To be held at ACL 2025, running jointly with FieldMatters (July 31 or August 1 in Vienna, Austria)

Workshop description

The aim of the 7th edition of SIGTYP workshop is to act as a platform and a forum for the exchange of information between typology-related research, multilingual NLP, and other research areas that can lead to the development of truly multilingual NLP methods. The workshop is specifically aimed at raising awareness of linguistic typology and its potential in supporting and widening the global reach of multilingual NLP, as well as at introducing computational approaches to linguistic typology. It will foster research and discussion on open problems, not only within the active community working on cross- and multilingual NLP but also inviting input from leading researchers in linguistic typology. Our workshop will serve as a platform to enable fruitful discussions. In 2025, we would additionally focus on the utility of LLMs for typological research.

SIGTYP is the first dedicated venue for typology-related research and its integration in multilingual NLP. Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to) the following as they relate to the areas of the workshop:

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Integration of typological features in language transfer and joint multilingual learning. In addition to established techniques such as “selective sharing”, are there alternative ways to encoding heterogeneous external knowledge in machine learning algorithms?

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Development of unified taxonomy and resources. Building universal databases and models to facilitate understanding and processing of diverse languages.

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Automatic inference of typological features. The pros and cons of existing techniques (e.g. heuristics derived from morphosyntactic annotation, propagation from features of other languages, supervised Bayesian and neural models) and discussion on emerging ones.

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Typology and interpretability. The use of typological knowledge for interpretation of hidden representations of multilingual neural models, multilingual data generation and selection, and typological annotation of texts.

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Improvement and completion of typological databases. Combining linguistic knowledge and automatic data-driven methods towards the joint goal of improving the knowledge on cross-linguistic variation and universals.

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Linguistic diversity and universals. Challenges of cross-lingual annotation. Which linguistic phenomena or categories should be considered universal? How should they be annotated?

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Using LLMs for typological studies. Can LLMs be utilised to formulate or prove typological hypotheses? Are they capable of making useful cross-linguistic generalisations?

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Extra topics also include: generation of constructed languages, universals in diachronic languages changes, information-theoretic approaches to typology, automated approaches to etymology.

Important Dates (all deadlines are 23:59 AoE)

Direct submission deadline: March 1, 2025

Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline: March 25, 2025

Notification of acceptance: April 17, 2025

Camera-ready paper deadline: May 16, 2025

Workshop dates: July 31st or August 1st 2025

Submissions

We invite both extended abstract submissions (non-archival) and general paper submissions (archival). The accepted submissions will be presented at the workshop, providing new insights and ideas. Extended abstracts should describe already published work or work in progress and should not exceed two (2) pages. This way, we will not discourage researchers from preferring main conference proceedings, at the same time ensuring that interesting and thought-provoking research is presented at the workshop. For general (archival) submissions we accept both long and short papers. Short papers should not exceed four (4) pages, long papers should not exceed eight (8) pages papers. Unlimited additional pages are allowed for the references section in all submission types.

Submissions should be anonymous, without authors or an acknowledgement section; self-citations should appear in third person.

Submissions must follow the ACL 2025 stylesheet https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files; both long and short paper submissions must follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings. All submissions must be in PDF format.

These should be submitted via OpenReview: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2025/Workshop/SIGTYP.

Organizing Committee

Michael Hahn, Priya Rani, Andreas Shcherbakov, Oleg Serikov, Aleksey Sorokin, Ryan Cotterell and Kat Vylomova

Anti-harassment policy

The workshop follows the ACL anti-harassment policy: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Anti-Harassment_Policy.

Contact

For any inquiries regarding the workshop, please send an email to the Organizing Committee at sigtyp@gmail.com