarded a copy of Avocado Research Email Corpus LDC2015T03 for her work in behavioral science.
Le Phuoc Thinh Tien, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam); Bachelor's student, Faculty of Information Technology. Le is awarded a copy of Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0 LDC2019T05 for his research in natural logical reasoning.
The next round of applications will be accepted in September 2025. For information about the program, visit the Data Scholarships page<https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/language-resources/data/data-scholarships>.
________________________________
New publications:
AIDA Scenario 3 Practice Topic Source Data and Annotation<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2025T02> was developed by LDC and is comprised of English, Russian, and Spanish web documents (text, video, image) and annotations. Each phase of the AIDA program centered on a specific scenario, or broad topic area, with related subtopics designated as either practice subtopics or evaluation subtopics. The Phase 3 scenario focused on the COVID-19 global pandemic. This corpus contains source documents and annotations for the Scenario 3 practice topics.
The corpus contains 1417 root documents; 279 documents were annotated. Annotations include:
* Event, relation, and entity annotation (64 documents)
* Claim frame annotation: claims (true or not) relating to the COVID-19 pandemic (203 documents)
* Practice topic query claim frames: example claim frames intended to be used by systems as queries to extract similar claims from additional documents (30 documents)
The DARPA AIDA (Active Interpretation of Disparate Alternatives) program aimed to develop a multi-hypothesis semantic engine to generate explicit alternative interpretations of events, situations, and trends from a variety of unstructured sources. LDC supported AIDA by collecting, creating, and annotating multimodal linguistic resources in multiple languages.
2025 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
*
MATERIAL Georgian-English Language Pack<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2025S01> was developed by Appen<http://www.appen.com/> for the IARPA MATERIAL<https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/material> program and contains 79 hours of Georgian conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations, and queries. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments. Transcripts cover approximately half of the speech files, and approximately 3% of the speech data was translated into English. This release also includes English queries and their relevance annotations.
The MATERIAL program focused on underserved languages with the ultimate goal to build cross language information retrieval systems to find speech and text content using English search queries.
2025 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
To unsubscribe from this newsletter, log in to your LDC account<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/login> and uncheck the box next to "Receive Newsletter" under Account Options or contact LDC for assistance.
Membership Coordinator
Linguistic Data Consortium<ldc.upenn.edu>
University of Pennsylvania
T: +1-215-573-1275
E: ldc(a)ldc.upenn.edu<mailto:ldc@ldc.upenn.edu>
M: 3600 Market St. Suite 810
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Dear List,
the 12th International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (CMC-Corpora) will be held at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, on the 4th and 5th of September 2025 (CfP below).
Keynotes
Gavin Brookes (Lancaster University)
Stephanie Evert (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Deadline paper/abstract submission: 15th May 2025, 23:59 CEST
The conference brings together language-centered research on CMC and social media in linguistics, philologies, communication sciences, media, and social sciences with research questions from the fields of corpus and computational linguistics, language technology, text technology, and machine learning.
We adhere to a wide definition of CMC and social media, covering various media of digital communication, including email, newsgroups, forums, chat and messenger applications (e.g. WhatsApp), social networks (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok), gaming platforms, as well as interactions in the communication areas of video portals (YouTube), learning platforms, gaming apps, online games and virtual worlds.
We invite submissions to the 12th conference on following topics:
* Development of CMC corpora / social media corpora
* Building CMC corpora: from data collection to publication
* Open access data for CMC research: ethical and GDPR issues
* Annotating CMC data: genres, linguistic aspects, metadata
* Multimodal corpora
* Big data corpora
* Analysis of CMC corpora / social media corpora
* Sociolinguistic studies of CMC
* Discourse analysis of CMC
* Linguistic characteristics of CMC
* Multimodal (incl. visual) aspects of CMC
* Multilingualism and code-switching in CMC
* CMC in language education
* Natural language processing (NLP) of CMC data / social media data
* Normalization
* PoS tagging
* Lemmatization
* Syntactic parsing
* CMC for the benefit of digital societies
* Interdisciplinary research design and research methods in CMC for the benefit of digital societies
* Exploration of Diversity and Inclusion in CMC
* Intersection of CMC and Social Sciences
* Intersection of CMC and Human-Centered Data Science
* Intersection of CMC and Computational Social Science
* Contrastive CM studies across different languages
The conference language is English. Submissions will consist of:
* Short papers (2-4 pages – maximal 6 pages including the list of references –, following the existing template) for oral presentations
* Abstracts (max. 300 words) for poster presentations
Submission and review
Authors of accepted papers are invited to present their work at the conference (30-minute timeslots: 20-minute talks, followed by 10 minutes of discussion). Authors of accepted abstracts can present their work in progress or early-stage research during the poster session. At the start of the conference, all accepted papers will be made available in online proceedings. After the conference, speakers with the best contributions will be invited to submit extended papers for one or more special issue journal or a volume publication.
Instructions for authors
All contributions will be collected via ConfTool.
Templates
Submission templates for MS Word and LaTeX are provided on the conference’s homepage:
https://www.cmc2025.uni-bayreuth.de/en/.
Important Dates
* Platform opening for short paper and abstract submission: 17th February 2025 (platform open)
* Deadline paper/abstract submission: 15th May 2025, 23:59 CEST
More information on the CMC2025 conference:
https://www.cmc2025.uni-bayreuth.de/en/
For all enquiries, please contact the organizers at cmc2025(a)uni-bayreuth.de.
More information on the “International Conference Series on CMC and Social Media Corpora (cmc-corpora)”:
https://cmc-corpora.org/series/#
Local organizing committee:
* Dr. Annamária Fábián (University of Bayreuth/Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation at the Bavarian Academy of Science)
* Prof. Dr. Igor Trost (Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt/University of Passau)
Scientific chairs:
* Dr. Steven Coats (University Oulu)
* Dr. Annamária Fábián (University of Bayreuth)
* Prof. Dr. Julien Longhi (CY Cergy Paris University)
* Prof. Igor Trost (Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt/U. of Passau)
* Prof. Reinhild Vandekerckhove (University of Antwerp)
* Dr. Lieke Verheijen (Radboud University)
Scientific committee (so far confirmed):
* Paul Baker (Lancaster University)
* Gavin Brookes (Lancaster University)
* Noah Bubenhofer (University of Zürich)
* Mario Cal Varela (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)
* Louis Cotgrove (Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim)
* Steven Coats (University of Oulu)
* Orphée DeClercq (Ghent University)
* Stephanie Evert (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nüremberg)
* Francisco Javier Fernández Polo (University of Santiago de Compostela)
* Annamária Fábián (University of Bayreuth/Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation – Bavarian Academy of Science)
* Jenny Frey (European Academy of Bozen)
* Aivars Glaznieks (Eurac Research Bolzano)
* Claire Hardaker (Lancaster University)
* Stefan Hartmann (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf)
* Iris Hendrickx (Radboud University Nijmegen)
* Axel Herold (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
* Besim Kabashi (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nüremberg)
* Erik-Tjong Kim-Sang (Netherlands eScience Center)
* Alexander Koenig (CLARIN ERIC)
* Marc Kupietz (Leibniz-Institut für deutsche Sprache Mannheim)
* Mikko Laitinen (University of Eastern Finland)
* Els Lefever (Ghent University)
* Julien Longhi (Cergy-Pontoise Université)
* Harald Lüngen (Leibniz-Institut für deutsche Sprache Mannheim)
* Konstanze Marx-Wischnowski (University of Greifswald)
* Maja Miličević-Petrović (University of Bologna)
* Nelleke Oostdijk (Radboud University)
* Jan Oliver Rüdiger (Leibniz-Institut für deutsche Sprache Mannheim)
* Tatjana Scheffler (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
* Steven Schoonjans (Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt)
* Mirco Schönfeld (University of Bayreuth)
* Stefania Spina (Università per Stranieri di Perugia)
* Egon Stemle (Eurac Research)
* Caroline Tagg (The Open University)
* Stefanie Ullmann (University of Cambridge)
* Igor Trost (Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt/Universität Passau)
* Reinhild Vandekerckhove (University of Antwerp)
* Lieke Verheijen (Radboud University)
* Stefanie Walter (Technical University Munich)
* Katrin Weller (GESIS Cologne)
All the best,
Annamaria Fabian (Bayreuth) and Igor Trost (Klagenfurt/Passau)
Dr. Annamaria Fabian
Principal Investigator (Post-Doc) of the project "Disability diversity and the communicative realization of inclusion on Social Media"
Department German Linguistics
University of Bayreuth
https://www.gl.uni-bayreuth.de/de/team/A-Fabian/index.php
Member of the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (Bavarian Academy of Science)
Head of the Research Group "Diversity and Inclusion in Digital Societies"
Newly published:
Annamaria Fabian, Igor Trost, Kevin Altmann & Mara Schwind (2024): The analysis of ‘inclusion’ and ‘accessibility’ in Computer-Mediated-Communication for an inclusive transformation in digital societies. pp. 16-20 (double-side print). In: Céline Poudat, Mathilde Guernut. Proceedings of the 11th Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities. 11th Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (CMC 2024), CORLI; Université Côte d’Azur, 2024. halshs-04673776v1
available here: https://cmc-corpora-nice.sciencesconf.org/data/pages/CMC2024_2_.pdf
We are pleased to announce the first shared task on Critical Questions
Generation, hosted at The 12th Workshop on Argument Mining, co-located in
ACL 2025 in Vienna, Austria. All details can be found in:
https://hitz-zentroa.github.io/shared-task-critical-questions-generation/
**Introduction**
In recent years, a growing concern within the educational community has
been whether the widespread use of LLM-based chats could foster superficial
learning habits and weaken students' critical thinking skills. To counter
this trend, in this task, we propose using LLMs to guide users towards
asking critical questions. That is, questions that can uncover fallacious
or poorly constructed arguments. In short: **we want to foster critical
thinking by developing a system that generates insightful critical
questions when given argumentative texts**.
In the same line, Natural Language Processing applications to deal with
misinformation are a popular line of research. However, most applications
face challenges regarding three issues: LLMs often lack the required
up-to-date knowledge for these tasks, there is not always an agreement on
what is the truth, and LLMs themselves can produce hallucinations or rely
on unfaithful data, generating misinformation of their own making. **Yet,
instead of requiring the LLMs to output factual knowledge, could we use
them to point at the missing or potentially uninformed claims?**
**What is the task of Critical Questions Generation?**
The task of Critical Questions Generation consists of generating useful
critical questions when given an argumentative text. For this purpose, a
dataset of real debate interventions with associated critical questions
will be released.
Critical Questions are the set of inquiries that should be asked in order
to judge if an argument is acceptable or fallacious. Therefore, these
questions are designed to unmask the assumptions held by the premises of
the argument and attack its inference.
In the dataset, the argumentative texts are interventions of real debates,
which have been annotated with Argumentation Schemes and later associated
with a set of critical questions. For every intervention, the speaker, the
set of Argumentation Schemes, and the critical questions are provided.
These questions have been annotated according to their usefulness for
challenging the arguments in each text. The labels are either Useful,
Unhelpful, or Invalid. The goal of the task is to generate critical
questions that are Useful.
The participant will be asked to develop a system that gets one of the
interventions as input, and outputs exactly 3 critical questions. The 3
critical questions should all be useful for challenging the arguments in
the intervention. Each of these 3 critical questions will be evaluated
separately and then the punctuation will be aggregated. You can either
create a system that generates only Useful CQs, or you can decide to
generate many CQs and choose the top 3.
For more information on Critical Questions Generation, please read Critical
Questions Generation: Motivation and Challenges
<https://aclanthology.org/2024.conll-1.9/>
**Important Dates**
- Sample data available: 17th February
- Validation data ready: 21st February
- Evaluation start: 28th March
- Evaluation end: 4th April
- Paper submission due: 25th April
- Notification to authors: 2nd May
- Camera ready due: 9th May
- Workshop: 31st July (co-located with ACL 2025)
**Organizers of the shared task**
- Blanca Calvo Figueras <https://github.com/BlancaCalvo>,
HiTZ Basque Center for Language Technology - Ixa, University of the Basque
Country UPV/EHU, Spain
- Rodrigo Agerri <https://ragerri.github.io/>,
HiTZ Basque Center for Language Technology - Ixa, University of the Basque
Country UPV/EHU, Spain
- Elena Cabrio <https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Elena.Cabrio/>,
University of Côte d’Azur and member of the Inria-I3S research team Wimmics
- Serena Villata <https://webusers.i3s.unice.fr/~villata/Home.html>,
University of Côte d’Azur and member of the Inria-I3S research team Wimmics
**Do you have other questions?**
Please become a member of the Google Group
"critical-questions-generation-shared-task"
<https://groups.google.com/g/critical-questions-generation-shared-task> to
keep yourself updated.
For specific questions, contact blanca.calvo(a)ehu.eus
Website:
https://hitz-zentroa.github.io/shared-task-critical-questions-generation/
Apologies for cross-posting.
----------------------------------------
*The International Conference on Spoken Language Translation*
*ACL – 22nd IWSLT 2025 – **Third** Call for Participation*
*31 July-1 August 2025 - Vienna, Austria*
http://iwslt.org
The International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT)
<https://iwslt.org/> is the premier annual conference for all aspects of
Spoken Language Translation. Every year, the conference organises and
sponsors open evaluation campaigns around key challenges in simultaneous
and consecutive translation, under real-time/low latency or offline
conditions and under low-resource or multilingual constraints. System
descriptions and results from participants’ systems and scientific papers
related to key algorithmic advances and best practices are presented.
IWSLT is the venue of the SIGSLTs <https://iwslt.org/sigslt/>, the Special
Interest Group on Spoken Language Translation <https://iwslt.org/sigslt/>
of ACL <https://www.aclweb.org/portal/>, ISCA <https://www.isca-speech.org/>
and ELRA <https://www.elra.info/>. With a track record of 21 years, IWSLT
benchmarks and proceedings serve as reference for all researchers and
practitioners working on speech translation and related fields.
The 22nd edition of IWSLT will be run as a hybrid ELRA
<https://www.elra.info/>/ACL <https://www.aclweb.org/portal/> event,
co-located with ACL 2025 <https://2025.aclweb.org/> from 31 July to 1
August 2025.
*Important Dates*
*January 1, 2025*: Release of shared task training and dev data
*March 15, 2025*: Scientific paper submission deadline
*Apr 1-15, 2025*: Evaluation period
*April 21, 2025*: System description paper and demo submission deadline
*May 15, 2025*: Notification of acceptance
*June 1, 2025*: Camera-ready deadline (all paper)
*July 31-Aug 1*, *2025*: IWSLT conference
*Evaluation*
The IWSLT 2025 features shared tasks <https://iwslt.org/2025/#shared-tasks>
that address the following focus areas:
- High-resource ST: Offline track, Simultaneous track, Subtitling track, Model
compression track
- Low-resource ST: Low-resource and Indic (multilingual) tracks
- Instruction-following Speech Processing track: Technical domain ST, ASR,
Summarization, and QA
Training and development data for each shared task will be prepared and
released by the respective organisers (for further information on this
initiative, please refer to the IWSLT website <https://iwslt.org/2025/>).
Participants will receive instructions about how to submit their runs. In
addition, participants have the opportunity to present their work
through a system
paper that will be published in the ACL Proceedings.
*Conference*
IWSLT also invites submissions of scientific papers to be published in the
ACL Proceedings and presented either in oral or poster format. The
conference selects high-quality, original contributions on theoretical and
practical issues of spoken language translation research, technologies and
applications. Submissions will be accepted directly through the IWSLT
submission site (to be announced on the website <https://iwslt.org/2025/>).
We will also accept commitments of submissions with reviews from the ACL
Rolling Review.
Additionally, to foster cross-pollination of ideas, the conference also
invites the presentation of papers on speech translation recently published
elsewhere. Please note that this is for non-archival presentation of papers
relevant to speech translation already published in other venues (e.g.,
Findings for the *ACL, speech, NLP or MT conferences). Submissions for this
category will be accepted through a dedicated form (to be announced on the
website <https://iwslt.org/2025/>). Papers will be checked for relevance to
IWSLT, and assigned either oral or poster presentation slots if selected.
*Demo Session*
We invite researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals to
participate in an engaging demo session highlighting innovative systems,
tools, and component technologies that advance the field of speech
translation. The session will include live and interactive system
demonstrations to foster discussion and knowledge exchange among
participants across the field.
For more information, please see our Call for Demos
<https://iwslt.org/2025/call-for-demos>.
*Contact*
Please email iwslt-evaluation-campaign(a)googlegroups.com if you have any
questions related to the shared tasks.
Thanks,
Marine, Marcello, Alex, Jan, Sebastian, Elizabeth, Atul
(IWSLT organisers)
Dear all,
Apologies for cross-posting.
School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of
Surrey is seeking to recruit lecturers in Computer Science (NICE Research
group) and at the Institute for People-Centred AI. Please find information
about both positions below and listings for other senior roles as well.
Lecturer in Natural Language Processing [https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009525]
The School is home to two established research centres with expertise in AI
and Machine Learning: the Computer Science Research Centre and the Centre
for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP). This post is aligned to
the Nature Inspired Computer and Engineering group within Computer
Science. The Nature Inspired Computing and Engineering group solves
real-world problems in healthcare and sustainability, complex networks,
robotics, natural language processing (NLP), and other areas, as well as
foundational research in Machine Learning. For example, our colleagues
specialising in NLP research have expertise in language modelling, machine
translation, semantic web, and multimodal challenges aligned with NLP. This
role encourages applicants from the areas of natural language processing
including language modelling, language generation (machine
translation/summarisation), explainability and reasoning in NLP, and/or
aligned multimodal challenges for NLP (vision-language, audio-language, and
so on) and we are particularly interested in candidates who enhance our
current strengths and bring complementary areas of AI expertise.
Department: Computer Science
Location: Guildford
Salary: £46,735 to £55,755 per annum
Post Type: Full Time
Closing Date: 23.59 hours GMT on Wednesday 12 March 2025
Interviews are planned to take place on 7th April, 2025
For informal enquiries, please contact Professor Steve Schneider,
s.schneider(a)surrey.ac.uk
Lecturer in People-Centred AI [https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009725]
The School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering together with the
Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI is seeking to recruit a full-time
Lecturer in People-Centred Artificial Intelligence to expand our team of
dynamic and highly skilled AI researchers. The School is home to two
established research centres with expertise in AI and Machine Learning: the
Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) and the Computer
Science Research Centre. This post is aligned to CVSSP. CVSSP is an
internationally recognised leader in artificial intelligence for
audio-visual machine perception pioneering foundational research in the
field over the past 40 years. With a diverse community of more than 150
researchers, we are one of the largest audio and vision research groups in
the UK. Research in the Centre has led to award-winning spin-out companies
in the biometric, communication, healthcare, and creative industries. CVSSP
has a long-standing international track record in AI research, ranking 1st
in the UK for computer vision and 3rd in the UK for computer vision, AI and
robotics based on publication in leading academic forums (CSRankings.org).
CVSSP and Computer Science are at the core of the Surrey Institute for
People-Centred AI (PAI) established in 2021 as a pan-University initiative
which brings together leading AI research with cross-discipline expertise
across health, social, behavioural, and engineering sciences, and business,
law, and the creative arts to shape future AI to benefit people and
society. This role encourages applicants from the areas of creative
technologies, media provenance, audio-visual AI, foundation models,
generative AI, and complementary areas of people-centred AI expertise.
Department: Centre of Vision, Speech & Signal Processing
Location: Guildford
Salary: £46,735 to £55,755 per annum
Post Type: Full Time
Closing Date: 23.59 hours GMT on Wednesday 12 March 2025
Planned Interview Date: Monday 31 March 2025
For informal enquiries, please contact Professor Adrian Hilton,
a.hilton(a)surrey.ac.uk
--
Full list of vacancies at the School of CS and EE:
*Role Title*
*Role Link*
Professor in Satellite Communications
*https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009225 <https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009225>*
Lecturer in Natural Language Processing
*https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009525 <https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009525>*
Lecturer in Cyber Security
*https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009425 <https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009425>*
Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security
*https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009325 <https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009325>*
Lecturer in Robotics
*https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009625 <https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009625>*
Lecturer in People-Centred AI
*https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009725 <https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk/009725>*
Surrey has an established international reputation in AI research, 1st in
the UK for computer vision and top 10 for AI, computer vision, machine
learning and natural language processing (CSRankings.org) and were 7th in
the UK for REF2021 outputs in Computer Science research. Computer Science
and CVSSP are at the core of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI
(PAI), established in 2021 as a pan-University initiative which brings
together leading AI research with cross-discipline expertise across health,
social, behavioural, and engineering sciences, and business, law, and the
creative arts to shape future AI to benefit people and society. PAI leads a
portfolio of £100m in grant awards including major research activities in
creative industries and healthcare, and two doctoral training programmes
with funding for over 100 PhD researchers: the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral
Training in AI for Digital Media Inclusion, and the Leverhulme Trust
Doctoral Training Network in AI-Enabled Digital Accessibility.
The University of Surrey is committed to providing an inclusive environment
that offers equal opportunities for all. We place great value on diversity
and are seeking to increase the diversity within our community. Therefore,
we particularly encourage applications from under-represented groups, such
as people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups and people with
disabilities.
Regards,
*Dr Diptesh Kanojia <https://dipteshkanojia.github.io/> **(he/him)*
Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence for Natural Language Processing
<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/dr-diptesh-kanojia>
Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI
<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/artificial-intelligence> | School of CS & EE
<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/school-computer-science-and-electronic-engineering>
Office: 13BA02, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK
*"Nearly everyone can stand adversity, but if you want to test their
character, give them power."*
Dear All,
28th February is the deadline for RAG Workshop proposals. The Workshop takes place during 25th ICCS meeting in Singapore, 7-9 July 2025.
Details: https://www.iccs-meeting.org/iccs2025/workshops/#ragw
Description: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical and rapidly evolving theme in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). RAG systems address a significant limitation of Large Language Models (LLMs): their inability to incorporate real-time updates and private knowledge efficiently, as their knowledge is static and embedded within the model’s weights, making updates costly and time-intensive. By integrating traditional and modern information retrieval (IR) techniques with the generative capabilities of LLMs, RAG systems offer a dynamic solution that allows models to access and utilize the most up-to-date and domain-specific information. This combination makes RAG a promising approach for building systems that are not only powerful but also accurate, efficient, and adaptable to specialized contexts.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on RAG systems, particularly those focused on complex and high-stakes domains such as law, biology, physics, and medicine, where accuracy and reliability are paramount. Our goal is to foster discussions, share novel approaches, and identify emerging challenges in the development and application of RAG systems.
Topics of Interest
We invite high-quality submissions addressing various aspects of RAG systems, including but not limited to:
1. Core Improvements and Architectures
– Innovations in information retrieval models.
– New architectures and frameworks for RAG systems.
– Enhanced techniques for vector representation and storage.
2. Efficiency and Scalability
– Methods to improve processing speed and reduce memory consumption in RAG pipelines.
– Quantization techniques for efficient vector storage and retrieval.
– Scalable solutions for large-scale domain-specific datasets.
3. Domain-Specific Applications
– Development of RAG systems tailored for specialized fields such as legal, biomedical, and scientific domains.
– Strategies for adapting LLMs to retrieval tasks in niche contexts.
4. Fusion and Retrieval Optimization
– Models for combining results from diverse retrieval systems.
– Novel fusion techniques to enhance relevance and accuracy.
5. Evaluation and Robustness
– Creation of new evaluation datasets and benchmarks.
– Metrics and methodologies for assessing RAG performance.
– Techniques for controlling hallucinations in generated outputs.
6. Broader Applications and Challenges
– Ethical considerations and biases in RAG systems.
– Cross-lingual or multilingual RAG applications.
– Use of RAG systems in low-resource or under-represented domains.
Who Should Attend?
This workshop is designed for researchers, industry professionals, and students interested in the intersection of retrieval systems and generative models. Whether your focus is on improving foundational technologies, developing novel applications, or tackling real-world challenges in specialized domains, we invite you to join us in advancing the field of RAG.
We look forward to your contributions and to stimulating discussions that will shape the future of Retrieval-Augmented Generation!
Best regards
Magda Król