- SIGUL - ELRA lists

CALL FOR PAPERS: Special issue on Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages@Language Resources and Evaluation Journal
by Atul K. Ojha 16 Apr '25

16 Apr '25

Apologies for cross-posting. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- *CALL FOR PAPERS: Language Resources and Evaluation Journal- Special Issue on Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages* https://link.springer.com/collections/gbdgacbgbg *Guest Editors:* - Atul Kr. Ojha (Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, DSI, University of Galway, Ireland) - Chao-Hong Liu (Industrial Technology Research Institute, Potamu Research Ltd.) - Ekaterina Vylomova (University of Melbourne, Australia) - Flammie Pirinen (UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø) - Jonathan Washington (Swarthmore College, USA) - Nathaniel Oco (De La Salle University, Philippines) - Xiaobing Zhao (Minzu University of China) Machine translation (MT) technologies have been improved significantly in the last decade using neural MT (NMT) approaches. However, most of these methods rely on the availability of large parallel data for training the MT systems, resources which are not available for the majority of language pairs. Hence, current technologies often fall short in their ability to be applied to low-resource languages. Developing MT technologies using relatively small corpora still presents a major challenge for the MT community. In addition, many methods for developing MT systems still rely on several natural language processing (NLP) tools to pre-process texts in source languages and post-process MT outputs in target languages. The performance of these tools often has a great impact on the quality of the resulting translation. The availability of MT technologies and NLP tools can facilitate equal access to information for the speakers of a language and determine on which side of the digital divide they will end up. The lack of these technologies for many of the world's languages provides opportunities both for the field to grow and for making tools available for speakers of low-resource languages. In the past few years, several workshops and evaluations have been organized to promote research on low-resource languages. NIST has been conducting Low Resource Human Language Technology evaluations (LoReHLT) annually from 2016 to 2019. In LoReHLT evaluations, there is no training data in the evaluation language. Participants receive training data in related languages but need to bootstrap systems in the surprise evaluation language at the start of the evaluation. Methods for this include pivoting approaches and taking advantage of linguistic universals. The evaluations are supported by DARPA's Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) program, which seeks to advance technologies that are less dependent on large data resources and that can be quickly pivoted to new languages within a very short amount of time so that information from any language can be extracted in a timely manner to provide situation awareness to emergent incidents. There are also the Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT), Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL), Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia (EURALI), the Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing (DeepLo). AfricaNLP, TurkLang, Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), and International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) workshop, which provide a venue for sharing research and working on research and development in this field. This topical collection solicits original research papers on MT systems/methods and related NLP tools for low-resource languages in general. LoReHLT, LORELEI, LoResMT, SIGUL, EURALI, DeepLo, WMT, and IWSLT participants are very welcome to submit their work to the special issue. Summary papers on MT research for specific low-resource languages, as well as extended versions (>40% difference) of published papers from relevant conferences/workshops, are also welcome. Topics of the special issue include, but are not limited to: * Research and review papers on MT systems/methods for low-resource languages * Research and review papers on pre-processing and/or post-processing NLP tools for MT * Word tokenizers/de-tokenizers for low-resource languages * Word/morpheme segmenters for low-resource languages * Use of morphological analyzers and/or morpheme segmenters in MT * Multilingual/cross-lingual NLP tools for MT * Review of available corpora of low-resource languages for MT * 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 and/or NLP tools for low-resource languages * Machine translation for language preservation * Techniques that work across many languages and modalities * Techniques that are less dependent on large data resources * Use of language-universal resources * Bootstrap-trained resources for the short development cycle * Entity, relation- and event-extraction * Sentiment detection in MT * MT Summarisation * Processing diverse languages, genres (news, social media, etc.) and modalities (text, speech, video, etc.) * Speech Translation for low-resource languages * Multimodal MT for low-resource languages * MT models using LLMs for low-resource languages * Generative AI models for low-resource languages * Evaluation metrics and datasets for low-resource languages For further information on this initiative, please refer to https://link.springer.com/collections/gbdgacbgbg *IMPORTANT DATES* May 26, 2025: Expression of interest (EOI) via this form: https://forms.gle/QqeqxZgGfsxP6rZ77 August 26, 2025: Paper submission deadline December 05, 2025: Revised papers due March 2026: Publication * SUBMISSION GUIDELINES* Authors should follow the "Instructions for Authors <https://link.springer.com/journal/10579/submission-guidelines> ( https://link.springer.com/journal/10579/submission-guidelines)" on the LRE journal website <https://link.springer.com/journal/10579>. Thanks, Atul

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First call for papers DHASA Conference 2025
by Menno Van Zaanen 16 Apr '25

16 Apr '25

First call for papers DHASA Conference 2025 https://dh2025.digitalhumanities.org.za Theme: The role of humanities in digital humanities and artificial intelligence The Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA) is pleased to announce its fifth conference, focusing on the theme The role of humanities in digital humanities and artificial intelligence. In a region where the field of Digital Humanities is still relatively underdeveloped, this conference aims to address this gap and foster growth and collaboration in the field. The conference offers an opportunity for researchers interested in showcasing their work in the broad field of Digital Humanities to come together. By doing so, the conference provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of- the-art in Digital Humanities, particularly within the Southern Africa region. As such, we welcome submissions related to Digital Humanities research conducted by individuals from Southern Africa or research focused on the geographical area of Southern Africa in the broad sense. Furthermore, the conference serves as a platform for information sharing and networking among researchers passionate about Digital Humanities. By bringing together experts working on Digital Humanities in Southern Africa or with a focus on Southern Africa, we aim to promote collaboration and facilitate further research in this dynamic field. In addition to the main conference, affiliated workshops and tutorials will be organised, providing researchers with valuable insights into novel technologies and tools. These supplementary events are designed for researchers interested in specific aspects of Digital Humanities or seeking practical information to enter or advance their knowledge in the field. The DHASA conference welcomes interdisciplinary contributions from researchers in various domains of Digital Humanities, including, but not limited to, language, literature, visual art, performance and theatre studies, media studies, music, history, sociology, psychology, language technologies, library studies, philosophy, methodologies, software and computation, AI, and more. Our goal is to cultivate an inclusive scientific community of practice within Digital Humanities. Suggested topics include the following: * The role of AI in digital humanities, the role of Digital Humanities in shaping AI, and the broader role of the humanities in both AI and DH projects; * Digital archives and the preservation of marginalised voices; * Intersectionality and the digital humanities: exploring the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, culture, and class in digital research and activism; * Activism and social change through digital media: how digital humanities tools and methodologies can be used to promote inclusion; * Engaging marginalised communities in the creation and use of digital tools, resources, and AI; * Exploring the role of digital humanities in decolonising knowledge and promoting indigenous perspectives; * The ethics of data collection and analysis in digital humanities and AI research; * The role of digital humanities and AI in promoting inclusive and equitable pedagogy; * Digital humanities and inclusion in the context of African and global perspectives and international collaborations; * Critical approaches to digital humanities and inclusion: examining the limitations and possibilities of digital tools and methodologies in promoting inclusion; and * Collaborative digital humanities projects with non-profit organisations, community groups, and cultural institutions; * Development of digital and AI tools for supporting digital humanities; * Novel utilisation of digital and AI tools for performing digital humanities research; * The role of digital humanities in the classroom: reimagining literacy and AI fluency * Digital humanities data and project management; * The role of librarians in the digital humanities project; * Any other digital humanities-related topic that serves the Southern African community. Submission Guidelines The DHASA conference 2025 asks for three types of submissions: * Long papers: Authors may submit long papers with a maximum of 8 content pages and unlimited pages for references and appendices. The final versions of accepted long papers will be granted an additional page (leading to a total of up to 9 content pages) to incorporate reviewers' comments. Long papers accepted for the conference will be presented in 30-minute time slots (which includes 10 minutes for questions). * Short papers: Authors may submit short papers with a maximum of 5 content pages and unlimited pages for references and appendices. The final versions of accepted short papers will be allowed an extra page (leading to a total of up to 6 content pages) to accommodate reviewers' comments. Short papers accepted for the conference will be presented in 15-minute time slots (which includes 5 minutes for questions). * Executive summaries: Authors can submit an executive summary for work in progress, limited to 1 page. Executive summaries accepted for the conference will be presented as posters during a dedicated poster presentation slot. All accepted long and short paper submissions that are presented at the conference will be published in the JDHASA journal, see https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/dhasa. In addition, the executive summaries for the poster presentations will be published in a book of executive summaries before the conference. We particularly encourage student submissions where the first author is a student. All submissions should adhere to the ACL style guide: https://acl-org.github.io/ACLPUB/formatting.html Submissions should be submitted in PDF format. Submissions that do not adhere to the prescribed style guide will be rejected. Follow this link to go to the submission platform: https://dh2025.digitalhumanities.org.za/submission/ Authors are encouraged to upload their datasets to the SADiLaR repository: https://repo.sadilar.org/. In case of difficulties uploading the datasets, please reach out to Benito Trollip (benito.trollip(a)nwu.ac.za). Important dates Submission deadline: 14 July 2025 Date of notification: 16 September 2025 Camera-ready copy deadline: 24 October 2025 Conference: 10 November 2025 – 14 November 2025 Conference venue: CSIR ICC, Pretoria, South Africa Co-located events Several co-located events are currently being prepared, including workshops and tutorials. These will be updated on the conference website. Organising Committee Aby Louw, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Andiswa Bukula, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Avi Moodley, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Franco Mak, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Franziska Pannach, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Ilana Wilken, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Johannes Sibeko, Nelson Mandela University Juan Steyn, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Laurette Marais, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Marissa Griesel, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Privolin Naidoo, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Sthembiso Mkhwanazi, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research -- Prof Menno van Zaanen menno.vanzaanen(a)nwu.ac.za Professor in Digital Humanities South African Centre for Digital Language Resources https://www.sadilar.org ________________________________ NWU PRIVACY STATEMENT: http://www.nwu.ac.za/it/gov-man/disclaimer.html DISCLAIMER: This e-mail message and attachments thereto are intended solely for the recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorised review, use, disclosure, or distribution is prohibited. If you have received the e-mail by mistake, please contact the sender or reply e-mail and delete the e-mail and its attachments (where appropriate) from your system. ________________________________

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Second Call for Special Issue Proposals - Journal Natural Language Processing
by Ranasinghe, Tharindu 16 Apr '25

16 Apr '25

Journal Natural Language Processing (formerly Journal of Natural Language Engineering) *** Second Call for Special Issue Proposals *** In recent years the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has enjoyed unprecedented developments since the emergence of Deep Learning and, lately, Large Language Models. At the same time, NLP is following the trend of many other areas in becoming highly specialised, with a number of application-orientated and narrow-domain topics emerging or growing in importance. These developments, often coinciding with a lack of related literature, necessitate and warrant the publication of specialised volumes focusing on a specific topic of interest to the NLP research community. The Journal Natural Language Processing (formerly Journal of Natural Language Engineering), which features six 160-page issues per year and has had its impact factor increase yearly, invites proposals for special issues on a competitive basis covering any topics in applied NLP which have emerged as important recent developments and have attracted the attention of a number of researchers. The Journal Calls for Proposals for special issues have resulted in high-quality outputs and this year we look forward to another successful competition. Proposals on topics covering a variety of methods, tasks, resources and applications from Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Speech and Language Processing, Text Analytics and related areas are eligible. Special issues on timely NLP topics such as latest language models including Large Language Models/Generative AI, are welcome. Special issue proposals may be based on a successful workshop or a body of work associated with a particular group or section of the community. In the case of papers previously submitted to workshops, the Guest Editors will not be able to re-use previous workshop reviews. In addition, the call for papers of the accepted proposals must be open to all interested parties and all authors will be given equal treatment; in the case of proposals based on previous workshops, submissions cannot be limited to workshop participants only. Prospective proposers are also encouraged to consult the successful Journal columns "Industry Watch" and "Emerging Trends" for additional inspiration. Interested parties have the option of preliminary feedback by emailing expressions of interest accompanied by a brief description of the intended special issue to the Executive Editor (Ruslan.Mitkov(a)ua.es). He will give a brief indication of whether the topic is appropriate to the Journal. In the case of initial positive feedback, the prospective Guest Editors will be asked to submit a proposal for a special issue that will be reviewed by the Editors of the Journal and by other members of the Journal Editorial Board. The proposal for a special issue should include a brief outline of the field and rationale as to why it is important to launch a special issue on the particular topic of interest at the current time. It should include a relevant literature survey (related previous special issues, volumes, workshop and conference proceedings) and should explain the added value of the proposed special issue against the background of other relevant or competing publications and volumes (if applicable). It is desirable that evidence for the estimate of expected submissions to the special issue be provided and justified. The proposals should also include a tentative Guest Editorial Board. It is desirable that at least one (preferably two) of the members of the Guest Editorial Board is on the Editorial Board of the Journal Natural Language Processing. The proposal should also include a tentative time-scale for the production of the special issue (the time-scale committed to in the proposal should be adhered to, if the proposal is accepted), and information about the prospective Guest Editors such as relevant experience, publications etc. Time-scale - Deadline for submission of special issue proposals: 28 April 2025 (proposals to be emailed to Ruslan.Mitkov(a)ua.es with a copy to NLP(a)cambridge.org) - Notification of acceptance/rejection: 19 May 2025 - Calls for papers related to the successful proposals (at least 2 calls are recommended): 7 June 2025 first call July-September 2025 second (and third call, if applicable) Once the special issue is approved and launched, Guest Editors are expected to adhere to the same reviewing and acceptance standards as regular issues of the Journal. In particular, each submission needs to be reviewed by three members of the Guest Editorial Board or other experts in the field. To ensure geographical diversity and balance, and to avoid over-reliance on the same reviewers, each submission must not be reviewed by three experts from the same country, and no single reviewer should evaluate more than two submissions. If the Executive Editor is not satisfied with the review process for a special issue paper, he may either reject the paper or send it for additional review. As a last resort, the Executive Editor has the discretion to reject the entire special issue if the reviewing practices are found to be flawed. All special issues are required to include a survey of the field (at least 15 pages) as its first article, which can be written either by the Guest Editors or experts in the field commissioned by the Guest Editors. This is in addition to a 1-2 page preface by the Guest Editors. Best Regards Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe | Lecturer in Security and Protection Science School of Computing and Communications | Lancaster University Contact me on Teams<https://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/0?users=t.ranasinghe@lancaster.ac.uk> www.lancaster.ac.uk<https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/>

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[Second CfP] The 2025 CLASP Conference on Language models And RePresentations (LARP 2025)
by LARP2025 11 Apr '25

11 Apr '25

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS ======= LARP Language models And RePresentations September 8 - September 9, 2025, Gothenburg, Sweden ======= https://gu-clasp.github.io/LARP/index.html Invited speakers ---- Dan Roth, University of Pennsylvania and Oracle Vaishak Belle, University of Edinburgh Moa Johansson, Chalmers University of Technology Important dates ---- - Submission deadline (archival): April 28, 2025 - Notification of acceptance (archival): June 20, 2025 - NEW!!! Commitment deadline for pre-reviewed ACL ARR submissions: July 31, 2025 - Submission deadline (non-archival): August 1, 2025 - Notification of acceptance (non-archival): August 8, 2025 - Camera ready (archival): August 8, 2025 - Camera ready (ARR Commitments): August 15, 2025 - Registration deadline: TBA - Conference: September 8–9, 2025, University of Gothenburg, Sweden All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”). Language models And RePresentations (LARP) brings together researchers that explore how information is structured, encoded and used in computational language systems. We encourage submissions on both neural (sub-symbolic) and discrete (symbolic) representations from the fields of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence or their intersection. The conference is organised by the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability (CLASP, https://gu-clasp.github.io/), University of Gothenburg. The conference will be held between September 8 and 9 in Gothenburg, Sweden (on-site and hybrid). Topics of interest ---- We hope to see innovative work that considers neural and symbolic learning and processing in terms of different modelling perspectives. Papers are invited on the following topics as they relate to natural language: - Neuro-symbolic integration: novel hybrid frameworks combining symbolic representations with neural network learning for enhanced reasoning and natural language processing - Explainable machine learning: techniques that allow for better interpretability, transparency, and explainability of neural, symbolic and neuro-symbolic architectures - Logical constraints in neural networks: methods that use logical structures (e.g., knowledge bases, ontologies) for post-hoc or inherent explainability - Automated reasoning systems providing human-interpretable rationales for decisions - Symbolic planning and control in neural workflows - Application-driven scenarios (robots, autonomous systems) showcasing benefits of symbolic approaches - Techniques that integrate symbolic representations into text or multimodal generation - Approaches that enforce domain knowledge, consistency, or adherence to constraints in text and/or multimodal generation - Fine-tuning and in-context learning strategies that incorporate logical or rule-based knowledge This list is illustrative but is not intended to be exhaustive. Submission Requirements ---- **Archival track** Archival track will feature the following types of submissions to appear in conference proceedings: we accept long papers (max 8 pages) and short papers (max 4 pages). Long and short papers must describe substantial, original, and unpublished research. Supplementary materials, appendices, a section on limitations and ethical concerns do not count towards the page limit. Archival accepted papers will be published in the 2025 ACL Anthology as a CLASP Conference Proceedings. Papers should be electronically submitted via the OpenReview system at https://openreview.net/group?id=CLASP/LARP/2025/Conference. Submissions should be .pdf files and use the LaTeX or Word templates provided for ACL submissions (https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files). Archival submissions must be anonymous. Please make sure that you select the right track when submitting your paper. Contact the organisers if you have questions. **NEW!!! ARR Commitment** We accept papers that have been pre-reviewed via ACL Rolling Review<https://aclrollingreview.org/>. You are welcome to submit the link to your ARR submission. The linked submission must include both the reviews and the meta-review. Both the submission and its reviews will be evaluated by the programme committee for their relevance to the conference topic. To submit, please visit https://openreview.net/group?id=CLASP/LARP/2025/ARR_Commitment. **Non-archival track** At the time of submission, authors may indicate that their paper should be considered for the non-archival track. The format for non-archival submissions is the same for both long and short papers as it is for the archival submissions. Non-archival papers will not undergo the peer review process. They will be evaluated by the programme committee for clarity and content relevance before the decision by the PC is made. Non-archival papers do not need to be anonymous. If accepted, they are to be published on the conference website and presented as posters. **Poster abstracts** We invite researchers to submit abstracts in the above areas of interest. Abstract submissions are non-archival. This is a great opportunity to get feedback on work in progress or to present previously published work to a new audience. The deadline for abstract submission is the same as for non-archival papers. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by August 8, 2025. Abstract submissions should be .pdf files and use the LaTeX or Word templates provided for ACL submissions (https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files). Abstracts should not exceed 2 pages (supplementary materials, appendices, a section on limitations and ethical concerns are not included) and be submitted via OpenReview system at https://openreview.net/group?id=CLASP/LARP/2025/Conference. The acceptance decision on abstracts will go through the same procedure as papers for the non-archival track. Accepted abstracts will be presented as posters. Concurrent Submissions ---- Papers that have been or will be submitted to other conferences or publications must indicate this at submission time using a footnote on the title page of the submissions. We will not accept publications or presentation papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at LARP must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented. All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the Proceedings. Camera Ready Versions ---- Camera ready versions must be deanonymised. Archival submissions get 1 more page to address comments from reviewers: long papers can be maximum up to 9 pages, short papers can be maximum up to 5 pages. Organisers ---- LARP is organised by the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability (CLASP, https://gu-clasp.github.io/) at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science (FLoV), University of Gothenburg. CLASP focuses its research on the application of probabilistic and information theoretic methods to the analysis of natural language. CLASP is concerned both with understanding the cognitive foundations of language and developing efficient language technology. We work at the interface of computational linguistics/natural language processing, theoretical linguistics, and cognitive science. For practical inquiries, send an email to larp2025(a)flov.gu.se<mailto:larp2025@flov.gu.se>.

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Call for trainers: UniDive training school on diversity in NLP, Yerevan, January 2026
by Dan Zeman 09 Apr '25

09 Apr '25

* UniDive COST Action <https://unidive.lisn.upsaclay.fr/>is a scientific network dedicated to universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology. We are looking for trainers for our winter training school in Yerevan <https://unidive.lisn.upsaclay.fr/doku.php?id=meetings:other-events:2nd_unid…>, Armenia, organized at the Yerevan State University on January 20-24, 2026.The training school is dedicated tolinguistic diversityand related topics. We are interested in various aspects of diversity relevant to NLP like lexical, syntactic, semantic, typological, cultural, genre diversity, etc. We invite course proposals covering (but not necessarily restricted to) the following: * Introduction to typology for newcomers (especially from NLP) * Diversity quantification in NLP * Diversity and Large Language Models (LLMs) * LLMs for low-resourced languages * Enhancing diversity in models and datasets * Using “universalist” resources (such as Universal Dependencies or PARSEME corpora) for typological research * LLMs and language creativity vs. wooden language Proposals of courses (4 pages max.) should be sent by Monday June 2, 2025 at the latest to Dan Zeman <zeman(a)ufal.mff.cuni.cz <mailto:zeman@ufal.mff.cuni.cz>>, Verginica Mititelu <vergi(a)racai.ro <mailto:vergi@racai.ro>> and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe <marie-catherine.demarneffe(a)uclouvain.be <mailto:marie-catherine.demarneffe@uclouvain.be>>, with the subject “UniDive training school proposal”. The proposals should include: * Title of the course * Abstract, including the topics to be covered * Level (introductory, intermediate or advanced course) * Draft schedule, with a brief description of each session (max. 5 sessions of up to 2h each – the training school goes over 5 days, but courses do not have to be given every day, see the schedule of our previous training school <https://unidive.lisn.upsaclay.fr/doku.php?id=meetings:other-events:1st_unid…>) * Necessary infrastructure * Prerequisites for the trainees (bibliography to be covered, software to be installed, accounts to be created, etc.) * Bibliography (highlighting the recommended readings for the trainees) * Instructors, their affiliation, contact details and experience Important dates (anywhere on Earth): * Monday June 2, 2025: Submission of course proposals from potential trainers * Thursday June 12, 2025: Notification * Wednesday November 26, 2025: Publishing the prerequisites for the courses * Tuesday-Saturday January 20-24, 2026: Training school We cannot offer a salary for the courses themselves but long-distance travel costs of the trainers will be covered, as well as a daily allowance of 185 EUR (to cover hotel, meals and local transportation – see COST Annotated Rules <https://www.cost.eu/uploads/2025/02/COST-094-21-V2.0-Annotated-Rules-for-CO…>, Annex A1-3.1 TRAVEL REIMBURSEMENT RULES). Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Agata Savary, Dan Zeman (on behalf of the UniDive Core Group) *

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Assistant professor in Computational lingustics
by Sara Stymne 08 Apr '25

08 Apr '25

Join the Computational Linguistics group at Uppsala University! We are hiring an Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) in Computational Linguistics Application deadline: April 29, 2025 Find out more and apply: https://uu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:809532/ ****************************** Description The department is seeking an associate senior lecturer in computational linguistics. Computational linguistics, or language technology, is an interdisciplinary field dealing with computational models of natural language. Traditionally, research has been driven both by the theoretical goal of understanding human language and by practical applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, and human-computer dialogue. The area has in recent years increasingly been influenced by the emergence of large language models and generative AI. The computational linguistics group at Uppsala University conducts research within a broad field with two focus areas: digital philology and multilingual language technology. Education is primarily offered at the second-cycle level, within the international master’s program in language technology, and at the third-cycle level within the PhD program in computational linguistics. Subject area Computational linguistics Duties The aim of the position is to give the teacher the opportunity to develop independence as a researcher and enhance their academic as well as their pedagogical qualifications in order to meet the criteria for employment as senior lecturer. The duties comprise research within the relevant area of specialization (50% of full-time) as well as teaching and administration (no more than 50% of full-time). Teaching includes supervision, course responsibility, course administration, and course development. Teaching primarily consists of courses in language technology, including master’s thesis supervision, within the international master’s program in language technology, which is taught in English. Teaching may include courses with the following specializations: general language technology, language technology applications such as information retrieval and machine translation, machine learning in language technology, as well as programming and mathematics. It may also include supervision of PhD students. As an associate senior lecturer, the candidate is expected to actively apply for external research funding, to stay aware of developments within their field of specialization, and to take part in the faculty’s and department’s development of research and teaching. Eligibility requirements Applicants are eligible for employment as associate senior lecturer if they hold a doctoral degree or have the equivalent academic competence, have demonstrated pedagogical competence, and have the personal characteristics required in order to carry out the duties that the position involves well. Precedence will be given to applicants who completed their PhD projects or reached the equivalent competence no more than five years before the deadline for applications. In order to meet the requirement of pedagogical competence, the applicant should have completed at least five weeks of relevant training in tertiary-level teaching or acquired the equivalent competence in other ways. In special circumstances, the training can be carried out during the first two years of employment. Ability to teach in English is required. The candidate is furthermore expected to be able to use Swedish as a working language within two years. The candidate should have the personal characteristics required to carry out the duties of the position well. Such characteristics include flexibility, the capacity to work well with others, and a sense of responsibility. It is a requirement that the applicant’s academic, pedagogical, and professional competence is relevant to the subject area and duties that the position involves. När du har kontakt med oss på Uppsala universitet med e-post så innebär det att vi behandlar dina personuppgifter. För att läsa mer om hur vi gör det kan du läsa här: http://www.uu.se/om-uu/dataskydd-personuppgifter/ E-mailing Uppsala University means that we will process your personal data. For more information on how this is performed, please read here: http://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/data-protection-policy

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Call for Special Issue Proposals - Journal Natural Language Processing
by Ranasinghe, Tharindu 28 Mar '25

28 Mar '25

Journal Natural Language Processing (formerly Journal of Natural Language Engineering) *** Call for Special Issue Proposals *** In recent years the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has enjoyed unprecedented developments since the emergence of Deep Learning and, lately, Large Language Models. At the same time, NLP is following the trend of many other areas in becoming highly specialised, with a number of application-orientated and narrow-domain topics emerging or growing in importance. These developments, often coinciding with a lack of related literature, necessitate and warrant the publication of specialised volumes focusing on a specific topic of interest to the NLP research community. The Journal Natural Language Processing (formerly Journal of Natural Language Engineering), which features six 160-page issues per year and has had its impact factor increase yearly, invites proposals for special issues on a competitive basis covering any topics in applied NLP which have emerged as important recent developments and have attracted the attention of a number of researchers. The Journal Calls for Proposals for special issues have resulted in high-quality outputs and this year we look forward to another successful competition. Proposals on topics covering a variety of methods, tasks, resources and applications from Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Speech and Language Processing, Text Analytics and related areas are eligible. Special issues on timely NLP topics such as latest language models including Large Language Models/Generative AI, are welcome. Special issue proposals may be based on a successful workshop or a body of work associated with a particular group or section of the community. In the case of papers previously submitted to workshops, the Guest Editors will not be able to re-use previous workshop reviews. In addition, the call for papers of the accepted proposals must be open to all interested parties and all authors will be given equal treatment; in the case of proposals based on previous workshops, submissions cannot be limited to workshop participants only. Prospective proposers are also encouraged to consult the successful Journal columns "Industry Watch" and "Emerging Trends" for additional inspiration. Interested parties have the option of preliminary feedback by emailing expressions of interest accompanied by a brief description of the intended special issue to the Executive Editor (Ruslan.Mitkov(a)ua.es). He will give a brief indication of whether the topic is appropriate to the Journal. In the case of initial positive feedback, the prospective Guest Editors will be asked to submit a proposal for a special issue that will be reviewed by the Editors of the Journal and by other members of the Journal Editorial Board. The proposal for a special issue should include a brief outline of the field and rationale as to why it is important to launch a special issue on the particular topic of interest at the current time. It should include a relevant literature survey (related previous special issues, volumes, workshop and conference proceedings) and should explain the added value of the proposed special issue against the background of other relevant or competing publications and volumes (if applicable). It is desirable that evidence for the estimate of expected submissions to the special issue be provided and justified. The proposals should also include a tentative Guest Editorial Board. It is desirable that at least one (preferably two) of the members of the Guest Editorial Board is on the Editorial Board of the Journal Natural Language Processing. The proposal should also include a tentative time-scale for the production of the special issue (the time-scale committed to in the proposal should be adhered to, if the proposal is accepted), and information about the prospective Guest Editors such as relevant experience, publications etc. Time-scale - Deadline for submission of special issue proposals: 28 April 2025 (proposals to be emailed to Ruslan.Mitkov(a)ua.es with a copy to NLP(a)cambridge.org) - Notification of acceptance/rejection: 19 May 2025 - Calls for papers related to the successful proposals (at least 2 calls are recommended): 7 June 2025 first call July-September 2025 second (and third call, if applicable) Once the special issue is approved and launched, Guest Editors are expected to adhere to the same reviewing and acceptance standards as regular issues of the Journal. In particular, each submission needs to be reviewed by three members of the Guest Editorial Board or other experts in the field. To ensure geographical diversity and balance, and to avoid over-reliance on the same reviewers, each submission must not be reviewed by three experts from the same country, and no single reviewer should evaluate more than two submissions. If the Executive Editor is not satisfied with the review process for a special issue paper, he may either reject the paper or send it for additional review. As a last resort, the Executive Editor has the discretion to reject the entire special issue if the reviewing practices are found to be flawed. All special issues are required to include a survey of the field (at least 15 pages) as its first article, which can be written either by the Guest Editors or experts in the field commissioned by the Guest Editors. This is in addition to a 1-2 page preface by the Guest Editors. Best Regards Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe | Lecturer in Security and Protection Science School of Computing and Communications | Lancaster University Contact me on Teams<https://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/0?users=t.ranasinghe@lancaster.ac.uk> www.lancaster.ac.uk<https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/>

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[CfP] Third LLM4Eval@SIGIR 2025
by Guglielmo Faggioli 21 Mar '25

21 Mar '25

The Third Workshop on LLM4Eval progresses the discussion from the previous series. These earlier events investigated the potential and challenges of using LLMs for search relevance evaluation, automated judgments, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assessment. As modern IR systems integrate search, recommendations, conversational interfaces, and personalization, new evaluation challenges arise beyond basic relevance assessment. These applications create personalized rankings, explanations, and adapt to user preferences over time, requiring new evaluation methods. Overview Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted evaluation methodologies in Information Retrieval (IR), reshaping the way relevance, quality, and user satisfaction are assessed. Initially demonstrating the potential for query-document relevance judgments, LLMs are now being applied to more complex tasks, including relevance label generation, assessment of retrieval-augmented generation systems, and evaluation of the quality of text-generation systems. As IR systems evolve toward more sophisticated and personalized user experiences, integrating search, recommendations, and conversational interfaces, new evaluation methodologies become necessary. Building upon the success of our previous workshops, this third iteration of the LLM4Eval workshop at SIGIR 2025 seeks submissions exploring new opportunities, limitations, and hybrid approaches involving LLM-based evaluations. Important Dates - Paper submission deadline: April 23, 2025 (AoE) - Notification of acceptance: May 21, 2025 (AoE) - Workshop date: July 17, 2025 Topics of interest We invite submissions on topics including, but not limited to: - LLMs for query-document relevance assessment - Evaluating conversational IR and recommendation systems with LLMs - Hybrid evaluation frameworks combining LLM and human annotations - Identifying failure modes and limitations of LLM annotations - Prompt engineering strategies for improving LLM annotation quality - Standardizing protocols for reliable LLM-based evaluations - Bias, fairness, and ethical considerations in LLM evaluations - LLM annotation robustness, reliability, and reproducibility - User-centric evaluations, personalization, and subjective assessments with LLMs - Case studies and lessons from industry applications of LLM-based evaluations Submission guidelines - Papers must follow SIGIR format and should not exceed 9 pages, excluding references. - We accept full papers (published or unpublished), position papers, and demo papers. - All papers will be peer-reviewed (double-blind) by the program committee and judged by their relevance to the workshop themes and potential to generate discussion. - Previously published studies can be submitted in their original format and will be reviewed solely for their relevance to this workshop. - All submissions must be in English (PDF format). - Submission through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=llm4evalsigir25. Publication options Authors can choose between archival and non-archival options for their submissions: - Archival: Papers will be included in the workshop proceedings. - Non-archival: Papers may be uploaded to arXiv.org, allowing submission elsewhere as they will be considered non-archival. The workshop’s website will maintain a link to the arXiv versions of the papers.

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RANLP 2025: Third Call for Papers and Extended Submission Deadline
by Ranasinghe, Tharindu 17 Mar '25

17 Mar '25

RANLP 2025 RECENT ADVANCES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Hotel “Cherno More” Varna, Bulgaria https://ranlp.org/ranlp2025/ Summer School on Deep Learning and LLMs for NLP: 3-5 September 2025 (Wednesday-Friday) Tutorials: 6-7 September 2025 (Saturday-Sunday) Main Conference: 8-10 September 2025 (Monday-Wednesday) Workshops and shared tasks: 11-13 September 2025 (Thursday-Saturday) We are pleased to announce that the 15th biennial RANLP conference will take place in September 2025 at the Black Sea city of Varna. In addition to the conference programme of competitively peer-reviewed papers reporting on the recent advances of a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) topics, the conference features keynote talks by leading experts in NLP. Poster and demo sessions will be held at the conference exhibition area. The conference will be preceded by three days of summer school on Deep Learning and LLMs for NLP (3-5 September 2025) and two days of tutorials (6-7 September 2025). Post-conference specialised workshops as well as shared tasks covering timely NLP topics will be held on 11-13 September 2025. A Student Research Workshop will run in parallel to the main conference. The Student Research Workshops (now the 9th edition) have become active discussion fora for young researchers. As from RANLP 2009, the papers accepted at RANLP and the associated workshops are included in the ACL Anthology. The RANLP proceedings are indexed by SCOPUS and DBLP. The SCOPUS SJR of RANLP proceedings is 0,299 (2023). After 2017, all accepted papers have DOI numbers. CHAIR OF THE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Ruslan Mitkov (University of Lancaster, UK and University of Alicante, Spain) CHAIR OF THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE Galia Angelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria) The Programme Committee members are distinguished NLP experts from all over the world. The list of PC members will be announced on the conference website in due course. INVITED SPEAKERS The list of keynote speakers at RANLP 2025 and tutorial lecturers as well as summer school lecturers and teaching assistants includes (more names will be announced in the coming weeks): KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: * Eneko Agirre (University of the Basque Country, Spain) * Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy) * Anna Rogers (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark) TUTORIAL LECTURERS: * Burcu Can (University of Sterling, UK) * Anna Rogers and Max Müller-Eberstein (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark) SUMMER SCHOOL LECTURERS and TEACHING ASSISTANTS (in alphabetical order): * Maram Alharbi (University of Lancaster, UK) * Isuri Nanomi Arachchige (University of Lancaster, UK) * Burcu Can (University of Sterling, UK) * Salmane Chafik (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco) * Ernesto Luis Estevanell (University of Alicante, Spain) * Hansi Hettiarachchi (University of Lancaster, UK) * Andrei Mikheev (Daxtra Technologies, UK) * Damith Dola Mullage (University of Lancaster, UK) * Max Müller-Eberstein (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark) * Henry Oldroyd (University of Lancaster, UK) * Tharindu Ranasinghe (University of Lancaster, UK) WORKSHOPS and SHARED TASKS: The RANLP 2025 workshops and shared tasks will be held on 11-13 September 2025. The first workshops have already been selected (see below) and further proposals are expected by 31 March 2025. * The first Interdisciplinary Workshop on Observations of Misunderstood, Misguided and Malicious Use of Language Models (OMMM 2025), organised by Piotr Przybyła, Matthew Shardlow, Clara Colombatto and Nanna Inie * The first Workshop on Ethical Concerns in Training, Evaluating and Deploying Large Language Models (EthicalLLMs 2025), organised by Damith Premasiri, Tharindu Ranasinghe and Hansi Hettiarachchi. * Natural Language Processing and Language Models for Digital Humanities organised by Isuri Nanomi Arachchige, Francesca Frontini, Ruslan Mitkov and Paul Rayson * From rules to language models: comparative evaluation of NLP methods organised by Alicia Picazo-Izquierdo, Ernesto Luis Estevanell-Valladares, Ruslan Mitkov and Raúl García Cerdá * Advancing NLP for Low-Resource Languages organised by Ernesto Luis Estevanell-Valladares, Alicia Picazo-Izquierdo and Tharindu Ranasinghe The following SHARED TASKS have been accepted and Call for Participation has been distributed: * PolyHope-M: Bridging Hope Speech Detection Across Multiple Languages, organised by Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Sabur Butt, Maaz Amjad, Luis Jose Gonzalez-Gomez, Abdul Gafar Manuel Meque, Helena Gomez-Adorno, Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Grigori Sidorov, Thomas Mandl, Ruba Priyadharshini and Saranya Rajiakodi Task website - https://www.codabench.org/competitions/5635/ * Multilingual Coreference Resolution, organised by Vijay Sundar Ram, Pattabhi RK Rao and Sobha Lalitha Devi Task website - https://www.codabench.org/competitions/5759/ * Sentiment Analysis on Arabic Dialects in the Hospitality Domain: A Multi-Dialect Benchmark, organised by Maram I. Alharbi, Salmane Chafik, Ruslan Mitkov and Saad Ezzini Task website - https://ahasis-42267.web.app/ * Multi-Domain Detection of AI-Generated Text (M-DAIGT), organised by Salima Lamsiyah, Saad Ezzini, Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Hamza Alami, Abdessamad Benlahbib, Samir El Amrany, Salmane Chafik and Hicham Hammouchi Task website - https://ezzini.github.io/M-DAIGT/ * Identification of the severity of the depression in forum posts, organised by Isuri Anuradha, Hasintha Hewawasam, Deshan Koshala Sumanathilaka, Ruslan Mitkov, Paul Rayson and Saad Ezzini Task website - https://www.codabench.org/competitions/5894/ SUBMISSION OF PAPERS, POSTERS, DEMOS The submissions will be maintained by the conference management software START. For further instructions, please follow the submission information at the conference website at https://ranlp.org/ranlp2025/. The reviewing process will be anonymous. Double submission is acceptable, but authors will be asked to declare it at the time of submission. Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the Programme Committee. Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the proceedings. All RANLP papers have DOI numbers assigned. The full conference proceedings will be uploaded on the ACL Anthology. RANLP publishes Regular papers 8 pages (with 30 min oral presentation), Short papers 6 pages (with 20 min oral presentation), and Poster/Demo papers 4 pages (with presentation in a poster or demo session). Additional pages are allowed for references only. RANLP-2025 aims to provide early notification of acceptance to authors and presenters who need visa to enter Bulgaria. We invite early submissions of authors’ names and paper abstracts, in order to plan quick reviewing. Access to the conference management software will be available as from 1 April 2025. IMPORTANT DATES Deadline for submission of workshop proposals: 15 March 2025 31 March 2025 Workshop selection: 22 March 2025 2 April 2025 Conference abstracts submission: 11 May 2025 (strongly recommended, to facilitate review planning) Conference papers submission: 25 May 2025 Conference papers acceptance notification: 4 July 2025 Camera-ready versions of the conference papers: 31 July 2025 Workshop paper submission deadline (suggested): 6 July 2025 Workshop paper acceptance notification (suggested): 31 July 2025 Workshop paper camera-ready versions (suggested): 30 August 2025 Workshop camera-ready proceedings ready (suggested): 8 September 2025 RANLP Summer School on Deep Learning in NLP: 3-5 September 2025 RANLP tutorials: 6-7 September 2025 (Saturday-Sunday) RANLP conference: 8-10 September 2025 (Monday-Wednesday) RANLP workshops and Shared Tasks presentations: 11-13 September 2025 (Thursday-Saturday) VENUE RANLP 2025 will be held at the conference facilities of Hotel “Cherno More” (http://www.chernomorebg.com<http://www.chernomorebg.com/> ) in Varna, the largest city on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast. The event venue is centrally located at the entrance of the Sea Garden and offers excellent conference facilities. The city is a major tourist destination with flights to/from the Varna International Airport. It is also known for its Archaeological Museum, which features the oldest gold treasure in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_Necropolis). The conference organisers plan to arrange a visit to Provadia-Solnitsata, the oldest salt-production and urban centre in Europe (5600 - 4350 BC, https://provadia-solnitsata.com/en/ ) which is located 50 km from Varna. THE TEAM BEHIND RANLP-25 Galia Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Chair Organising Committee) Ruslan Mitkov, University of Lancaster, UK and University of Alicante, Spain (Chair Programme Committee) Nikolai Nikolov, Bulgarian Association for Computational Linguistics, Bulgaria Tharindu Ranasinghe, Lancaster University, UK (Workshops Chair and Shared tasks Co-Chair) Saad Ezzini, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia (Sponsorship Chair and Shared tasks Co-Chair) Maria Kunilovskaya, Saarland University, Germany (Publication Chair) Preslav Nakov, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE Ivelina Nikolova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshops Co-Chair) Petya Osenova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshops Co-Chair)

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Job Opening for Data Scientist (with a focus on natural language processing)
by Menno Van Zaanen 17 Mar '25

17 Mar '25

Job Opening for Data Scientist (with a focus on natural language processing) Application link: https://bit.ly/4iUSSAN Application deadline: 20 April 2025 As a Data Scientist at the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) you will have the opportunity to initiate and lead projects focusing on Human Language Technology and Digital Humanities stemming from your own research interests. You will work closely together with a team of researchers as part of SADiLaR’s extended network, both on your own and commissioned projects. Dissemination of project results at national and international conferences will be encouraged and supported. This position is crucial for research and development in Human Language Technology and Digital Humanities, fields that form the essence of SADiLaR, which is a national Research Infrastructure supported by the Department of Science and Innovation. Read more at https://www.sadilar.org. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES: * Research: Research in the area of Human Language Technology and Digital Humanities. * Project work: Initiating and contributing to Human Language Technology and Digital Humanities projects. * Teaching: Teaching in the area of Human Language Technology and Digital Humanities. * Mentorship: Mentorship of researchers in the field of Human Language Technology and Digital Humanities. Minimum requirements * A PhD (NQF level 10) in one of the following fields: Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Human Language Technology, Digital Humanities, Data Science, Computer Science, Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, or related fields. The PhD should have a focus on computational aspects of linguistics. * A minimum of (five) 5 years’ experience in the use of Python (other programming languages used within the computational linguistics or Digital Humanities domain can also be considered). * Evidence of peer-reviewed academic publications. * A minimum of (three) 3 years’ experience as a supervisor/co- supervisor of students or playing a mentorship/supervising role for individuals. * A minimum of (three) 3 years’ experience with using and/or developing computational tools. * A minimum of (three) 3 years experience related to research within the domain of Language Technology or Digital Humanities. * A minimum of (one) 1 year experience related to teaching or training within the domain of Language Technology or Digital Humanities. ADDED ADVANTAGE * Membership with Academic subject communities. Functional / Technical Competencies (Knowledge and Skills) * Advanced computer literacy. * Ability to lead research projects. * Experience in the presentation of research-based results at national and international conferences. * Experience with writing research reports. * Evidence of acquiring research funding. KEY BEHAVIOURAL COMPETENCIES: * Ability to work independently or as part of a team. * Ability to effectively liaise and communicate with public, students, colleagues, and other stakeholders at various levels and from diverse backgrounds. * Demonstration of language proficiency in order to function optimally in the various multilingual environments of SADiLaR. * Strong interest in the advancement of under-resourced South African languages. REMUNERATION The annual total remuneration package will be commensurate with the level of appointment as advertised and in line with the NWU policy guidelines. ENQUIRIES REGARDING JOB CONTENT MAY BE DIRECTED TO: Prof. Menno van Zaanen, E-mail: Menno.VanZaanen(a)nwu.ac.za ENQUIRIES REGARDING RECRUITMENT PROCESS MAY BE DIRECTED TO: Mr. Byron Louw, Tel No. 018 285 2304 CLOSING DATE: 20 April 2025 PLANNED COMMENCEMENT OF DUTIES: As soon as possible Kindly take note: applications must be submitted online through the official nwu vacancy website. Incomplete applications and those submitted through any other platform will not be considered. Application link: https://bit.ly/4iUSSAN -- Prof Menno van Zaanen menno.vanzaanen(a)nwu.ac.za Professor in Digital Humanities South African Centre for Digital Language Resources https://www.sadilar.org ________________________________ NWU PRIVACY STATEMENT: http://www.nwu.ac.za/it/gov-man/disclaimer.html DISCLAIMER: This e-mail message and attachments thereto are intended solely for the recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorised review, use, disclosure, or distribution is prohibited. If you have received the e-mail by mistake, please contact the sender or reply e-mail and delete the e-mail and its attachments (where appropriate) from your system. ________________________________

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