Call for Papers: * HTRes 2024 – Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources *Pre-conference workshop at LREC-COLING 2024 (https://lrec-coling-2024.org/)

Tuesday, 21st May, 2024 in Torino, Italy Workshop webpage: https://www.clarin.eu/HTRes2024

** Final date for paper submission:  21 February 2024 **

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.

Topics of interest:

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 * Digitisation 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 NLP 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'.

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 should strictly follow the LREC2024 stylesheet formatting guidelines. All papers should be electronically submitted in PDF format via the main conference platform via START (https://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/htres2024/)

Important Dates:

Final date for paper submission:  21 February 2024 Notification of Acceptance: 20 March 2024 Camera-ready version submission: 15 April 2024 Workshop date: 21 May 2024

Programme:

Please refer to the website for the details of the programme, plus the organizing and programme committees: https://www.clarin.eu/HTRes2024