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SIGUL Elections - Call for Candidates
by ELRA ELDA Information 05 Nov '20

05 Nov '20

Dear All, First of all, we hope you are all safe in these difficult times. As you may already know, the joint ISCA-ELRA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) has been created in 2017. The first Board was elected in January 2018 (current Board members are: Claudia Soria, Laurent Besacier and Sakriani Sakti) and according to ELRA and ISCA by-laws is in charge for two years. The end of the term being on January 2020, it is now time to organize the elections to renew the Board members. The elected members of the SIG shall consist of a chairperson, a co-chair and a secretary. All elected members should commit themselves to become individual members of either ISCA or ELRA associations. The term of all elected board members of the SIG shall be 2 years. They may be re-elected but consecutive appointments are limited to four consecutive terms. The schedule of the election can be found here: http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/ Currently, the *Call for candidates* is open (from now to November 30th 2020) : if you want to be a candidate, please send a message to choukri(a)elda.org before Nov 30th with a short bio and a statement/manifesto that explains why you want to be an elected member of SIGUL board (please write or keep ‘SIGUL election’ in the mail subject). We hope you will take an active part to this election and we are looking forward to seeing you during coming SIGUL events whether virtual or onsite (ALPS virtual winter school in 2021, next joint CCURL-SLTU workshop that will be organized in 2022). Our mailing-list sigul(a)list.elra.info now gathers 334 members and we have been organizing several events or activities for the past 3 years. You can find the the last ISCA SIG reports for 2017-2018 and 2019-2020 in the SIGUL page (http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/) on the ELRA web site. Best Regards Khalid Choukri, in charge of supervising these elections for the SIGUL committee

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Funding opportunity for mobility provided by COST Action LITHME (Language in the Human-Machine Era)
by Claudia Soria 23 Oct '20

23 Oct '20

Dear Collegues,   'Language In The Human-Machine Era' (LITHME) is a research network funded by the EU COST programme (https://cost.eu). LITHME is centered around the relationship between language and machines, with the aim of forecasting the impact that future technology may have on language, and prepare research to that future. A COST Action is basically a networking mechanism that fosters exchange across researchers coming from different disciplines and countries.   During the COVID travel restrictions we sadly can't arrange large in-person meetings. But COST also funds individual 'Short-term Scientific Missions', where one researcher travels across borders to learn and share knowledge. So for the time being we're focusing on these short term individual visits where cross-border travel is allowed, and ensuring COVID safety protocols during the visit and associated travel. Intended for novel dialogue as outlined above, these visits should increase understanding and preparation for language in the human-machine era.   For eligibility criteria and further information, please see our website: https://lithme.eu/STSM Please also forward this message on to anyone who might be interested, and retweet us here: https://twitter.com/LgHumanMachine/status/1318260873216012289 All the best, Claudia -- Claudia Soria Researcher Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via Moruzzi 1 56124 Pisa Italy Management Committee member COST Action CA19102 ‘Language In The Human-Machine Era' (LITHME) www.lithme.eu Tel. +39 050 3153166 Skype clausor

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Fwd: [2020PC+Board] The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World
by Joseph Mariani 30 Sep '20

30 Sep '20

fyi Joseph -------- Message transféré -------- Sujet : [2020PC+Board] The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World Date : Wed, 30 Sep 2020 14:40:21 +0100 De : Antonio Branco <antonio.branco(a)di.fc.ul.pt> Répondre à : LREC 2020 Program Committee plus ELRA Board <lrec2020-pc-plus-elra-board(a)list.lrec-conf.org> Organisation : University of Lisbon Pour : elra-board(a)list.elra.info, lrec2020-pc-plus-elra-board(a)list.lrec-conf.org Dear all, Hope you're all fine. Breaking our Summer holidays' radio silence, I'm sharing the paper below, with flattering news for us. My apologies if you have already stumbled upon it. It is a recent paper, published last July in ACL, in a special theme track they promoted this year, aimed at positive discrimination, namely at attracting "out of the(ir) box" papers, which would have been very likely rejected from ACL2020 otherwise. The key goals of this paper are "making the [ACL] community aware of the gap that needs to be filled before we can truly claim state-of-the-art technologies to be language agnostic"/universal, and "attempt to convince the ACL community to prioritize the resolution of the predicaments highlighted here, so that no language is left behind." One of its major, and duly emphasized, conclusion confirms (objectively) what we were (subjectively) sure about: "LREC has been more inclusive across different classes of languages" when compared to all the other top-tier NLP/CL venues (conferences and journal). All the best, António ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World Joshi et al, 2020, acl https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-main.560.pdf Language technologies contribute to promot-ing multilingualism and linguistic diversity around the world. However, only a very small number of the over 7000 languages of the world are represented in the rapidly evolving language technologies and applications. In this paper we look at the relation between the types of languages, resources, and their representation in NLP conferences to understandt he trajectory that different languages havefollowed over time. Our quantitative investigation underlines the disparity between languages, especially in terms of their resources, and calls into question the “language agnostic” status of current models and systems. _______________________________________________ LREC2020-PC-plus-ELRA-Board mailing list LREC2020-PC-plus-ELRA-Board(a)list.lrec-conf.org http://list.lrec-conf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lrec2020-pc-plus-elra-bo… -- Joseph MARIANI Directeur de Recherche Émérite LIMSI-CNRS Rue John von Neumann Campus Universitaire d'Orsay Batiment 508 91405 ORSAY Cedex (France) Tel: +33 1 69 15 78 56 Email: Joseph.Mariani(a)limsi.fr Web: https://perso.limsi.fr/mariani/index Web IMMI: http://immi.cnrs.fr/

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Fwd: Lacuna Fund RFP
by Laurent Besacier 24 Sep '20

24 Sep '20

> Début du message réexpédié : > > De: "De Wet, F [fdw(a)sun.ac.za <mailto:fdw@sun.ac.za>]" <fdw(a)sun.ac.za <mailto:fdw@sun.ac.za>> > Objet: Lacuna Fund RFP > Date: 24 septembre 2020 à 13:18:42 UTC+2 > À: Laurent Besacier <laurent.besacier(a)imag.fr <mailto:laurent.besacier@imag.fr>> > > Dear Laurent, > > This RFP may be of interest to some members of SIGUL. Could you please share it with the community? > > Thank you, > Febe de Wet > > Lacuna Fund, a collaborative effort to mobilize datasets for machine learning that solve urgent problems in low- and middle-income contexts globally, has issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for datasets in language in Sub-Saharan Africa. > The full RFP and more details on eligibility, selection criteria, as well as information about the Fund and upcoming calls, can be found at <http://www.lacunafund.org/>lacunafund.org <http://www.lacunafund.org/>. Questions about the RFP are welcome through 7 October 2020. The RFP closes on 6 November 2020. > We are seeking applications to create, expand, or maintain datasets from organizations and partnerships with technical expertise in language data collection and labeling. Proposals should also demonstrate a strong understanding of the machine learning landscape and the needs of end users. > Applicants must be headquartered in Africa or have a substantial partnership with an entity headquartered in Africa. Lacuna Fund encourages collaboration between organizations to assemble a competitive proposal. > Proposals will be selected by a Technical Advisory Panel based on the Fund’s principles: transformative potential, quality, accessibility, equity, ethics, and a participatory approach. > Lacuna Fund values a collaborative and locally driven approach to data creation, expansion, and maintenance. We recognize that the continued usefulness and maintenance of open data will thrive in a community that is collectively invested in that data. > While the Request for Proposals outlines some data needs identified by our Technical Advisory Panel, proposals are not restricted to these areas, and we welcome other ideas within the domain area that have a clearly articulated benefit. > Read more about Lacuna Fund’s open RFP in language data and apply on our website here <http://www.lacunafund.org/>. You can also sign up to receive future notifications of available funding. > Lacuna Fund is a funder collaborative between The Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org <http://google.org/>, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre, with an upcoming call for proposals on underserved languages also supported by the German development agency GIZ on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The Fund is governed by a multi-stakeholder steering committee composed of technical experts, thought leaders, local beneficiaries, and end users. Collectively, the Fund’s stakeholders are committed to creating and mobilizing labeled datasets that both solve urgent local problems and lead to a step change in machine learning’s potential worldwide. > > <https://www.sun.ac.za/english/about-us/strategic-documents> > The integrity and confidentiality of this email are governed by these terms. Disclaimer <https://www.sun.ac.za/emaildisclaimer/default.aspx> > Die integriteit en vertroulikheid van hierdie e-pos word deur die volgende bepalings bereël.Vrywaringsklousule <https://www.sun.ac.za/emaildisclaimer/default.aspx>

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CfP with extended deadline: Workshop on RESOURCEs and representations For Under-resourced Languages and domains (RESOURCEFUL-2020)
by Claudia Soria 24 Sep '20

24 Sep '20

**Deadline extended to: 13 October** Call for Extended Abstracts Workshop on RESOURCEs and representations For Under-resourced Languages and domains (RESOURCEFUL-2020) collocated with the Eighth Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC) University of Gothenburg, Sweden 25th November 2020 https://gu-clasp.github.io/resourceful-2020/ The workshop will be held online. Important dates: - Submission of extended abstracts: 29th September 2020, extended to 13 October - Notification of acceptance: 23rd October 2020 - Final version: 10th November 2020 - Workshop date: 25th November 2020 All times are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth"). Workshop description All areas of natural language processing have achieved visible breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. Contemporary machine learning is significantly influenced by techniques that rely on large datasets that demand substantial computational resources to solve practical problems in a tangible way (e.g. models based on transformers such as BERT, VilBERT, ALBERT, and GPT-2 that are pre-trained on large corpora of unlabelled data). However, many of the world’s languages lack the availability of linguistic description as well as of sufficiently large computer-readable corpora of linguistic material. Even those languages that are considered well-resourced have some domains where resources are scarce, for example corpora of dialogue and situated interaction. Another similarity of these domains with under-resourced languages is that since they focus on spoken or spoken-like interaction (either in a written or an audio form) they show a high variability of input data. Applying state-of-the-art deep-neural-network-based methods for the development of data-driven systems in such resource-constrained environments is a non-trivial task. For this workshop, we encourage contributions in the area of resource creation and representation learning in limited or low-resource environments that are tackling the above mentioned problems. In particular we would like to open a forum by bringing together students, researchers, and experts to address and discuss the following questions: - How can new resources be constructed or extended for languages and domains that lack standardised representations of linguistic units? - What experience from building resources for languages that have a good coverage today (for example Scandinavian languages) can be ported to building resources for under-resources languages and domains? - How to deal with the variability of data and its standardisation in machine learning approaches? - What algorithms and methods can we employ to transfer learning from related domains/languages that have good coverage? - What is the role of multi-task learning in this domain? - What representations can be learned and how effective are they in different low-resource scenarios? - How can newly created resources and learned representations be evaluated? - What ethical considerations are involved? Intended participants are researchers, PhD students and practitioners from diverse backgrounds (linguistics, computational linguistics, speech, machine learning etc). We foresee an interactive workshop with plenty of time for discussion, complemented with invited talks and short presentations of on-going or completed research. Submission We invite submissions of 2-page extended non-anonymous abstracts with any number of pages for references using the ACL/EMNLP template [1]. Papers related to our theme and already presented at other venues or have already been published elsewhere will be considered for acceptance for presentation as well. The abstracts will be reviewed by the workshop organisers and the accepted ones will be posted on the website, unless authors wish not to do so. There will be no workshop proceedings but post-proceedings may be organised depending on the interest of authors. [1]https://2020.emnlp.org/files/emnlp2020-templates.zip Extended abstracts should be submitted in the pdf format athttps://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=resourceful2020 Workshop organisers Tewodros Gebreselassie, University of Gothenburg Simon Dobnik, University of Gothenburg Barbara Plank, ITU, IT University of Copenhagen Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg resourceful2020(a)easychair.org https://gu-clasp.github.io/resourceful-2020/index.html -- Claudia Soria Researcher Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via Moruzzi 1 56124 Pisa Italy Tel. +39 050 3153166 Skype clausor

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2d Call For Participation : Advanced Language Processing School (ALPS) - January, 17-22 2021
by Laurent Besacier 24 Aug '20

24 Aug '20

--- SECOND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION Advanced Language Processing School (ALPS) January, 17-22 2021 Autrans (Grenoble area) - France We are opening the registration for the first Advanced Language Processing School (ALPS) in Grenoble, co-organized by University Grenoble Alpes and Naver Labs Europe. *Target Audience* This is a winter school covering advanced topics in NLP, and we are primarily targeting doctoral students and advanced (research) masters. A few slots will also be reserved for academics and persons working in research-heavy positions in industry. *Characteristics* This winter school aims to provide talks of renowned NLP researchers, as well as creating an ideal environment to foster collaborations The speakers are: - Isabelle Augenstein: _Interpretability and Explainability for NLP_ - Tim Baldwin: _Natural Language Processing for User Generated Content_ - Kyunghyun Cho: _Neural Sequence Modeling: Learning and Inference_ - Yejin Choi: _Neural Commonsense Knowledge and Reasoning_ - Grzegorz Chrupała: _Visually Grounded Models of Spoken Language and their Analysis_ - Claire Gardent: _Neural approaches to Natural Language Generation_ - Sanjeev Khudanpur: _Recent Advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (TBC)_ In addition to the talks, an important aspect of this school is the interaction between participants. The registration fee covers full board in a residence close to a ski resort, and some of the afternoons there will be organised social activities. In view of the current public health situation, we are preparing to hold the event virtually in case it will not be possible to do so physically in January. Registration fees will be adapted in that case. *Application* To apply to this winter school, please follow the instructions at http://alps.imag.fr/index.php/application/ <http://alps.imag.fr/index.php/application/> . The deadline for applying is July 31st, and we will notify acceptance in September *Contact* Website: http://alps.imag.fr/ Contact: alps2021(a)univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

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Fwd: [lift_members] [GdR LIFT] - prochaines journées LIFT - appel à contributions
by Laurent Besacier 08 Jul '20

08 Jul '20

> Début du message réexpédié : > > De: Yannick Parmentier <yannick.parmentier(a)loria.fr> > Objet: [lift_members] [GdR LIFT] - prochaines journées LIFT - appel à contributions > Date: 7 juillet 2020 à 16:25:54 UTC+2 > À: ln(a)groupes.renater.fr, lue-olki(a)univ-lorraine.fr, crem-sic-chercheurs(a)univ-lorraine.fr, tous_loria(a)loria.fr, lift_resp(a)inria.fr, lift_members(a)inria.fr > Répondre à: Yannick Parmentier <yannick.parmentier(a)loria.fr> > > ****************************** > Appel à communications > Journées LIFT, 10-11 Décembre > https://gdr-lift.loria.fr/ > ****************************** > > Le GdR LIFT (Linguistique Informatique, Formelle et de Terrain) organise deux journées de rencontres autour des thèmes de LIFT. Par ailleurs, deux thèmes spécifiques sont proposées pour ces journées : (i) Corpus arborés et syntaxe et (ii) Grammaire et Linguistique de terrain. L’objectif de ces journées est de favoriser les interactions entre linguistique informatique, linguistique formelle et linguistique de terrain, afin de favoriser le développement de recherches en linguistique qui tirent le meilleur parti des nouvelles technologies. > > En plus d’orateur.trice.s invité.e.s, ces journées incluent des moments d’échanges via la présentation de travaux de recherche en cours. Les personnes souhaitant présenter leurs travaux sont invitées à soumettre un résumé étendu (limité à 2 pages). Les résumés retenus pour présentation seront publiés dans les actes des journées (et téléversés dans l’archive ouverte HAL). La possibilité de passer certains résumés dans un format long pour publication dans une revue scientifique est à l’étude. > > Dates > > Soumission des résumés : 15 octobre 2020 > Notification aux auteurs : 7 novembre 2020 > Soumission des versions finales : 1er décembre 2020 > Journées scientifiques : 10-11 décembre 2020 > > Thématiques > > Les communications pourront porter sur tous les thèmes de LIFT ainsi que sur les thèmes des deux sessions spéciales (Corpus arborés et syntaxe; Grammaire et Linguistique de terrain), incluant, de façon non limitative: > > - Retours d’expérience concernant l’emploi et/ou le développement d’outils informatiques pour l’analyse linguistique > - Linguistique informatique et Science ouverte : perspectives ouvertes par le partage des données, des outils et des publications > - Modélisation informatique et linguistique formelle (théorie des langages formels, grammaires d’unification, théorie de la preuve…) > - Mise en dialogue des modèles linguistiques et des modèles d’apprentissage automatique (de tous types : approches génératives et discriminantes, approches statistiques neuronales, approches de type encodeurs-décodeurs…) > - Méthodes non supervisées ou faiblement supervisées pour l’analyse des langues peu dotées, peu écrites ou non documentées > - Réflexions au sujet de l’automatisation des processus d’analyse et de validation > > Toutes les propositions qui entrent dans les thèmes des journées d’étude sont les bienvenues. La présentation de travaux aboutis mais aussi de travaux en cours est possible. Les journées LIFT visent aussi bien à présenter des résultats qu’à susciter des discussions, notamment autour de travaux en cours pour lesquels les auteurs aimeraient développer des collaborations (par ex., expert en TAL souhaitent appliquer un outil sur des données langagières variées ; linguiste de terrain souhaitant automatiser une tâche d’annotation, etc.). > > Format > > En pratique, les résumés feront 2 pages maximum. Les soumissions devront être conformes aux lignes directrices officielles qui sont contenues dans les fichiers de style (https://mycore.core-cloud.net/index.php/s/YI4oEOQcw0vhQWj) et être en format PDF. Les articles sélectionnés seront présentés sous forme de poster. > > Lieu > > Selon la situation sanitaire et les règles en vigueur, les journées se feront soit en présentiel, soit en virtuel, soit dans une formule hybride avec des regroupements locaux permettant des rassemblements d’un nombre autorisés de personnes. Le lieu choisi sera aussi central que possible pour faciliter la participation à la conférence. Des bourses d’aide seront disponibles pour permettre à un maximum de personnes de participer. > > Comité d’organisation > > Yannick Parmentier, LORIA/Université de Lorraine > Thierry Poibeau, LATTICE/CNRS > Emmanuel Schang, LLL/Université d’Orléans > > Comité de programme > > A venir > > Conférencier.ière.s invité.e.s > > A venir

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Call for Participation: Dravidian-CodeMix - FIRE 2020 Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis for Under-resourced Languages
by John P. McCrae 13 Jun '20

13 Jun '20

Apologies for cross-posting ---- We are inviting researchers to participate in a shared task at FIRE 2020 on sentiment analysis for Dravidian languages in code-mixed text. Website: https://dravidian-codemix.github.io/2020/ The goal of this task is to identify sentiment polarity of the code-mixed dataset of comments/posts in Dravidian Languages (Malayalam-English and Tamil-English) collected from social media. The comment/post may contain more than one sentence but the average sentence length of the corpora is 1. Each comment/post is annotated with sentiment polarity at the comment/post level. This dataset also has class imbalance problems depicting real-world scenarios. Our proposal aims to encourage research that will reveal how sentiment is expressed in code-mixed scenarios on social media. The participants will be provided development, training and test dataset. Key Dates: Release of Trail data: 10 June Release of Training data: 10 June Release of Test data: 1 August Run submission deadline: 20 August Results declared: 31 August Paper submission: 20 September Revised paper: 30 October. 10th-13th December - FIRE 2020

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SLTU-CCURL2020 Proceedings now online!
by Claudia Soria 18 May '20

18 May '20

Dear SIGUL list members, we are very happy to announce that the SLTU-CCURL2020 Proceedings are available online: https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/media/proceedings/Workshops/Books/SLTUCCURLb… <https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/media/proceedings/Workshops/Books/SLTUCCURLb…> This year, LREC2020 would have featured an extraordinary event: the first joint SLTU-CCURL2020 Workshop, which was planned as a two-day workshop, with 54 papers accepted either as oral and poster presentations. The workshop program was enriched by two tutorials and two keynote speeches. We will miss the presentations, the discussions and the overall stimulating environment very deeply. We are thankful to ELRA and ISCA for their support to the workshop, to our Google sponsor and to the 60 experts of the Program Committee, who worked tirelessly in order to help us to select the best papers representing a wide perspective over NLP, speech and computational linguistics addressing less-resource languages. Looking forward to better times when we will be able to meet in person again, we hope that you will find these workshop proceedings relevant and stimulating for your own research. With our best wishes, Claudia Soria, Laurent Besacier, Dorothee Beermann, and Sakriani Sakti

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[2003.07082] Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages
by Laurent Besacier 17 Mar '20

17 Mar '20

hi i thought some of you might be interested by this online paper best laurent ==== > > https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07082 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07082> > > Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages > > (Submitted on 16 Mar 2020) > We introduce Stanza, an open-source Python natural language processing toolkit supporting 66 human languages. Compared to existing widely used toolkits, Stanza features a language-agnostic fully neural pipeline for text analysis, including tokenization, multi-word token expansion, lemmatization, part-of-speech and morphological feature tagging, dependency parsing, and named entity recognition. We have trained Stanza on a total of 112 datasets, including the Universal Dependencies treebanks and other multilingual corpora, and show that the same neural architecture generalizes well and achieves competitive performance on all languages tested. Additionally, Stanza includes a native Python interface to the widely used Java Stanford CoreNLP software, which further extends its functionalities to cover other tasks such as coreference resolution and relation extraction. Source code, documentation, and pretrained models for 66 languages are available at this https URL <https://stanfordnlp.github.io/stanza>.

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Information about SLTU-CCURL 2020
by Laurent Besacier 17 Mar '20

17 Mar '20

Dear All, As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic LREC has been suspended. As a satellite event SLTU-CCURL 2020 is thereby also suspended. We, as workshop organizers, will adhere to the policy and decisions that will be taken by the LREC 2020 organizers. The Workshop Proceedings will be published as planned in early May. Acceptance notifications will be sent out by Wednesday, 18 March. The SLTU/CCURL 2020 Organizers

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Last CfP: 1st Joint SLTU-CCURL Workshop @ LREC2020
by Claudia Soria 02 Mar '20

02 Mar '20

Apologies for cross-postings ============== Last Call for Papers 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop SLTU-CCURL 2020 is endorsed by SIGUL, ELRA and ISCA. Date: 11-12 May 2020 Venue: Palais du Pharo, Marseille, France Website: http://sltu-ccurl-2020.ilc.cnr.it Submission Deadline: 14 February 2020 - no extension will be granted Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/SLTUCCURL2020/ ============== Workshop Description and Objectives The first joint SLTU-CCURL workshop, organized by SIGUL, a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), will gather researchers working on speech processing and NLP for less-resourced languages. We solicit papers and posters related to all areas of NLP , speech and computational linguistics, as well as those at the intersection with digital humanities and documentary linguistics, provided that they address less-resourced languages. The intention of this joint SLTU-CCURL workshop is not only to provide a forum for the presentation of research, but also to offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages. Topics of interest Topics include but are not limited to: -Language resource development, acquisition and representation -Linguistic theories, corpus development and resources -Linguistic and cognitive studies -Unsupervised discovery of linguistic units -Code switched lexical modeling -Multi-lingual and cross-lingual (spoken, text) language processing -Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech processing -Machine translation and dialogue systems -NLP and speech technologies for under-resourced languages Submission & Publication Papers need to address less-resourced languages. They can contain an analysis and insight into existing methods and problems; a description of resources; an overview of the literature or of current initiatives, or a combination of the above. Authors must declare if part of the paper contains material previously published elsewhere. We accept submission of long papers (up to 8 pages, to be presented as long presentations) and short papers (up to 4 pages, to be presented as posters or demos). The program committee reserves the right to decide whether a paper submitted as a long paper is better suited for a poster presentation. Page limits exclude references. The papers of the workshop will be published in online proceedings. Papers must strictly comply with the LREC stylesheet (https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/) and be submitted in PDF unprotected format. Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/SLTUCCURL2020/ Each submission will be reviewed by three programme committee members. In compliance with the LREC rules, papers must not be anonymized. Important Dates - Paper submission deadline: 14 February 2020 - Notification of acceptance: 13 March 2020 - Camera-ready paper: 2 April 2020 - Workshop date: 11-12 May 2020 Invited speakers Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Teresa Lynn, ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland Tutorials On May 10th, SLTU-CCURL is pleased to offer two tutorials (held at Université Aix-Marseille, near the LREC venue). T1: Jan Trmal, John Hopkins University: Building ASR systems using the Kaldi toolkit T2: Achim Rabus, University of Freiburg : Introduction to Handwritten Text Recognition with Transkribus More details will be announced on the workshop web page. Attendance to tutorials will be free of charge but registration will be required for organisational purposes (and number of attendees will be limited to 25 per tutorial). Organizing Committee * Dorothee Beermann, NTNU, Norway   * Laurent Besacier, LIG-Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France  * Sakriani Sakti, NAIST, Japan  * Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Italy  To contact the organizers, please mail Claudia.soria(a)ilc.cnr.it or Laurent.Besacier(a)univ-grenoble-alpes.fr (Subject: [SLTUCCURL@LREC2020]). Programme Committee Adrian Doyle (University of Galway, Ireland) Alexey Karpov (SPIIRAS, Russian Federation) Alexis Palmer (University of North Texas, USA) Amita Dev (IGDTUW, India) Amir Aharoni (Wikimedia Foundation) Andras Kornai (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary) Angelo Mario Del Grosso (CNR-ILC, Italy) Antti Arppe (University of Alberta, Canada) Anupam Shukla (IIITM, India) Charl Van Heerden (Saigen, South Africa) Daan Van Esch (Google) Dafydd Gibbon (Bielefeld University, Germany) Delyth Prys (Bangor University, UK) Dewi Bryn Jones (Bangor University, UK) Dorothee Beermann (NTNU, Norway) Emily Le Chen (University of Illinois, USA) Federico Boschetti (CNR-ILC, Italy) Francis Tyers (Moscow Higher School of Economics, Russia) Gerard Bailly (GIPSA Lab, CNRS) Gilles Adda (LIMSI/IMMI CNRS, France) Hemant Patil (DA-IICT, India) Jeff Good (University at Buffalo, USA) John Judge (ADAPT DCU, Ireland) Jonas Fromseier Mortensen (Google) Jordan Lachler (University of Alberta, Canada) Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, France) Kepa Sarasola (University of the Basque Country, Spain) Kevin Scannell (Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA) Klara Ceberio (Elhuyar, Spain) Lane Schwartz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) Laurent Besacier (LIG-IMAG, France) Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain) Miikka Silfverberg (University of Helsinki, Finland) Mikel Forcada (Universitat d’Alacant, Spain) Mohammad A. M. Abushariah (The University of Jordan, Jordan) Nick Thieberger (University of Melbourne / ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australia) Omar Farooq (AMU, India) Pierric Sans (Google) Pradip K Das (IIT, India) Sakriani Sakti (NAIST, Japan) Satoshi Nakamura (NAIST, Japan) Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Germany) Shyam S Agrawal (KIIT, India) Steven Bird (Charles Darwin University, Australia) Tanja Schultz (Uni-Bremen, Germany) Thang Vu (Uni-Stuttgart, Germany) Teresa Lynn (ADAPT Centre, Ireland) Trond Trosterud (Tromsø University, Norway) Tunde Adegbola (African Languages Technology Initiative, Nigeria) Vera Ferreira (CIDLeS - Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Portugal) Win Pa Pa (UCS Yangon, Myanmar) Acknowledgments The 1st joint SLTU-CCURL Workshop is endorsed by SIGUL (http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/), ISCA (https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/), and SIGEL and sponsored by Google. Identify, Describe and Share your LRs! Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field. This will contribute to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data. As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also to allow the replication of the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time. -- Claudia Soria Researcher Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via Moruzzi 1 56124 Pisa Italy Tel. +39 050 3153166 Skype clausor

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CFP Deadline Extended to February 24, 2020 for Citizen Linguistics in Language Resource Development at LREC 2020
by Cieri, Christopher M 12 Feb '20

12 Feb '20

*CFP Deadline Extended to February 24, 2020* 2nd Call For Papers: The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) will host the workshop "Citizen Linguistics in Language Resource Development" (CLLRD 2020) at LREC 2020 in Marseille, France, on May 16, 2020. Full details and CFP: https://sites.google.com/view/cllrd-2020/ Description Notwithstanding advances in data collection and processing, language related research, education and technology development continue to suffer from inadequate supply of Language Resources. To supplement traditional LR development, which typically relies upon top down support from some government or private foundation, Citizen Linguistics (the Citizen Science of Language) changes the incentive model to attract a new workforce which in turn requires a different kind of workflow. Incentives to Citizen Linguists may include the opportunities to learn and develop new skills; to socialize, compete and earn status or recognition; to document their language and promote their culture and, most importantly, to contribute directly to research and indirectly to a greater cause or social good. By offering human contributors sustained access to appropriate opportunities, activities, and incentives, we can enhance LR development well beyond what traditional direct funding alone can produce. However, along with these new incentives and workflows come new challenges whose solutions are relevant even to expert (paid) annotation. The goal of this hybrid workshop/tutorial is two-fold. First is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to explore and discuss the issues, advantages and challenges of using Citizen Linguistics as a method for the creation of language resources. Second is to introduce LanguageARC<https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Flanguagearc.com&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=…>, a new Citizen Linguistics web portal for collecting language data and judgements. Topics There will be two sessions at the workshop. For the first session, papers are welcome on any topic related to Citizen Linguistics in the development of Language Resources including: · case studies · language specific challenges · incentive models · workforce recruitment, training and evaluation · task design, granularity and assignment · workflow and ordering · response evaluation and aggregation · the preparation of language resources from raw results and their use in research and in developing and evaluating HLTs. For the second session, papers are welcome on any topic related specifically to the use of LanguageARC.org<http://LanguageARC.org> to create tasks that collect language data for research and development. Presenting authors of Best Papers Employing LanguageARC will receive travel subsidies to present during this workshop at LREC. The second session will also include a brief tutorial on LanguageARC for new or potential users. By the end of the tutorial, attendees will be fully capable of implementing their data collection or annotation project via LanguageARC. Submissions We will accept papers between 4 and 8 pages excluding references. Accepted workshop papers will be published as workshop proceedings along with the main conference papers. Papers must follow the LREC 2020 style sheet<https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Flrec2020.lrec-conf.org%2Fen%2Fsu…> and author’s kit<https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Flrec2020.lrec-conf.org%2Fen%2Fsu…> templates. Papers are to be submitted via the workshop START page<https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.softconf.com%2Flrec2020%2FCL…>. Important Dates - submission deadline: February 24, 2020 - notification of acceptance: March 12, 2020 - deadline for camera-ready versions: April 2, 2020 Identify, Describe and Share your LRs! * Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data. * As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.islrn.org%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=A…>), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time. For more information please visit the workshop website (https://sites.google.com/view/cllrd-2020/) or contact James Fiumara: jfiumara AT ldc.upenn.edu<http://ldc.upenn.edu> The organizing committee, Chris Callison-Burch, University of Pennsylvania Christopher Cieri, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania James Fiumara, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania Mark Liberman, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania Chris — Christopher Cieri Executive Director, Linguistic Data Consortium and Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA. 19104 p: 215-573-5489, f: 215-573-2175, mailto:ccieri@ldc.upenn.edu

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SPECOM-2020 FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
by Claudia Soria 11 Feb '20

11 Feb '20

********************************************************* SPECOM-2020 FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS ********************************************************* 22nd International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM-2020) Venue: St. Petersburg, Russia, October 06-10, 2020 Web: http://www.specom.nw.ru/2020 ORGANIZERS The conference is organized by the St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia) in cooperation with Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU, Moscow, Russia). CONFERENCE TOPICS SPECOM attracts researchers, linguists and engineers working in the following areas of speech science, speech technology, natural language processing, human-computer interaction: Affective computing Audio-visual speech processing Corpus linguistics Computational paralinguistics Deep learning for audio processing Feature extraction Forensic speech investigations Human-machine interaction Language identification Multichannel signal processing Multimedia processing Multimodal analysis and synthesis Sign language processing Speaker recognition Speech and language resources Speech analytics and audio mining Speech and voice disorders Speech-based applications Speech driving systems in robotics Speech enhancement Speech perception Speech recognition and understanding Speech synthesis Speech translation systems Spoken dialogue systems Spoken language processing Text mining and sentiment analysis Virtual and augmented reality Voice assistants SATELLITE EVENT 5th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics ICR-2020: http://www.specom.nw.ru/icr2020 OFFICIAL LANGUAGE The official language of the event is English. However, papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged. FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE The conference program will include presentation of invited talks, oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. SUBMISSION OF PAPERS Authors are invited to submit full papers of 6-10 pages formatted in the Springer LNCS style. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers (single-blind), and accepted papers will be presented either orally or as posters. Papers submitted to SPECOM must not be under review by any other conference or publication during the SPECOM review cycle, and must not be previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the on-line submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=specom2020 PROCEEDINGS SPECOM Proceedings will be published by Springer as a book in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI/LNCS) series listed in all major international citation databases. SPECOM Proceedings are included in the list of forthcoming proceedings for October 2020. IMPORTANT DATES May 26, 2020 ............ Submission of full papers July 03, 2020 ........... Notification of acceptance July 17, 2020 .......... Camera-ready papers and early registration October 06-10, 2020 ..... Conference dates GENERAL CHAIRS Alexey Karpov - SPIIRAS, Russia Rodmonga Potapova - MSLU, Russia CONTACTS All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to: SPECOM-2020 Secretariat: E-mails: specom(a)iias.spb.su SPECOM-2020 web-site: www.specom.nw.ru/2020 -- Claudia Soria Researcher Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via Moruzzi 1 56124 Pisa Italy Tel. +39 050 3153166 Skype clausor

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Fwd: ZeroSpeech 2020 - release of the evaluation code and submission protocol
by Laurent Besacier 09 Feb '20

09 Feb '20

> Début du message réexpédié : > > De: zerospeech 2020 <zerospeech2020(a)gmail.com <mailto:zerospeech2020@gmail.com>> > Objet: ZeroSpeech 2020 - release of the evaluation code and submission protocol > Date: 7 février 2020 à 22:21:48 UTC+1 > > > Dear all, > > We have updated our website <http://zerospeech.com/2020/index.html> with the evaluation code and submission protocol for the ZeroResource Speech Challenge 2020. Please see both the overview page and the detailed instructions, which include new submission formats and software tools. > > Please also download the updated versions of the datasets, even if you have downloaded them already. As indicated, the training data is the same, but new test files have been added submission. You will need to register as challenge participants to get a password. > > Thanks very much for your continuing interest, > > Best regards, > > The ZRC Team > -- > http://zerospeech.com/ <http://zerospeech.com/>

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2d CFP: 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop
by Laurent Besacier 05 Feb '20

05 Feb '20

Apologies for cross-postings ============== 2nd Call for Papers 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop Date: 11-12 May 2020 Venue: Palais du Pharo, Marseille, France Website: http://sltu-ccurl-2020.ilc.cnr.it <http://sltu-ccurl-2020.ilc.cnr.it/> Submission Deadline: 14 February 2020 Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/SLTUCCURL2020/ ============== Workshop Description and Objectives The first joint SLTU-CCURL workshop, organized by SIGUL, a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), will gather researchers working on speech processing and NLP for less-resourced languages. We solicit papers and posters related to all areas of NLP , speech and computational linguistics, as well as those at the intersection with digital humanities and documentary linguistics, provided that they address less-resourced languages. The intention of this joint SLTU-CCURL workshop is not only to provide a forum for the presentation of research, but also to offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages. Topics of interest Topics include but are not limited to: -Language resource development, acquisition and representation -Linguistic theories, corpus development and resources -Linguistic and cognitive studies -Unsupervised discovery of linguistic units -Code switched lexical modeling -Multi-lingual and cross-lingual (spoken, text) language processing -Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech processing -Machine translation and dialogue systems -NLP and speech technologies for under-resourced languages Submission & Publication Papers need to address less-resourced languages. They can contain an analysis and insight into existing methods and problems; a description of resources; an overview of the literature or of current initiatives, or a combination of the above. Authors must declare if part of the paper contains material previously published elsewhere. We accept submission of long papers (up to 8 pages, to be presented as long presentations) and short papers (up to 4 pages, to be presented as posters or demos). The program committee reserves the right to decide whether a paper submitted as a long paper is better suited for a poster presentation. Page limits exclude references. The papers of the workshop will be published in online proceedings. Papers must strictly comply with the LREC stylesheet (https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/) and be submitted in PDF unprotected format. Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/SLTUCCURL2020/ Each submission will be reviewed by three programme committee members. In compliance with the LREC rules, papers must not be anonymized. Important Dates - Paper submission deadline: 14 February 2020 - Notification of acceptance: 13 March 2020 - Camera-ready paper: 2 April 2020 - Workshop date: 11-12 May 2020 Invited speakers Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Teresa Lynn, ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland Tutorials On May 10th, SLTU-CCURL is pleased to offer two tutorials (held at Université Aix-Marseille, near the LREC venue). T1: Jan Trmal & Sanjeev Khudanpur, John Hopkins University: Building ASR systems using the Kaldi toolkit T2: Achim Rabus, University of Freiburg : Introduction to Handwritten Text Recognition with Transkribus More details will be announced on the workshop web page. Attendance to tutorials will be free of charge but registration will be required for organisational purposes (and number of attendees will be limited to 25 per tutorial). Organizing Committee Dorothee Beermann, NTNU, Norway Laurent Besacier, LIG-Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France Sakriani Sakti, NAIST, Japan Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Italy To contact the organizers, please mail Claudia.soria(a)ilc.cnr.it or Laurent.Besacier(a)univ-grenoble-alpes.fr (Subject: [SLTUCCURL@LREC2020]). Programme Committee Adrian Doyle (University of Galway, Ireland) Alexey Karpov (SPIIRAS, Russian Federation) Alexis Palmer (University of North Texas, USA) Amita Dev (IGDTUW, India) Amir Aharoni (Wikimedia Foundation) Andras Kornai (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary) Angelo Mario Del Grosso (CNR-ILC, Italy) Antti Arppe (University of Alberta, Canada) Anupam Shukla (IIITM, India) Charl Van Heerden (Saigen, South Africa) Daan Van Esch (Google) Dafydd Gibbon (Bielefeld University, Germany) Delyth Prys (Bangor University, UK) Dewi Bryn Jones (Bangor University, UK) Dorothee Beermann (NTNU, Norway) Emily Le Chen (University of Illinois, USA) Federico Boschetti (CNR-ILC, Italy) Francis Tyers (Moscow Higher School of Economics, Russia) Gerard Bailly (GIPSA Lab, CNRS) Gilles Adda (LIMSI/IMMI CNRS, France) Hemant Patil (DA-IICT, India) Jeff Good (University at Buffalo, USA) John Judge (ADAPT DCU, Ireland) Jonas Fromseier Mortensen (Google) Jordan Lachler (University of Alberta, Canada) Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, France) Kepa Sarasola (University of the Basque Country, Spain) Kevin Scannell (Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA) Klara Ceberio (Elhuyar, Spain) Lane Schwartz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) Laurent Besacier (LIG-IMAG, France) Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain) Miikka Silfverberg (University of Helsinki, Finland) Mikel Forcada (Universitat d’Alacant, Spain) Mohammad A. M. Abushariah (The University of Jordan, Jordan) Nick Thieberger (University of Melbourne / ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australia) Omar Farooq (AMU, India) Pierric Sans (Google) Pradip K Das (IIT, India) Sakriani Sakti (NAIST, Japan) Satoshi Nakamura (NAIST, Japan) Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Germany) Shyam S Agrawal (KIIT, India) Sin Horng Chen (NCTU, Taiwan) Steven Bird (Charles Darwin University, Australia) Tanja Schultz (Uni-Bremen, Germany) Thang Vu (Uni-Stuttgart, Germany) Teresa Lynn (ADAPT Centre, Ireland) Trond Trosterud (Tromsø University, Norway) Tunde Adegbola (African Languages Technology Initiative, Nigeria) Vera Ferreira (CIDLeS - Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Portugal) Win Pa Pa (UCS Yangon, Myanmar) Acknowledgments The 1st joint SLTU-CCURL Workshop is endorsed by SIGUL (http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/), ISCA (https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/), and SIGEL and sponsored by Google. Identify, Describe and Share your LRs! Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field. This will contribute to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data. As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also to allow the replication of the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org <http://www.islrn.org/>), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.

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CFP: 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop
by Claudia Soria 16 Dec '19

16 Dec '19

Apologies for cross-postings ============== 1st Call for Papers 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop Date: 11-22 May 2020 Venue: Palais du Pharo, Marseille, France Website: http://sltu-ccurl-2020.ilc.cnr.it Submission Deadline: 14 February 2020 Submission page: will be announced by 20 December 2020 ============== Workshop Description and Objectives The first joint SLTU-CCURL workshop, organized by SIGUL, a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), will gather researchers working on speech processing and NLP for less-resourced languages. We solicit papers and posters related to all areas of NLP , speech and computational linguistics, as well as those at the intersection with digital humanities and documentary linguistics, provided that they address less-resourced languages. The intention of this joint SLTU-CCURL workshop is not only to provide a forum for the presentation of research, but also to offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages. Topics of interest Topics include but are not limited to: - Language resource development, acquisition and representation - Linguistic theories, corpus development and resources - Linguistic and cognitive studies - Unsupervised discovery of linguistic units - Code switched lexical modeling - Multi-lingual and cross-lingual (spoken, text) language processing - Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech processing - Machine translation and dialogue systems - NLP and speech technologies for under-resourced languages Submission & Publication Papers need to address less-resourced languages. They can contain an analysis and insight into existing methods and problems; a description of resources; an overview of the literature or of current initiatives, or a combination of the above. Authors must declare if part of the paper contains material previously published elsewhere. We accept submission of long papers (up to 8 pages, to be presented as long presentations) and short papers (up to 4 pages, to be presented as posters or demos). The program committee reserves the right to decide whether a paper submitted as a long paper is better suited for a poster presentation. Page limits exclude references. The papers of the workshop will be published in online proceedings. Papers must strictly comply with the LREC stylesheet (https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/) and be submitted in PDF unprotected format. Submission page: will be announced on the website by 20 December 2020. Each submission will be reviewed by three programme committee members. In compliance with the LREC rules, papers must not be anonymized. Important Dates - Paper submission deadline: 14 February 2020 - Notification of acceptance: 13 March 2020 - Camera-ready paper: 2 April 2020 - Workshop date: 11-12 May 2020 Invited speakers Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Teresa Lynn, ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland Tutorials On May 10th, SLTU-CCURL is pleased to offer two tutorials (held at Université Aix-marseille, near the LREC venue). T1: Jan Trmal, John Hopkins University: Building ASR systems using the Kaldi toolkit T2: Achim Rabus, University of Freiburg : Introduction to Handwritten Text Recognition with Transkribus More details will be announced on the workshop web page. Attendance to tutorials will be free of charge but registration will be required for organisational purposes (and number of attendees will be limited to 25 per tutorial). Organizing Committee * Dorothee Beermann, NTNU, Norway  * Laurent Besacier, LIG-Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France  * Sakriani Sakti, NAIST, Japan  * Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Italy  To contact the organizers, please mail Claudia.soria(a)ilc.cnr.it or Laurent.Besacier(a)univ-grenoble-alpes.fr (Subject: [SLTUCCURL@LREC2020]). Programme Committee Adrian Doyle (Galway University, Ireland) TBC Alexey Karpov (SPIIRAS, Russian Federation) Alexis Palmer (University of North Texas, USA) Amita Dev (IGDTUW, India) Amir Aharoni (Wikimedia Foundation) Andras Kornai (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary) Angelo Mario Del Grosso (CNR-ILC, Italy) Antti Arppe (University of Alberta, Canada)Â Anupam Shukla (IIITM, India) Ayu Purwarianti (ITB, Indonesia) TBC Bruce Birch (The Minjilang Endangered Languages Publications Project, Australia) TBC Bruce Robertson (Mount Allison University, Canada) TBC Charl Van Heerden (SPbSU, Russian Federation) TBC Chiu Yu Tseng (ILAS, Taiwan) TBC Chris Cieri (LDC, USA) TBC Clara Rivera (Google) TBC Daan Van Esch (Google) Dafydd Gibbon (Bielefeld University, Germany) Delyth Prys (Bangor University, UK) Dewi Bryn Jones (Bangor University, UK) Dirk Van Compernolle (KU Leuven, Belgium) TBC Dorothee Beermann (NTNU, Norway) Emily Le Chen (University of Illinois, USA) Emily Prud'hommeaux (Boston College, USA) TBC Emmanuel Dupoux (EHESS-ENS, France) TBC Federico Boschetti (CNR-ILC, Italy) Francis Tyers (Moscow Higher School of Economics, Russia) Gerard Bailly (GIPSA Lab, CNRS) TBC Gilles Adda (LIMSI/IMMI CNRS, France) Hemant Patil (DA-IICT, India) Jeff Good (University at Buffalo, USA) John Judge (ADAPT DCU, Ireland) Jonas Fromseier Mortensen (Google) Jordan Lachler (University of Alberta, Canada) TBC Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, France) Karunesh Arora (C-DAC, NOIDA, India) TBC Kepa Sarasola (University of the Basque Country, Spain) Kevin Scannell (Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA) Klara Ceberio (Elhuyar, Spain) Lane Schwartz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) Laurent Besacier (LIG-IMAG, France) Lori Lamel (LIMSI, France) TBC Luong Chi-Mai (IOIT, Vietnam) TBC Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain) Mans Hulden (University of Colorado Boulder, USA) TBC Miikka Silfverberg (University of Helsinki, Finland) Mikel Forcada (Universitat d’Alacant, Spain) Mirna Adriani (UI, Indonesia) TBC Mohammad A. M. Abushariah (The University of Jordan, Jordan) Nick Thieberger (University of Melbourne / ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australia) Omar Farooq (AMU, India) Pierric Sans (Google) TBC Pradip K Das (IIT, India) Sakriani Sakti (NAIST, Japan) Satoshi Nakamura (NAIST, Japan) Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Germany) Shyam S Agrawal (KIIT, India) Sin Horng Chen (NCTU, Taiwan) Steven Bird (Charles Darwin University, Australia) Tan Tien Ping (USM, Malaysia) TBC Tanja Schultz (Uni-Bremen, Germany) Thang Vu (Uni-Stuttgart, Germany) Teresa Lynn (ADAPT Centre, Ireland) Trond Trosterud (Tromsø University, Norway) Tunde Adegbola (African Languages Technology Initiative, Nigeria) Vera Ferreira (CIDLeS - Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Portugal) Win Pa Pa (UCS Yangon, Myanmar) Xavier Anguera (Telefonica, Spain) TBC Yoshinori Sagisaka (Waseda University, Japan) TBC Zuraida Mohd Don (UPSI, Indonesia) TBC Identify, Describe and Share your LRs! Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field. This will contribute to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data. As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also to allow the replication of the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time. -- Claudia Soria Researcher Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via Moruzzi 1 56124 Pisa Italy Tel. +39 050 3153166 Skype clausor

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Fwd: [ilat] Graduate student positions in Indigenous languages and technology
by Claudia Soria 11 Dec '19

11 Dec '19

FYI. -------- Messaggio Inoltrato -------- Oggetto: [ilat] Graduate student positions in Indigenous languages and technology Data: Tue, 10 Dec 2019 02:56:54 +0100 Mittente: Antti Arppe <arppe(a)ualberta.ca> Rispondi-a: ilat(a)list.arizona.edu A: ILAT(a)list.arizona.edu CC: 21st Century Tools for Indigenous Languages <21ct4il(a)gmail.com>, Antti Arppe <arppe(a)ualberta.ca> Dear colleagues, We'd appreciate if you shared the posting below on our graduate student positions through your networks. Also, if you know of students who'd be interested in the creation of language technological resources and in Indigenous languages, we'd be most happy if they applied. ---- LEVEL: MA / PhD SPECIALTY AREAS: Morphology; Phonetics; Computational Linguistics; Language Documentation; Text/Corpus Linguistics, Indigenous Languages; Language Revitalization DESCRIPTION: The Alberta Language Technology Lab (ALTLab) in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta is offering two graduate student positions at the PhD (4 years) or MA (2 years) level in its graduate program, beginning in September 2020 within the research project: 21st Century Tools for Indigenous Languages, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant in 2019 – 2026. For more information, see our Partnership website: http://altlab.artsrn.ualberta.ca/21c. This partnership is hosted by the Alberta Language Technology Lab (ALTLab) and is led by Dr. Antti Arppe (Associate Professor & Partnership Director). We are developing language technological models, tools, and resources for Indigenous languages in Canada, starting with Plains Cree (Algonquian) and Tsuut’ina (Dene), and plan to continue and expand work in other languages. These tools and resources include: intelligent electronic dictionaries, linguistically analyzed collections of spoken and written texts, spell-checkers, language learning and practice tools, and word form analyzers and generators, all created in collaboration with Indigenous communities in order to facilitate and support the use of their languages in all spheres of life by community members. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Alongside studies in the Department’s graduate program, the graduate student will be expected to: * support the development or maintenance of our current or future projects within ALTLab for our partnering communities. * conduct research that falls within the purview of ALTLab research interests on either the languages of our partners and/or another indigenous language (see our list of past publications from our ALTLab team and a full list of potential research topics.) THESE POSITIONS REQUIRE: a keen interest in North American Indigenous languages; * a Bachelor's or Master’s degree in a relevant field; and * meeting the general entrance requirements to the Department’s graduate program (http://www.linguistics.ualberta.ca/Graduate/Admissions.aspx) WE WILL PREFER CANDIDATES WITH: * experience in and knowledge of the phonetics/phonology and/or morphosyntax of Indigenous languages (North American Indigenous languages, in particular Plains Cree or other Algonquian language); and/or * experience in computational linguistics and natural language processing (e.g. finite-state transducers, speech technology); and/or * interest or experience in language documentation, language revitalization, and language learning. WE OFFER: * an opportunity to personally contribute to the practical retention of linguistic diversity; * opportunities for well-rounded, comprehensive training in empirical research methods in field linguistics, psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics as well as in language technology; and * a chance to participate in an international SSHRC funded Partnership involving collaboration with 27 researchers from 14 different partner organizations world-wide including leading research centers in the development of language technology and research on indigenous languages. HOW TO APPLY: To apply, send by email to our Partnership office (21ct4il(a)gmail.ca, Attn: Dr. Antti Arppe, ref: PhD 2020) the following: 1. a brief statement of research interests and relevant background; 2. curriculum vitae (including possible publications and presentations); 3. transcripts of university studies (electronic copies will do); and 4. at least two confidential academic letters of reference delivered directly to Dr. Antti Arppe (arppe(a)ualberta.ca) by the referees. We will start considering applications at the end of December 2019. These positions are open until filled, but we urge applications to be submitted by Friday Jan 3, 2020, in order to meet the Linguistics departmental regular graduate application deadline on Friday, Jan 10, 2020. These positions are for a start in September 2020. For further information, please consult the the project website: http://altlab.artsrn.ualberta.ca/21c and contact our Partnership office (21ct4il(a)gmail.com, attn: Antti Arppe). APPLICATIONS DEADLINE: 03-Jan-2020 MORE INFORMATION/UPDATES: http://altlab.artsrn.ualberta.ca/call-for-phd-student-applications-deadline… CONTACT INFORMATION: Partnership office 21ct4il(a)gmail.com -- ====================================================================== Antti Arppe - Ph.D (General Linguistics), M.Sc. (Engineering) Associate Professor of Quantitative Linguistics Director, Alberta Language Technology Lab (ALTLab) Project Director, 21st Century Tools for Indigenous Languages (21C) Chair, Canadian Initiative for Nordic Studies (CINS) Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta E-mail: arppe(a)ualberta.ca, antti.arppe(a)iki.fi WWW: www.ualberta.ca/~arppe, altlab.artsrn.ualberta.ca Mānahtu ina rēdûti ihza ummânūti ihannaq - dulum ugulak úmun ingul ----------------------------------------------------------------------

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(during LREC 2020) CFP 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop
by Laurent Besacier 06 Dec '19

06 Dec '19

Call for Papers 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop http://www.ilc.cnr.it/sltu-ccurl_2020/ <http://www.ilc.cnr.it/sltu-ccurl_2020/> 1st Call for Papers Date: 11-12 May, 2020. To be held as part of the 12th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), at the Palais du Pharo, Marseille, France. Endorsed by SIGUL (http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/ <http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/>) , ELRA and ISCA (to be confirmed) Invited speakers Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Teresa Lynn, ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland Tutorials On May 10th, SLTU-CCURL is pleased to offer two tutorials (held at Université Aix- marseille, near the LREC venue). T1: Jan Trmal, John Hopkins University (building ASR systems using the Kaldi toolkit) T2: Achim Rabus, University of Freiburg (Using Transkribus in training models for less-resourced languages) title to be confirmed More details will be announced on the workshop web page. Attendance to tutorials will be free of charge but registration will be required for organisational purposes (and number of attendees will be limited to 25 per tutorial).    Workshop description and objectives   The first joint SLTU-CCURL workshop will be held on May 11-12 2020 in Marseille, France, during LREC2020. Organized by SIGUL, a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), this joint workshop will gather researchers working on speech processing and NLP for less resourced languages. We solicit papers and posters related to all areas of NLP , speech and computational linguistics, as well as those at the intersection with digital humanities and documentary linguistics, provided that they address less- resourced languages. Example topics are the following: -Language resource development, acquisition and representation -Linguistic theories, corpus development and resources -Linguistic and cognitive studies -Unsupervised discovery of linguistic units -Code switched lexical modeling -Multi-lingual and cross-lingual (spoken, text) language processing -Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech processing -Machine translation and dialogue systems -NLP and speech technologies for under-resourced languages The intention of this joint SLTU-CCURL workshop is not only to provide a forum for the presentation of research, but also to offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages. We will have both oral presentation sessions and poster sessions. The decision on whether a presentation will be an oral or poster one will be taken by the Organizing Committee on the advice of the Program Committee, taking into account the subject matter and how that might be best conveyed. Oral and poster presentations will not be distinguished in the Proceedings. Submission and Publication   ● Papers need to address less-resourced languages. They can contain an analysis and insight into existing methods and problems; a description of resources; an overview of the literature or of the current initiatives, or a combination of the above. Authors must declare if part of the paper contains material previously published elsewhere. ● Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers of 8 pages (references excluded), strictly complying with the LREC stylesheet (https:// lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/ <http://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/>). Papers should be submitted in PDF unprotected format to the workshop START page (URL will be provided in due time). ● Each submission will be reviewed by three programme committee members. In compliance with the LREC rules, papers must not be anonymized. Authors must declare if part of the paper contains material previously published elsewhere.    ● Accepted papers will be presented either as oral presentations or posters and will be published in the workshop proceedings.  ● The formatting template must be strictly adhered to and deadlines met.     Important dates    February 14, 2020 Paper submission deadline  March 13, 2020 Paper notification of acceptance April 2, 2020 Camera-ready papers due   May 11-12, 2020 Workshop Identify, Describe and Share your LRs! ● Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data. ● As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org <http://www.islrn.org/>), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.   Workshop chairs   Dorothee Beermann, NTNU, Norway Laurent Besacier, LIG-Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France Sakriani Sakti, NAIST, Japan Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Italy    Programme Committee  ● Adrian Doyle (Galway University, Ireland) TBC ● Alexey Karpov (SPIIRAS, Russian Federation) ● Alexis Palmer (University of North Texas, USA) ● Amita Dev (BPIBS, India) TBC ● Amir Aharoni (Wikimedia Foundation) ● Andras Kornai (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary) ● Angelo Mario Del Grosso (CNR-ILC, Italy) ● Antti Arppe (University of Alberta, Canada) TBC ● Anupam Shukla (IIITM, India) ● Ayu Purwarianti (ITB, Indonesia) TBC ● Bruce Birch (The Minjilang Endangered Languages Publications Project, Australia) TBC ● Bruce Robertson (Mount Allison University, Canada) TBC ● Charl Van Heerden (SPbSU, Russian Federation) TBC ● Chiu Yu Tseng (ILAS, Taiwan) TBC ● Chris Cieri (LDC, USA) TBC ● Clara Rivera (Google) TBC ● Dafydd Gibbon (Bielefeld University, Germany) ● Delyth Prys (Bangor University, UK) ● Dewi Bryn Jones (Bangor University, UK) ● Dirk Van Compernolle (KU Leuven, Belgium) TBC ● Dorothee Beermann (NTNU, Norway) ● Emily Prud'hommeaux (Boston College, USA) TBC ● Emmanuel Dupoux (EHESS-ENS, France) TBC ● Federico Boschetti (CNR-ILC, Italy) ● Francis Tyers (Moscow Higher School of Economics, Russia) ● Gerard Bailly (GIPSA Lab, CNRS) TBC ● Gilles Adda (LIMSI/IMMI CNRS, France) TBC ● Hemant Patil (DA-IICT, India) ● Jeff Good (University at Buffalo, USA) ● John Judge (ADAPT DCU, Ireland) ● Jordan Lachler (University of Alberta, Canada) TBC ● Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS, France) TBC ● Karunesh Arora (C-DAC, NOIDA, India) TBC ● Kepa Sarasola (University of the Basque Country, Spain) TBC ● Kevin Scannell (Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA) ● Klara Ceberio (Elhuyar, Spain) ● Lane Schwartz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) ● Laurent Besacier (LIG-IMAG, France) ● Lori Lamel (LIMSI, France) TBC ● Luong Chi-Mai (IOIT, Vietnam) TBC ● Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain) ● Mans Hulden (University of Colorado Boulder, USA) TBC ● Maxim Romanov TBC ● Miikka Silfverberg (University of Helsinki, Finland) ● Mikel Forcada (Universitat d’Alacant, Spain) ● Mirna Adriani (UI, Indonesia) TBC ● Mohammad A. M. Abushariah (The University of Jordan, Jordan) ● Nick Thieberger (University of Melbourne / ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australia) ● Omar Farooq (AMU, India) ● Pedro Moreno (Google, USA) TBC ● Pradip K Das (IIT, India) ● Richard Sproat (Google, USA) TBC ● Clara Rivera (Google) TBC ● Sakriani Sakti (NAIST, Japan) ● Satoshi Nakamura (NAIST, Japan) ● Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Germany) ● Shyam S Agrawal (KIIT, India) ● Sin Horng Chen (NCTU, Taiwan) ● Steven Bird (Charles Darwin University, Australia) TBC ● Tan Tien Ping (USM, Malaysia) TBC ● Tanja Schultz (Uni-Bremen, Germany) ● Thang Vu (Uni-Stuttgart, Germany) TBC ● Teresa Lynn (ADAPT Centre, Ireland) ● Trond Trosterud (Tromsø University, Norway) ● Tunde Adegbola (African Languages Technology Initiative, Nigeria) ● Uwe Springmann (Würzburg University, Germany) TBC ● Vera Ferreira (CIDLeS - Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Portugal) ● Win Pa Pa (UCS Yangon, Myanmar) ● Xavier Anguera (Telefonica, Spain) TBC ● Yoshinori Sagisaka (Waseda University, Japan) TBC - Zuraida Mohd Don (UPSI, Indonesia) TBC  Contact claudia.soria(a)ilc.cnr.it <mailto:claudia.soria@ilc.cnr.it> Laurent.Besacier(a)univ-grenoble-alpes.fr <mailto:Laurent.Besacier@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr>

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[CFP-Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities] Special Issue on "Collecting, Preserving and Disseminating Endangered Cultural Heritage for New Understandings Through Multilingual Approaches"
by Amel Fraisse 19 Sep '19

19 Sep '19

Dear Colleagues, The recent DH workshop <https://francestanford.stanford.edu/sites/francestanford/files/media/file/D…> (Workshop program) <https://francestanford.stanford.edu/sites/francestanford/files/media/file/D…> held at Stanford University (April 9, 2019) has shown how, as Digital Humanities continues to gain momentum, the field is intersecting with an ever-widening range of disciplines including Natural Language Processing, Library and Information Science, History, Literature, and Translation Studies to name only a few. The growth of these fields within DH enables us to break new scientific ground. For example, the existing reservoir of public domain translations of literary texts, once tracked and digitalized, provides a new wealth of resources to sustain knowledge diversity, preserve our cultural heritage and help us map the global circulation and reception of information and texts. In the wake of this workshop, the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities will publish a special issue "Collecting, Preserving and Disseminating Endangered Cultural Heritage for New Understandings Through Multilingual Approaches" featuring a selection of papers from the workshop and is opening up to additional contributions presenting recent research that aims at collecting, preserving, and dissiminating endangered knowledge and cultural heritage for new understandings through multilingual approaches. We welcome submissions including but not limited to the following topics: Knowledge circulation and organization in a translational context Digital Humanities, crowdsourcing and digital libraries Digital Humanties and the circulation of translated literary texts Natural Language Processing to preserve knowledge diversity and cultural heritage Collecting and aligning translated texts in and for under-resourced languages Multilingual corpora and their circulation Open data, open access and data preservation Collaboration and computing for endangered knowledge Ethics and data privacy issues in a global context More information about submission : https://jdmdh.episciences.org/page/collecting-preserving-and-disseminating-… <https://jdmdh.episciences.org/page/collecting-preserving-and-disseminating-…> Amel Fraisse, Ronald Jenn and Shelley Fisher Fishkin <applewebdata://060E0A9B-8B96-4A98-B8D1-3B313F034C36> Amel Fraisse Maitre de Conférences Université de Lille - Département SID - Laboratoire Gériico Amel.fraisse(a)univ-lille.fr <mailto:prenom.nom@univ-lille.fr> | https://pro.univ-lille.fr/amel-fraisse/ <https://pro.univ-lille.fr/amel-fraisse/> Bât. 2 - bureau B2.467 Domaine Universitaire de Pont de Bois - Villeneuve d'Ascq T. +33 (0)3 20 41 61 53

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preliminary announcement of the 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under- resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop in May 2020
by Laurent Besacier 16 Sep '19

16 Sep '19

Dear SIGUL members Please find attached a preliminary announcement of the 1st Joint SLTU (Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages) and CCURL (Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages) Workshop. It will be held in Marseille, France – May 10th-12th 2020 (as a LREC workshop*) *subject to acceptance by LREC Workshop committee Submission deadline is January 31st 2020. A web site will be set up soon... Best regards Dorothee Beermann, Laurent Besacier, Claudia Soria and Sakriani Sakti (Workshop co-chairs)

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International Conference on Language Technologies for All (LT4All) - UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on December 5-6, 2019.
by Laurent Besacier 25 Jul '19

25 Jul '19

Dear SIGUL members Here is a preliminary announcement on the LT4All event that may be of interest for some of you. More soon on this mailing-list (you can also check their Web site) Best Laurent Besacier ======= International Conference on Language Technologies for All (LT4All) Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide in the framework of the International Year of Indigenous Languages – IYIL 2019 will take place at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on December 5-6, 2019. https://lt4all.elra.info/ <https://lt4all.elra.info/>

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CLEOPATRA project - two PhD positions open @ University of Zagreb
by Marko Tadić 11 Jun '19

11 Jun '19

*** Only few days left *** Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb (FFZG) hires two (2) Early Stage Researchers (ESRs – PhD position) to join the CLEOPATRA project (Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN, www.cleopatra-project.eu) in the areas of natural language processing for under-resourced languages and cross-lingual sentiment detection. ESRs will be appointed starting in July 2019. Further information is available here: http://dokumenti.ffzg.unizg.hr/natjecaji/2019/05/15/raspis-natjecaja-doktor… Please, share this information with your students who might be interested in offered positions. -- Marko Tadić, professor University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Linguistics Ivana Lučića 3 HR-10000 Zagreb Croatia t: +385 1 4092 066 f: +385 1 6156 879 w: hnk.ffzg.hr/mt/ <http://hnk.ffzg.hr/mt/> s: marko__tadic

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META-FORUM 2019: 8/9 Oct. 2019 – save the date!
by Georg Rehm 17 May '19

17 May '19

Dear colleagues, with this email we’d like to inform you about the date and location of this year’s META-NET conference and the opportunities how to participate actively: META-FORUM 2019: Introducing the European Language Grid 8/9 October, 2019 – Brussels, Belgium (BluePoint Conference Centre) Please save the date! META-FORUM 2019 is organised by the new EU project European Language Grid (ELG). Details about the project are available on https://www.european-language-grid.eu <https://www.european-language-grid.eu/>. Submit programme suggestions While the website of META-FORUM 2019 is still under development, we’d already now like to invite you to participate in the event and also to propose relevant content, presentations, sessions etc. If there’s a certain topic or speaker that you’d like to see at META-FORUM 2019, please let us know. Invitation to participate in the project and initiative expo Furthermore, we’re organising an expo again at this year’s META-FORUM 2019. We want to showcase current projects, especially EU projects and European initiatives from the area of Language Technology, Artificial Intelligence and related fields. Larger regional or national projects are also welcome to showcase their activities. We can provide either a table with chairs or space for a roll-up or poster so that projects and initiatives can present themselves. Please note that the availability of expo booths is limited – if you’re interested, please get in touch as soon as possible. Participation is free of charge Participation (including expo booths) is, as usual, free of charge. The registration form will be available on the website very soon. In the meantime, if you want to actively participate, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via email to my colleague Katrin Marheinecke (cc:) and me. Look forward to seeing you in Brussels in October! Best regards, Georg -- Dr. Georg Rehm <http://georg-re.hm/> Principal Researcher and Research Fellow <http://www.dfki.de/> DFKI GmbH <http://www.dfki.de/>, Alt-Moabit 91c, 10559 Berlin, Germany Phone: +49 30 23895-1833 – Fax: -1810 – Mobile: +49 173 2735829 georg.rehm(a)dfki.de Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH Firmensitz: Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern Geschäftsführung: Prof. Dr. Jana Köhler (Vorsitzende), Dr. Walter Olthoff Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313

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SIGUL Newsletter no. 7
by Claudia Soria 17 May '19

17 May '19

** *Dear SIGUL Members,* * we are pleased to share with you the seventh SIGUL Newsletter. The SIGUL Newsletter is a bi-weekly report on issues related to the topics of language resources and tools for less-resourced languages. Your feedback will be welcome. Claudia Soria SIGUL Co-chair SIGUL is the ELRA-ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages * *Calls for papers* ICALP2019 (ex CITALA) submission deadline is approaching (May 31, 2019). The International Conference on Arabic Language Processing ICALP2019 (ex CITALA) is aimed to be one of the most important and leading conference on Arabic NLP (https://icalp2019.loria.fr). ICALP2019 is the 7th edition (information about the previous editions are mentioned at: ICALP2017), all branches of NLP related to Arabic or Semitic languages are welcomed. Arabic spoken or text language processing are the main kernel of ICALP2019. The conference will emphasize on all the approaches from theoretical models to industrial applications. ICALP2019 will be held at Loria (University of Lorraine), which is situated in Nancy on the east part of France near the border of Luxembourg and Germany. We look forward to welcome you to a scientifically inspiring event and we hope that ICALP2019 will be a highly positive scientific experience for all the participants. Two keynote speakers *Dr Mona Diab* (Department of Computer Science, George Washington University) and *Dr Albert Gatt *(Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, University of Malta.) will share their expertise with the aim of exposing participants to a wide spectrum of research and applications, to foster cross-pollination of research ideas and interests in Arabic Language Processing and related applications. As in the previous year (ICALP – CITALA 2017), we aim, for accepted papers, to be published by Springer. All the submitted papers will be reviewed by three experts from the domain. Only the 30% best papers will be selected to be published by Springer. Participants are invited to submit original communications in all the areas of Arabic NLP. Few topics of the conference are given below. *Thanks to the Google's sponsoring two scholarships (including the Flight ticket, the accomodation and the registration fees) are proposed to Phd or Master students to attend the conference. A short CV and a motivation letter are requested to apply to this scholarship (please contact icalp2019(a)inria.fr) * List of Topics * Arabic dialect processing * Automatic speech recognition * Building ontologies * Code Switching phenomena * Comparative Linguistic Studies * Cross-Language Applications * Deep Learning for Arabic applications * Digital Humanities * End-to-End DNN * Generation and Analysis * Human Machine-Dialogue * Information retrieval on Social Networks * Linguistic Resources for Arabic NLP Applications * Machine Translation * Multi-Word Term Extraction * Named Entity Recognition * Opining Mining and Sentiment Analysis * Optical Character Recognition * Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment * Question/Answering Systems * Semitic languages * Spell-check and automatic corrections * Study of Linguistic Phenomena * Text Categorization and Clustering * Text Summarization * Word Sense Disambiguation Committees Program Committee * *Ahmed Ali *(Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI)) * *Mohamed Afify (*Microsoft, Cairo, Egypt) * *Hassina Aliane* (Centre de Recherche sur l’Information Scientifique et Technique , Algeria) * *Frédéric Béchet* (Aix Marseille Université - LIF, France) * *Almoataz Bellahal-Said* (Cairo University, Egypt) * *Laurent Besacier* (University of Grenoble, France) * *Karim Bouzoubaa* (EMI, UM5, Rabat, Morocco) * *Violetta Cavalli-Sforza* (Al Akhawayn University, Morocco) * *Khalid Choukri* (ELDA, European Language Resource Association, France) * *Kareem Darwish* (Qatar Computing Research Institute) * *Joseph Di Martino* (Loria - University of Lorraine, France) * *Mona Diab* (George Washington university, USA) * *Abdelhamid El Jihad* (IERA, UMS, Rabat, Morocco) * *Mahmoud El-Haj* (School of Computing and Communications Lancaster University, UK) * *Yannick Estève* (LIUM University of Maine, France) * *Albert Gatt* ( Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, University of Malta) * *Nada Ghneim (*Higher Institute for Applied Science and Technology, Damascu) * *Ahmed Guessoum* (University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene, Algeria) * *Hatem Haddad* (Department of Computer & Decision Engineering, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) * *Kais Haddar* (Faculté des sciences de Sfax, Tunisia) * *Abdelfetah Hamdani* (IERA, UMS, rabat, Morocco) * *Yannis Haralambous* (Institut Mines-Télécom & UMR CNRS 6285 Lab-STICC, Brest, France) * *Salima Harrat* (Ecole Normale Supérieure Bouzaréah, Algiers, Algeria) * *Mark Hasegawa-Johnson* (University of Illinois, USA) * *Mustafa Jarrar* (Birzeit University- Sina Institute, Palestine) * *Denis Jouvet* (Loria University of Lorraine, France) * *Abdelmonaime Lachkar* (ENSA, USMBA, Fez, Morocco) * *David Langlois* (Loria University of Lorraine, France) * *Abdelhak Lakhouaja* (UMP, Oujda, Morocco) * *Azzedine Lazrek* (UCA, Marrakech, Morocco) * *Yves Lepage* (University of Waseda, Japan) * *Azzedine Mazroui* (UMP, Oujda, Morocco) * *Karima Meftouh* (University of Annaba, Algeria) * *Farid Meziane* (University of Salford, Manchester, UK) * *Vito Pirrelli* (Institute for Computational Linguistics CNR, Pisa Italy) * *Violaine Prince* (LIRMM, Montepelier, France) * *Allan Ramsay* (School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK) * *Horacio Rodríguez* (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona - Spain) * *Paolo Rosso* (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain) * *Motaz Saad* (University Islamic of Gaza, Palestine) * *Fatiha Sadat* (University du Québec à Montréal, Canada) * *Khaled Shaalan* (The British University, United Arab Emirates) * *Olivier Siohan* (Google, USA) * *Kamel Smaili* (Loria University of Lorraine, France) * *Adnan Yahya* (Birzeit University, Palestine) * *Abdella Yousfi* (Mohammed V university, Morocco) * *Wajdi Zaghouani* (Carnegie Mellon University Qatar) * *Imed Zitouni* (Microsoft Research, USA) Organizing committee * *Karima Abidi* (Student management) * *Olivia Brenner* (Communication) * *Joseph Di Martino* (Special Event) * *David Langlois* ( Publication and Logistic management) * *Mohamed-Amine Menacer* (Website designer) Invited Speakers * *Dr Mona Diab* ( Department of Computer Science <http://www.cs.gwu.edu/>, George Washington University (GW) <http://www.gwu.edu/> ) * *Dr Albert Gatt* ( Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology <http://www.um.edu.mt/linguistics/>, University of Malta <http://www.um.edu.mt/> ) Publication ICALP2019 (CITALA) proceedings aim to be published by Springer *Important**Dates* * Submission portal opens *April 30, 2019* * Final paper submission deadline *May 31, 2019* * Acceptance/rejection notification *July 15, 2019* * Camera ready*July 31, 2019 * * Registration open*August 25, 2019* * Conference*16-17 October, 2019* Venue The conference will be held in Nancy (East of France) near the borders of Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium. It will be held at Loria ( Laboratoire lorrain de recherche en informatique et ses applications). Contact smaili(a)loria.fr -------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------- The 2nd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT 2019) The Helix, DCU, Dublin, August 20, 2019 https://sites.google.com/view/loresmt/ @ MT Summit XVII ---------------------------------------------------- BRIEF 1. Call for Papers: https://easychair.org/cfp/LoResMT2019 Submission due on "May 24, 2019" (Abstract on "May 17"): https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=loresmt2019 2. Shared Tasks on MT for Bhojpuri, Magahi, Sindhi, and Latvian (<> English) *Registration open. Training, Development sets available upon registration!* Participants please register by sending email to loresmt(a)googlegroups.com <mailto:loresmt@googlegroups.com> with Team name, members (emails and affiliations) information. Timeline: May 03, 2019: Release of training data June 04, 2019: Release of test data June 11, 2019: Submission of the systems June 16, 2019: Notification of results June 25, 2019: Submission of shared task papers 3. Prof Xiaobing Zhao et al. will give an invited talk on "Building Cross-Lingual Knowledge Base for Low Resource Languages in China" 4. Please find below the proceeding and slides of LoResMT 2018. Works on several low resource languages, e.g. Filipino, Finnish, Irish, Latvian, Mongolian, Quechua, Tibetan, and Uyghur, are presented. https://amtaweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/AMTA_2018_Workshop_Proceedin… https://sites.google.com/view/loresmt-2018/ SCOPES Machine translation (MT) technologies have been improved significantly in the last two decades, with the developments on phrased-based statistical MT (SMT) and recently the neural MT (NMT). However, most of these methods rely on the availability of large parallel data (millions to tens of millions sentence pairs) in the training, which are resources that do not exist in many language pairs. In addition, MT methods still rely on a few natural language processing (NLP) tools to help pre-process human generated texts in the forms that are required as input for these methods, and/or post-process the output in proper textual forms in target languages. In many MT systems, the performance of these tools has great impacts on the quality of the resulting translation. These NLP tools include, but not limited to, several kinds of word tokenizers/de-tokenizers, word segmenters, morphology analyzers, etc. The workshop solicits papers on MT systems/methods for low resource languages in general. We also solicit papers dedicated to these supplementary NLP tools that are used in any language and especially in low resource languages. We would like to have an overview of research on MT for low resource languages and these NLP tools from our community. TOPICS We solicit original research papers, review papers, and position papers on MT research for low resource languages in the workshop. Multilingual and/or cross-lingual NLP tools for low resource languages are especially welcome. Topics of the workshop include but are not limited to: - Research and review papers of pre-processing and/or post-processing NLP tools for MT - Position papers on the development of pre-processing and/or post-processing tools for MT - Word tokenizers/de-tokenizers for specific languages - Word/morpheme segmenters for specific languages - Alignment/Re-ordering tools for specific language pairs - Use of morphology analyzers and/or morpheme segmenters in MT - Multilingual/cross-lingual NLP tools for MT - Re-usability of existing NLP tools for low resource languages - Corpora creation and curation technologies for low resource languages - Review of available parallel corpora for low resource languages - Research and review papers of MT methods for low resource languages - MT systems/methods (e.g. rule-based, SMT, NMT) for low resource languages - Pivot MT for low resource languages - Zero-shot MT for low resource languages - Fast building of MT systems for low resource languages - Re-usability of existing MT systems for low resource languages - Machine translation for language preservation SUBMISSION INFORMATION Workshop papers should adhere to MT Summit 2019 style guide (LaTeX, OpenOffice, Word). https://www.mtsummit2019.com/submissions Submission deadline: "May 24, 2019" (Abstract on "May 17"). https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=loresmt2019 There are two types of submissions in the workshop. For research, review and position papers, the length of each paper should be at least four (4) and not exceed eight (8) pages, plus unlimited pages for references. More pages would be allowed as long as it could be justified. The review will be double-blinded. For non-archival system demonstration abstracts, the limit is four (4) pages. The review will be single-blind. We would like to encourage authors to cite papers written in ANY language that are related to the topics, as long as both original bibliographic items and their corresponding English translations are provided. IMPORTANT DATES March 19, 2019: Call for papers April 19, 2019: 2nd Call for papers May 24, 2019: Submission deadline of workshop papers June 21, 2019: Notification of acceptance July 12, 2019: Camera-ready papers due July 19, 2019: Workshop proceeding on-line August 21, 2019: LoResMT workshop ORGANIZERS (listed alphabetically) Alina Karakanta FBK-Fondazione Bruno Kessler Atul Kr. Ojha Panlingua Language Processing LLP/Jawaharlal Nehru University Chao-Hong Liu ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University Jonathan Washington Swarthmore College Nathaniel Oco National University (Philippines) Surafel Melaku Lakew FBK-Fondazione Bruno Kessler Valentin Malykh Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Varvara Logacheva Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Xiaobing Zhao Minzu University of China CONTACT chaohong.liu(a)adaptcentre.ie <mailto:chaohong.liu@adaptcentre.ie> LoResMT @ MT Summit 2019 https://sites.google.com/view/loresmt/ LoResMT @ AMTA 2018 https://sites.google.com/view/loresmt-2018/ -- Claudia Soria Researcher Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli" Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via Moruzzi 1 56124 Pisa Italy Tel. +39 050 3153166 Skype clausor

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