Dear SIGUL Members,
the second issue of the SIGUL Newsletter is out.
The SIGUL Newsletter intends to be a bi-weekly report on issues broadly related to the topics of language resources and tools for less-resourced languages. Your feedback will be welcome.
Claudia Soria SIGUL Co-chair
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*Calls for Papers*
- The 6th LTC Workshop on Less-Resourced Languages (LRL 2019), May 19, Poznan, Poland
In conjunction with LTC’19, the 9th Language and Technology Conference
Endorsed by SIGUL, the ELRA-ISCA SIG on less-resourced languages (http://www.elra.info/en/sig/sigul/).
The LRL Call for Papers is attached.
*Paper submission deadline: 20 March 2019*
Invited speaker: Delyth Prys, Head of the Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University, Wales, UK
- VarDial - Sixth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
VarDial 2019: https://sites.google.com/view/vardial2019
Co-located with NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis USA, at VarDial we anticipate discussion on computational methods and on language resources for closely related languages, language varieties and dialects.
Together with the VarDial workshop, the third edition of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign with five shared tasks is being organized: https://sites.google.com/view/vardial2019/campaign
- IYIL2019 Global Call for Research Papers, deadline extended to 15 March 2019: https://en.iyil2019.org/newsletter/deadline-extended-iyil2019-global-call-fo...
* * **Call for participation**
- The time schedule for the 17th International Conference on Minority Languages (ICML XVII) is now online. With over 150 participants already, flying in from all over the world, this edition will be (again) incredibly interesting! You can find the schedules and all other information on https://icml.eu/. The conference is taking place 22-24 May 2019 and you can combine it with LRL 2019 in Poznan the week before for a full immersion in minority and less-resourced languages!
**Software development**
Are you interested in beta-testing LangSaver, a new iOS workflow for recording and organizing language materials? Mitch Nesbitt is looking for language workers and linguists to try it out and give feedback. Check out the GitHub page at https://github.com/mtchnsbtt/langsave !
**Funding opportunities**
- Google grants Wikimedia 3.1 M$ for addressing minority languages. See also : https://www.socialbeat.in/blog/kpmg-google-study-on-regional-content/
**Useful resources**
- Endangered Alphabets Atlas: https://www.endangeredalphabets.net
**Miscellaneous**
- Planet Word, the museum where language comes to life.
The museum plans to open in Washington D.C., in late 2019. Visitors will engage in activities that make words and language exciting with delightful programming and playful, interactive exhibits. https://www.planetwordmuseum.org/welcome
- Can you identify the world's languages from an audio clip? NameThatLanguage is a game that tests your skill at recognizing spoken languages. See how many points you can score while assisting language research. https://namethatlanguage.org
- On January 28, Joseph Mariani, Honorary President of ELRA, gave an overview of Language Technologies available to support the digital use of #IndigenousLanguages and their preservation. He also introduced LT4All a conference which could tackle those issue in the framework of UNESCO International Year Of Indigenous Languages, https://en.iyil2019.org/official-global-launch-event-of-the-2019-internation...
- LREC2020: the twelfth edition of LREC will take place in Marseille (France) on May 11-16, 2020 (http://www.elra.info/en/lrec/). Updates on Twitter account @LREC2020