Dear All,

Together with Sunayana Sitaram, we are organizing a special session (Dialogue Systems for Multilingual and Under-resourced Language Speakershttps://sites.google.com/view/iwsds2023/special-sessions) at IWSDS’2023 (hosted by University of Southern California/Institute for Creative Technologies).

Looking forward to the academic and industrial contributions (deadline for papers: Oct.28th).

Feel free to email us if you have any questions.

Kind regards,

A.S. Doğruöz & Sunayana Sitaram

Here is the call:

"Current dialogue systems target mostly monolingual and high resource languages and their speakers. However, millions of speakers around the world (e.g., India, Africa, Europe as well as indigenous and immigrant communities in the US) are multilingual and it is normal for these speakers and communities to switch within or across languages in daily lives (Doğruöz & Sitaram, 2022; Doğruöz et al., 2021; Sitaram et al., 2019). In addition, most languages of the world are still under-resourced. Therefore, there is a need for dialogue systems to be more inclusive and target both the multilingual and under-resourced languages and their speakers. The aim of this special session is to bring together researchers from the SDS community and encourage research and discussion around the unique challenges (e.g., data collection, model building, sociolinguistic aspects and system evaluation) for multilingual and under-resourced languages."

References:

Doğruöz, A. S., & Sitaram, S. (2022). Language technologies for low resource languages : sociolinguistic and multilingual insights.https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8756694 In M. Melero, S. Sakti, & C. Soria (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (pp. 92–97). Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

Doğruöz, A. S., Sitaram, S., Bullock, B. E., & Toribio, A. J. (2021). A survey of code-switching : linguistic and social perspectives for language technologieshttps://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8712328. In C. Zong, F. Xia, W. Li, & R. Navigli (Eds.), 59TH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS AND THE 11TH INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, VOL 1 (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) (pp. 1654–1666). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.131

Sitaram et al., (2019). A Survey of Code-switched Speech and Language Processing. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00784