computational linguistics

LaTeCH-CLfL 2021:
The 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

to be held on-line on 11 November 2021 in conjunction with EMNLP 2021

https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2021/

Third -- and last -- Call for Papers (with apologies for cross-posting)

Organisers: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz

LaTeCH-CLfL 2021 is the fifth in a series of meetings for NLP researchers who work with data from the broadly understood arts, humanities and social sciences, and for specialists in those disciplines who apply NLP techniques in their work. The workshop continues a long tradition of annual meetings. The SIGHUM Workshops on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH) ran from 2007 to 2016. The ACL Workshops on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLfL) took place from 2012 to 2016. The first four joint workshops (LaTeCH-CLfL) were held from 2017 to 2020.

Topics and Content

In the Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Heritage and literary communities, there is increasing interest in, and demand for, NLP methods for semantic and structural annotation, intelligent linking, discovery, querying, cleaning and visualization of both primary and secondary data. This is even true of primarily non-textual collections, given that text is also the pervasive medium for metadata. Such applications pose new challenges for NLP research: noisy, non-standard textual or multi-modal input, historical languages, vague research concepts, multilingual parts within one document, and so no. Digital resources often have insufficient coverage; resource-intensive methods require (semi-)automatic processing tools and domain adaptation, or intense manual effort (e.g., annotation).

Literary texts bring their own problems, because navigating this form of creative expression requires more than the typical information-seeking tools. Examples of advanced tasks include the study of literature of a certain period, author or sub-genre, recognition of certain literary devices, or quantitative analysis of poetry.

NLP methods applied in this context not only need to achieve high performance, but are often applied as a first step in research or scholarly workflow. That is why it is crucial to interpret model results properly; model interpretability might be more important than raw performance scores, depending on the context.

More generally, there is a growing interest in computational models whose results can be used or interpreted in meaningful ways. It is, therefore, of mutual benefit that NLP experts, data specialists and Digital Humanities researchers who work in and across their domains get involved in the Computational Linguistics community and present their fundamental or applied research results. It has already been demonstrated how cross-disciplinary exchange not only supports work in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage communities but also promotes work in the Computational Linguistics community to build richer and more effective tools and models.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• adaptation of NLP tools to Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and literature;
• automatic error detection and cleaning of textual data;
• complex annotation schemas, tools and interfaces;
• creation (fully- or semi-automatic) of semantic resources;
• creation and analysis of social networks of literary characters;
• discourse and narrative analysis/modelling, notably in literature;
• emotion analysis for the humanities and for literature;
• generation of literary narrative, dialogue or poetry;
• identification and analysis of literary genres;
• linking and retrieving information from different sources, media, and domains;
• modelling dialogue literary style for generation;
• modelling of information and knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage;
• profiling and authorship attribution;
• search for scientific and/or scholarly literature;
• work with linguistic variation and non-standard or historical use of language.

Information for Authors

We invite papers on original, unpublished work in the topic areas of the workshop. In addition to long papers, we will consider short papers and system descriptions (demos). We also welcome position papers.

• Long papers, presenting completed work, may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of references; final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
• A short paper / demo can present work in progress, or the description of a system, and may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus additional pages of references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings.
• A position paper — clearly marked as such — should not exceed six (6) pages including references.

All submissions are to use the EMNLP stylesheets (for LaTeX / Overleaf and MS Word), to be announced soon at https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/. Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF, via the LaTeCH-CLfL2021 submission website at https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/LaTeCHCLfL/.

Reviewing will be double-blind. Please do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, or any references to Web sites, project names, acknowledgements and so on — anything that immediately reveals the authors’ identity. Self-references should be kept to a reasonable minimum, and anonymous citations cannot be used. Please see https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/#anonymity-period for the official EMNLP policy (except that our anonymity period starts later).

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and later available in the ACL Anthology.

Important Dates

Anonymity period begins on July 1, 2021.
Paper submission deadline: August 5, 2021
Notification of acceptance: September 5, 2021
Camera-ready papers due: September 15, 2021
Workshop date: December 11, 2021

More on the organisers

Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
Anna Kazantseva, National Research Council of Canada
Nils Reiter, Department for Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Stan Szpakowicz, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa

Contact

latech-clfl [at] googlegroups.com

LaTeCH-CLfL 2021:
The 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

to be held on-line on 11 November 2021 in conjunction with EMNLP 2021

https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2021/

Second Call for Papers (with apologies for cross-posting)

Organisers: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz

LaTeCH-CLfL 2021 is the fifth in a series of meetings for NLP researchers who work with data from the broadly understood arts, humanities and social sciences, and for specialists in those disciplines who apply NLP techniques in their work. The workshop continues a long tradition of annual meetings. The SIGHUM Workshops on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH) ran from 2007 to 2016. The ACL Workshops on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLfL) took place from 2012 to 2016. The first four joint workshops (LaTeCH-CLfL) were held from 2017 to 2020.

Topics and Content

In the Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Heritage and literary communities, there is increasing interest in, and demand for, NLP methods for semantic and structural annotation, intelligent linking, discovery, querying, cleaning and visualization of both primary and secondary data. This is even true of primarily non-textual collections, given that text is also the pervasive medium for metadata. Such applications pose new challenges for NLP research: noisy, non-standard textual or multi-modal input, historical languages, vague research concepts, multilingual parts within one document, and so no. Digital resources often have insufficient coverage; resource-intensive methods require (semi-)automatic processing tools and domain adaptation, or intense manual effort (e.g., annotation).

Literary texts bring their own problems, because navigating this form of creative expression requires more than the typical information-seeking tools. Examples of advanced tasks include the study of literature of a certain period, author or sub-genre, recognition of certain literary devices, or quantitative analysis of poetry.

NLP methods applied in this context not only need to achieve high performance, but are often applied as a first step in research or scholarly workflow. That is why it is crucial to interpret model results properly; model interpretability might be more important than raw performance scores, depending on the context.

More generally, there is a growing interest in computational models whose results can be used or interpreted in meaningful ways. It is, therefore, of mutual benefit that NLP experts, data specialists and Digital Humanities researchers who work in and across their domains get involved in the Computational Linguistics community and present their fundamental or applied research results. It has already been demonstrated how cross-disciplinary exchange not only supports work in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage communities but also promotes work in the Computational Linguistics community to build richer and more effective tools and models.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• adaptation of NLP tools to Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and literature;
• automatic error detection and cleaning of textual data;
• complex annotation schemas, tools and interfaces;
• creation (fully- or semi-automatic) of semantic resources;
• creation and analysis of social networks of literary characters;
• discourse and narrative analysis/modelling, notably in literature;
• emotion analysis for the humanities and for literature;
• generation of literary narrative, dialogue or poetry;
• identification and analysis of literary genres;
• linking and retrieving information from different sources, media, and domains;
• modelling dialogue literary style for generation;
• modelling of information and knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage;
• profiling and authorship attribution;
• search for scientific and/or scholarly literature;
• work with linguistic variation and non-standard or historical use of language.

Information for Authors

We invite papers on original, unpublished work in the topic areas of the workshop. In addition to long papers, we will consider short papers and system descriptions (demos). We also welcome position papers.

• Long papers, presenting completed work, may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of references; final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
• A short paper / demo can present work in progress, or the description of a system, and may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus additional pages of references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings.
• A position paper — clearly marked as such — should not exceed six (6) pages including references.

All submissions are to use the EMNLP stylesheets (for LaTeX / Overleaf and MS Word), to be announced soon at https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/. Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF, via the LaTeCH-CLfL2021 submission website at https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/LaTeCHCLfL/.

Reviewing will be double-blind. Please do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, or any references to Web sites, project names, acknowledgements and so on — anything that immediately reveals the authors’ identity. Self-references should be kept to a reasonable minimum, and anonymous citations cannot be used. Please see https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/#anonymity-period for the official EMNLP policy (except that our anonymity period starts later).

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and later available in the ACL Anthology.

Important Dates

Anonymity period begins on July 1, 2021.
Paper submission deadline: August 5, 2021
Notification of acceptance: September 5, 2021
Camera-ready papers due: September 15, 2021
Workshop date: December 11, 2021

More on the organisers

Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
Anna Kazantseva, National Research Council of Canada
Nils Reiter, Department for Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Stan Szpakowicz, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa

Contact

latech-clfl [at] googlegroups.com

Final call for papers: Sumbission deadline extension -> October 4th!
=========================================

Depling 2021 will be held at the SyntaxFest in Sofia, during the week of March 21-March 25, 2022. The event will be held online, face-to-face or hybrid, depending on the health situation. The proceedings will be published preemptively, in December 2021.

Depling is a bi-annual conference dedicated to dependency-based approaches in linguistics and natural language processing. Dependencies, directed labeled graph structures representing hierarchical relations between morphemes, words or semantic units, have now become the standard representation of syntactic resources and NLP technologies. Depling has become the central event for people discussing the linguistic significance of these structures, their theoretical and formal foundations, their processing, and their use in NLP tools.

Selected topics of interest
----------------------------
For this edition, we would like to put a special emphasis on two topics of interest:
- the epistemological and historical foundations of dependency linguistics (how dependency is defined, how it emerged, how it was formalized, etc.);
- relations between theoretical dependency linguistics and NLP tasks (how, e.g., syntactic models are framed to achieve specific tasks, how the results of such computational tasks modify our conceptions about linguistic modeling, etc.).

Other topics are of course welcome. Topics include but are not limited to:
- The use of dependency structures in theoretical linguistics; a.o.:
- The use of syntactic trees to model syntactic relations;
- The use of semantic, valency-based or predicate-argument graph structures;
- The use of dependency-like structures to model semantic and pragmatic phenomena related to information structure;
- The use of dependency-like structures beyond the sentence (e.g., to model discourse phenomena);
- The elaboration of formal lexicons for dependency-based syntax and semantics, including descriptions of collocations and paradigmatic relations;
- The use of dependency in the field of linguistic universals, and typology.
- Historical and epistemological foundations of dependency grammar:
- The definition of the very notion of dependency;
- The development and the use of dependency-based diagrams;
- Dependency grammar and its relation to other formalisms;
- The use of dependency-like concepts in the history of grammar and linguistics.
- The use of the dependency structures in corpus linguistics:
- Corpus annotation and development of dependency-based treebanks and other linguistic resources of written and spoken texts;
- Recent advances in dependency-based parsing, and text generation;
- Cross-lingual dependency parser evaluation, with particular emphasis on intrinsic evaluation metrics.
- The relation between dependency-based grammar and other fields of science, such as, e.g., the psycholinguistic relevance of dependency grammar.

Paper submission information
----------------------------
Papers should describe original work related to dependency-based linguistics. They should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest to the attendees. All the details for submission can be found on the conference page.

Important dates
---------------
06 Sep. 2021: Announcement of conference modality
04 Oct. 2021 (updated): Submission deadlines for long and short papers
01 Nov. 2021: Long and short papers reviews due
10 Nov. 2021: Acceptance notification
30 Nov. 2021: Camera-ready version
21-25th March 2022: Conference
Attendants are encouraged but not obliged to participate in the whole SyntaxFest

The International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR) is the main event in the area of human language processing that is focused on theoretical and technological issues of written and spoken Portuguese and Galician. The meeting has been a very rich forum for the exchange of ideas and partnerships for the research and industry communities dedicated to the automated processing of Portuguese, promoting the development of methodologies, resources and projects that can be shared among researchers and practitioners in the field.

***We decided that PROPOR 2022 will either be fully online or hybrid, depending on how the travel restrictions rules will change in the next few months. Therefore, we will ensure online options for participants that prefer not to attend the conference in-person. In the case of a hybrid conference, we will also guarantee fair registration fees for online and in-person attendees.***

PROPOR 2022 will have three Invited Speakers:
-> Maria José Bocorny Finatto (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul- UFRGS, Brazil)
-> Rada Mihalcea (University of Michigan, USA)
-> Sebastião Miranda (Head of Development at Priberam, Portugal),
coming from universities and industry.

We call for papers describing work on any topic related to computational language and speech processing of Portuguese by researchers in the industry or academia. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Human speech production, perception and communication
- NLP-oriented linguistic description or theoretical analysis
- Natural language processing tasks (e.g. parsing, word sense disambiguation, coreference resolution)
- Natural language processing applications (e.g. question answering, subtitling, summarization, sentiment analysis)
- Speech technologies (e.g. spoken language generation, speech and speaker recognition, spoken language understanding)
- Speech applications (e.g. spoken language interfaces, dialogue systems, speech-to-speech translation)
- Resources, standardization and evaluation (e.g. corpora, ontologies, lexicons, grammars)
- Language and speech processing in academic disciplines
- Portuguese language variants and dialect processing (including the language varieties of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Galicia, Guinea Bissau, Macao, Mozambique, Portugal, and Sao Tome and Principe)
- Multilingual studies, methods, applications and resources including Portuguese

== Tracks ==
Considering the importance of language resources in the development and sustainability of language technologies, and the impact of natural language processing in the conception of innovative tools, services and applications,
PROPOR will have for the first time two tracks dedicated to Linguistics and Resources and to Industry, apart from the traditional NLP research track (named "General").

- Linguistics and Resources track papers can describe work focusing on linguistic research and development activities leading to rich and innovative language resources usable and useful for NLP. This track is specifically designed for (but not limited to) papers describing:
-- NLP-oriented linguistic description or theoretical analysis
-- Resources, standardization and evaluation (e.g. corpora, ontologies, lexicons, grammars)

- Industry track papers can describe work on any topic listed above, focusing on research and development activities on language technologies framed by industrial and/or commercial settings and goals.

== Venue ==
PROPOR 2022 will be held at the University of Fortaleza (Fortaleza - CE, Brazil) from March 21st to March 23rd. While we aim to host the conference in-person in Fortaleza, we are constantly monitoring the pandemic situation, and will provide suitable online options if needed.
PROPOR 2022 will be the 15th edition of the biennial PROPOR conference, hosted alternately in Brazil and in Portugal. Past meetings were held in Lisbon, PT (1993); Curitiba, BR (1996); Porto Alegre, BR (1998); Évora, PT (1999); Atibaia, BR (2000); Faro, PT (2003); Itatiaia, BR (2006); Aveiro, PT (2008); Porto Alegre, BR (2010); Coimbra, PT (2012); São Carlos, BR (2014), Tomar, PT (2016), Canela, BR (2018) and Évora, PT (2020).

== Submissions ==
Submissions for all tracks should describe original, unpublished work. Authors are invited to submit two kinds of papers:

- Full papers – Reporting substantial and completed work, especially those that may contribute in a significant way to the advancement of the area. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. Full papers can have up to 8 content pages + 2 pages for references.

- Short papers – Reporting small, focused contributions such as ongoing work, position papers, potential ideas to be discussed, negative results, or an interesting application nugget. Short papers can have up to 4 content pages + 1 page for references.

Authors are asked to indicate the submission track: Linguistic and Resources, Industry or General.

Each submission will be evaluated by at least three reviewers. As reviewing will be double-blind, submitted papers must be anonymized, that is, they should not contain the authors’ names and affiliations. Authors must avoid self-references that reveal identity, like, “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”. Instead, they should prefer citations such as “Smith (1991) previously showed …”. Separate author identification information will be required as part of the submission process.
Submissions should be written in English. At submission time, only PDF format is accepted. For the final versions, authors of accepted papers will be given 1 extra content page to take the reviews into account. Authors of accepted papers will be requested to send the source files for the production of the proceedings. All submitted papers must conform to the Springer LNAI/LNCS guidelines and use the LaTeX or MS Word stylesheets below:
LaTeX styelesheet (ftp://ftp.springernature.com/cs-proceeding/llncs/llncs2e.zip)
MS Word stylesheet (ftp://ftp.springernature.com/cs-proceeding/llncs/word/splnproc1703.zip)

The URL for paper submission is https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=propor2022

== Multiple-submission policy==
For submissions that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications, this information must be provided at submission time. If a submission is accepted, authors must notify the program chairs indicating which meeting they choose for presentation of their work. Papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere, cannot be accepted for publication or presentation.

== Important dates ==
- Full and short paper submission deadline: 27/09/2021 NEW: 25/10/2021 (23:59 GMT+1)
- Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: 05/11/2021 NEW: 02/12/2021
- Camera-ready papers due: 19/11/2021 NEW: 23/12/2021
- Conference: March 21st - 23rd, 2022

== Publication ==
The proceedings of PROPOR 2022 will be published by Springer as a volume of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Series. They will be available online. To ensure publication, at least one author of each accepted paper must complete a full registration for PROPOR 2022 by the early registration deadline.

LaTeCH-CLfL 2020:
The 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

to be held on 10 or 11 November 2021 in conjunction with EMNLP 2021, either in the Dominican Republic or on-line

https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2021/

First Call for Papers (with apologies for cross-posting)

Organisers: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz

LaTeCH-CLfL 2021 is the fifth in a series of meetings for NLP researchers who work with data from the broadly understood arts, humanities and social sciences, and for specialists in those disciplines who apply NLP techniques in their work. The workshop continues a long tradition of annual meetings. The SIGHUM Workshops on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH) ran from 2007 to 2016. The ACL Workshops on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLfL) took place from 2012 to 2016. The first four joint workshops (LaTeCH-CLfL) were held from 2017 to 2020.

Topics and Content

In the Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Heritage and literary communities, there is increasing interest in, and demand for, NLP methods for semantic and structural annotation, intelligent linking, discovery, querying, cleaning and visualization of both primary and secondary data. This is even true of primarily non-textual collections, given that text is also the pervasive medium for metadata. Such applications pose new challenges for NLP research: noisy, non-standard textual or multi-modal input, historical languages, vague research concepts, multilingual parts within one document, and so no. Digital resources often have insufficient coverage; resource-intensive methods require (semi-)automatic processing tools and domain adaptation, or intense manual effort (e.g., annotation).

Literary texts bring their own problems, because navigating this form of creative expression requires more than the typical information-seeking tools. Examples of advanced tasks include the study of literature of a certain period, author or sub-genre, recognition of certain literary devices, or quantitative analysis of poetry.

NLP methods applied in this context not only need to achieve high performance, but are often applied as a first step in research or scholarly workflow. That is why it is crucial to interpret model results properly; model interpretability might be more important than raw performance scores, depending on the context.

More generally, there is a growing interest in computational models whose results can be used or interpreted in meaningful ways. It is, therefore, of mutual benefit that NLP experts, data specialists and Digital Humanities researchers who work in and across their domains get involved in the Computational Linguistics community and present their fundamental or applied research results. It has already been demonstrated how cross-disciplinary exchange not only supports work in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage communities but also promotes work in the Computational Linguistics community to build richer and more effective tools and models.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• adaptation of NLP tools to Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and literature;
• automatic error detection and cleaning of textual data;
• complex annotation schemas, tools and interfaces;
• creation (fully- or semi-automatic) of semantic resources;
• creation and analysis of social networks of literary characters;
• discourse and narrative analysis/modelling, notably in literature;
• emotion analysis for the humanities and for literature;
• generation of literary narrative, dialogue or poetry;
• identification and analysis of literary genres;
• linking and retrieving information from different sources, media, and domains;
• modelling dialogue literary style for generation;
• modelling of information and knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage;
• profiling and authorship attribution;
• search for scientific and/or scholarly literature;
• work with linguistic variation and non-standard or historical use of language.

Information for Authors

We invite papers on original, unpublished work in the topic areas of the workshop. In addition to long papers, we will consider short papers and system descriptions (demos). We also welcome position papers.

• Long papers, presenting completed work, may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of references; final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
• A short paper / demo can present work in progress, or the description of a system, and may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus additional pages of references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings.
• A position paper — clearly marked as such — should not exceed six (6) pages including references.

All submissions are to use the EMNLP stylesheets (for LaTeX / Overleaf and MS Word), to be announced soon at https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/. Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF, via the LaTeCH-CLfL2021 submission website at https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/LaTeCHCLfL/.

Reviewing will be double-blind. Please do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, or any references to Web sites, project names, acknowledgements and so on — anything that immediately reveals the authors’ identity. Self-references should be kept to a reasonable minimum, and anonymous citations cannot be used. Please see https://2021.emnlp.org/call-for-papers/#anonymity-period for the official EMNLP policy (except that our anonymity period starts later).

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and later available in the ACL Anthology.

Important Dates

Anonymity period begins on July 1, 2021.
Paper submission deadline: August 5, 2021
Notification of acceptance: September 5, 2021
Camera-ready papers due: September 15, 2021
Workshop date: December 10 or 11, 2021

More on the organisers

Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
Anna Kazantseva, National Research Council of Canada
Nils Reiter, Department for Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Stan Szpakowicz, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa

Contact

latech-clfl [at] googlegroups.com

Today, the unprecedented quantity of easily accessible data on social, political, and economic processes offers ground-breaking potential in guiding data-driven analysis in social and human sciences and in driving informed policy-making processes. The need for precise and high-quality information about a wide variety of events ranging from political violence, environmental catastrophes, and conflict, to international economic and health crises has rapidly escalated (Porta and Diani, 2015; Coleman et al. 2014). Governments, multilateral organizations, local and global NGOs, and social movements present an increasing demand for this data to prevent or resolve conflicts, provide relief for those that are afflicted, or improve the lives of and protect citizens in a variety of ways. For instance, Black Lives Matter protests and conflict in Syria events are only two examples where we must understand, analyze, and improve the real-life situations using such data.

Event extraction has long been a challenge for the natural language processing (NLP) community as it requires sophisticated methods in defining event ontologies, creating language resources, and developing algorithmic approaches (Pustojevsky et al. 2003; Boroş, 2018; Chen et al. 2021). Social and political scientists have been working to create socio-political event databases such as ACLED, EMBERS, GDELT, ICEWS, MMAD, PHOENIX, POLDEM, SPEED, TERRIER, and UCDP following similar steps for decades. These projects and the new ones increasingly rely on machine learning (ML) and NLP methods to deal better with the vast amount and variety of data in this domain (Hürriyetoğlu et al. 2020). Automation offers scholars not only the opportunity to improve existing practices, but also to vastly expand the scope of data that can be collected and studied, thus potentially opening up new research frontiers within the field of socio-political events, such as political violence & social movements. But automated approaches as well suffer from major issues like bias, generalizability, class imbalance, training data limitations, and ethical issues that have the potential to affect the results and their use drastically (Lau and Baldwin 2020; Bhatia et al. 2020; Chang et al. 2019). Moreover, the results of the automated systems for socio-political event information collection may not be comparable to each other or not of sufficient quality (Wang et al. 2016; Schrodt 2020).

Socio-political events are varied and nuanced. Both the political context and the local language used may affect whether and how they are reported. Therefore, all steps of information collection (event definition, language resources, and manual or algorithmic steps) may need to be constantly updated, leading to a series of challenging questions: Do events related to minority groups are represented well? Are new types of events covered? Are the event definitions and their operationalization comparable across systems? (Hürriyetoğlu 2019, 2020a, 2020b) This workshop aims to seek answers to this kind of questions, to inspire innovative technological and scientific solutions for tackling the aforementioned issues, and to quantify the quality of the automated event extraction systems. Moreover, the workshop will trigger a deeper understanding of the performance of the computational tools used and the usability of the resulting socio-political event datasets.

We invite contributions from researchers in computer science, NLP, ML, AI, socio-political sciences, conflict analysis and forecasting, peace studies, as well as computational social science scholars involved in the collection and utilization of socio-political event data. This includes (but is not limited to) the following topics
* Extracting events in and beyond a sentence
* Training data collection and annotation processes
* Event coreference detection
* Event-event relations, e.g., subevents, main events, causal relations
* Event dataset evaluation in light of reliability and validity metrics
* Defining, populating, and facilitating event schemas and ontologies
* Automated tools and pipelines for event collection related tasks
* Lexical, Syntactic, and pragmatic aspects of event information manifestation
* Development and analysis of rule-based, ML, hybrid, and human-in-the-loop approaches for creating event datasets
* COVID-19 related socio-political events
* Applications of event databases
* Online social movements
* Bias and fairness of the sources and event datasets
* Estimating what is missing in event datasets using internal and external information
* Novel event detection
* Release of new event datasets
* Ethics, misinformation, privacy, and fairness concerns pertaining to event datasets
* Copyright issues on event dataset creation, dissemination, and sharing
* Qualities of the event information on various online and offline platforms

*** Keynotes ***

We invite leading scholars in computational linguistics and social and political sciences to deliver keynote speeches on collecting and exploiting socio-political event information.

Computational linguistics: Elizabeth Boschee is the Director of the Boston office of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and a Senior Supervising Computer Scientist in the Emerging Activities division. Her current efforts focus on cross-lingual information extraction, retrieval, and summarization, specifically targeting low or zero-resource settings, e.g. cross-lingual settings with <1M words of bitext or event extraction from non-English languages with only English training data. Prior to joining ISI, Boschee spent 17 years at BBN Technologies. As a Lead Scientist there, she was the chief architect of the BBN ACCENT event coder, the technology behind the W-ICEWS event data, which more than doubled the precision (while still increasing recall) of the previously deployed solution for CAMEO event coding.

Social and political sciences: Kristine Eck is an Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, where she serves as the Director of the Uppsala Rotary Peace Center. Her research interests concern coercion and resistance, including human rights, police misconduct, state surveillance, and conflict data production. She served as the Director of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) 2017-2018 and has been a Visiting Researcher at Oxford University, Copenhagen University, the University of Notre Dame, and Kobe University. Dr. Eck’s research has been funded by the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.

**** Submissions *****

This call solicits full papers reporting original and unpublished research on the topics listed above. The papers should emphasize obtained results rather than intended work and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Submissions should be between 4 and 8 pages in total. Authors are also invited to submit short papers not exceeding 4 pages (plus two additional pages for references). Short papers should describe:

a small, focused contribution;
work in progress;
a negative result;
a position paper.
a report on shared task participation.

Papers should be submitted on the START page of the workshop (link: TBD) in PDF format, in compliance with the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 author guidelines provided on https://2021.aclweb.org/calls/papers.

The reviewing process will be double-blind and papers should not include the authors’ names and affiliations. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. If you do include any author names on the title page, your submission will be automatically rejected. In the body of your submission, you should eliminate all direct references to your own previous work. Finally, the workshop Proceedings will be published on ACL Anthology.

**** Shared tasks ****

We are preparing a cross-lingual (Spanish, Portuguese, and English), which was only in English in previous events we organized, a socio-political event information classification and extraction task. Moreover, we are preparing two additional data challenges about protests pertaining to BlackLivesMatter and COVID19[3]. These challenges will be about automatically replicating the spatiotemporal distribution of a manually curated events list. Common Crawl News will be exploited as a data source. Moreover, a Twitter dataset will be shared with the participants as well.

A Codalab page will be set up for each task. Participating teams will be required to submit a report, which will be peer-reviewed, describing the methods and results they ran on the data. We encourage submissions of the system papers on our available benchmarks (ProtestNews @ CLEF 2020 and AESPEN @ LREC 2020). Please find details of these datasets and shared tasks on Hürriyetoğlu et al. (2019, 2020a, and 2020b).

Please send an e-mail to ahurriyetoglu@ku.edu.tr if you would like to participate in any of the shared tasks.
**** Important dates ****

April 26, 2021: Workshop Paper Due Date
May 28, 2021: Notification of Acceptance
June 7, 2021: Camera-ready papers due
August 5-6, 2021: Workshop Dates

Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth").

**** Organization Committee ****

Ali Hürriyetoğlu (Koc University, Turkey)
Hristo Tanev (Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, Italy)
Vanni Zavarella (Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, Italy)
Reyyan Yeniterzi (Sabancı University, Turkey)
Aline Villavicencio (University of Sheffield, the United Kingdom; and Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
Erdem Yörük (Koc University, Turkey),
Deniz Yuret (Koc University, Turkey),
Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland),
Gautam Kishore Shahi (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany).

**** Program Committee ****

Tommaso Caselli (University of Groningen, the Netherlands),
Osman Mutlu (Koc University, Turkey),
Fırat Duruşan (Koc University, Turkey),
Ali Safaya (Koc University, Turkey),
Bharathi Raja Asoka Chakravarthi (Insight SFI Centre for Data Analytics, the United Kingdom),
Gautam Kishore Shahi (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany),
Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland),
Matina Halkia (European Commission – Joint Research Centre, Italy),
Benjamin J. Radford (UNC Charlotte, the United States),
Mark Lee (University of Birmingham, the United Kingdom),
YiJyun Lin (University of Nevada, the United States),
Fredrik Olsson (RISE, Sweden),
Kristine Eck (Uppsala University, Sweden),
Nelleke Oostdijk (Radboud University, the Netherlands),
Francielle Vargas (University of São Paulo, Brazil),
Farhana Liza (University of Essex, the UK),
Nicoletta Calzolari (Institute for Computational Linguistics, Italy),
Milena Slavcheva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria),
Harish Tayyar Madabushi (University of Birmingham, the United Kingdom),
Ritesh Kumar (Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University, India),
Alexandra DeLucia (Johns Hopkins University, United States),
Jasmine Lorenzini (University of Geneva, Switzerland),
Kalliopi Zervanou Eindhoven (University of Technology the Netherlands).

Second announcement and call for papers for EACL 2021.

The 16th conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) will be held from 19 to 23 April, 2021. While we were planning to hold the conference in Kyiv, due to the current COVID situation the conference will be held entirely online.

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes poster sessions, tutorials, workshops, and demonstrations in addition to the main conference, As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

We invite submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of natural language processing, including but not limited to the following areas:

* Cognitive modeling and Psycholinguistics
* Dialog and Interactive Systems
* Discourse and Pragmatics
* Document analysis including Text Categorization, Topic Models and Information Retrieval
* Generation
* Information Extraction, Text Mining and Question Answering
* Machine learning in NLP
* Machine translation
* Multilinguality
* Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation
* Resources and Evaluation
* Semantics
* Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
* Social Media
* Speech
* Summarization
* Tagging, Chunking, Syntax, and Parsing
* Vision, Robots, and other Grounding

To reflect recent growing areas of interest, this year we will hold three additional tracks:

* Interpretability and Explainability
* Green and Sustainable NLP
* NLP and Crisis Management

Furthermore, we also welcome position papers reflecting on the current state-of-the-art in relation to prior research and future directions.

Important Dates

7 October, 2020: Revised submission deadline (long and short papers)
19-20 April, 2021: Tutorials and workshops
21-23 April, 2021: Main conference

Please visit https://2021.eacl.org for more information and follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/eaclmeeting

From the EACL 2021 organisers.

LaTeCH-CLfL 2020:
The 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

to be held in conjunction with COLING 2020 in Barcelona as a virtual event

https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2020/

Renewed Second, and Last, Call for Papers (with apologies for cross-posting)

Organisers: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz

= = = = = = = = = = = =
COLING will be run virtually, and so will our workshop. Look for more details on the workshop Web site.
= = = = = = = = = = = =

LaTeCH-CLfL 2020 is the fourth joint meeting of two communities with overlapping research goals and a similar research focus. The SIGHUM Workshops on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH) have been a forum for researchers who develop new technologies for improved information access to data from the broadly understood humanities and social sciences. The ACL Workshops on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLfL) have focussed on applications of NLP to a wide variety of literary data. The first three joint workshop (LaTeCH-CLfL 2017, 2018 and 2019) brought together people from both communities. We count on this workshop to broaden the scope of our work even further, and to encourage new common research initiatives.

Topics and content

In the Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Heritage and literary communities, there is increasing interest in, and demand for, NLP methods for semantic and structural annotation, intelligent linking, discovery, querying, cleaning and visualization of both primary and secondary data. This is even true of primarily non-textual collections, given that text is also the pervasive medium for metadata. Such applications pose new challenges for NLP research: noisy, non-standard textual or multi-modal input, historical languages, vague research concepts, multilingual parts within one document, and so no. Digital resources often have insufficient coverage; resource-intensive methods require (semi-)automatic processing tools and domain adaptation, or intense manual effort (e.g., annotation).

Literary texts bring their own problems, because navigating this form of creative expression requires more than the typical information-seeking tools. Examples of advanced tasks include the study of literature of a certain period, author or sub-genre, recognition of certain literary devices, or quantitative analysis of poetry.

NLP methods applied in this context not only need to achieve high performance, but are often applied as a first step in research or scholarly workflow. That is why it is crucial to interpret model results properly; model interpretability might be more important than raw performance scores, depending on the context.

More generally, there is a growing interest in computational models whose results can be used or interpreted in meaningful ways. It is, therefore, of mutual benefit that NLP experts, data specialists and Digital Humanities researchers who work in and across their domains get involved in the Computational Linguistics community and present their fundamental or applied research results. It has already been demonstrated how cross-disciplinary exchange not only supports work in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage communities but also promotes work in the Computational Linguistics community to build richer and more effective tools and models.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• adaptation of NLP tools to Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and literature;
• automatic error detection and cleaning of textual data;
• complex annotation schemas, tools and interfaces;
• creation (fully- or semi-automatic) of semantic resources;
• creation and analysis of social networks of literary characters;
• discourse and narrative analysis/modelling, notably in literature;
• emotion analysis for the humanities and for literature;
• generation of literary narrative, dialogue or poetry;
• identification and analysis of literary genres;
• linking and retrieving information from different sources, media, and domains;
• modelling dialogue literary style for generation;
• modelling of information and knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage;
• profiling and authorship attribution;
• search for scientific and/or scholarly literature;
• work with linguistic variation and non-standard or historical use of language.

Invited speaker

The workshop will feature an invited talk, as usual. The speaker will be Professor Elke Teich. See the relevant workshop Web page for her profile.

Information for authors

We invite papers on original, unpublished work in the topic areas of the workshop. In addition to long papers, we will consider short papers and system descriptions (demos). We also welcome position papers.

• Long papers, presenting completed work, may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of references; final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
• A short paper / demo can present work in progress, or the description of a system, and may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus additional pages of references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings.
• A position paper — clearly marked as such — should not exceed six (6) pages including references.

All submissions must adhere to the COLING stylesheets (for LaTeX and MS Word) posted at https://coling2020.org/coling2020.zip. Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF, at https://www.softconf.com/coling2020/LaTeCH-CLfL/.

Reviewing will be double-blind. Please do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, or any references to Web sites, project names, acknowledgements and so on — anything that immediately reveals the authors’ identity. Self-references should be kept to a reasonable minimum, and anonymous citations cannot be used.

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and later available in the ACL Anthology.

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: September 25, 2020
Notification of acceptance: October 26, 2020
Camera-ready papers due: November 1, 2020 (if possible, we will push the deadline several days forward)
Workshop date: December 12, 2020

More on the organisers

Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
Anna Kazantseva, National Research Council of Canada
Nils Reiter, Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), Stuttgart University
Stan Szpakowicz, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa

Contact

latech-clfl [at] googlegroups.com

LaTeCH-CLfL 2020:
The 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

to be held in conjunction with COLING 2020 in Barcelona

https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2020/

Renewed First Call for Papers (with apologies for cross-posting)

Organisers: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz

= = = = = = = = = = = =
The main conference has been moved three months forward, and so has our workshop. It may not be a face-to-face meeting of the participants and the fans but let us not cross that bridge yet. Stay tuned.
= = = = = = = = = = = =

LaTeCH-CLfL 2020 is the fourth joint meeting of two communities with overlapping research goals and a similar research focus. The SIGHUM Workshops on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH) have been a forum for researchers who develop new technologies for improved information access to data from the broadly understood humanities and social sciences. The ACL Workshops on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLfL) have focussed on applications of NLP to a wide variety of literary data. The first three joint workshop (LaTeCH-CLfL 2017, 2018 and 2019) brought together people from both communities. We count on this workshop to broaden the scope of our work even further, and to encourage new common research initiatives.

Topics and content

In the Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Heritage and literary communities, there is increasing interest in, and demand for, NLP methods for semantic and structural annotation, intelligent linking, discovery, querying, cleaning and visualization of both primary and secondary data. This is even true of primarily non-textual collections, given that text is also the pervasive medium for metadata. Such applications pose new challenges for NLP research: noisy, non-standard textual or multi-modal input, historical languages, vague research concepts, multilingual parts within one document, and so no. Digital resources often have insufficient coverage; resource-intensive methods require (semi-)automatic processing tools and domain adaptation, or intense manual effort (e.g., annotation).

Literary texts bring their own problems, because navigating this form of creative expression requires more than the typical information-seeking tools. Examples of advanced tasks include the study of literature of a certain period, author or sub-genre, recognition of certain literary devices, or quantitative analysis of poetry.

NLP methods applied in this context not only need to achieve high performance, but are often applied as a first step in research or scholarly workflow. That is why it is crucial to interpret model results properly; model interpretability might be more important than raw performance scores, depending on the context.

More generally, there is a growing interest in computational models whose results can be used or interpreted in meaningful ways. It is, therefore, of mutual benefit that NLP experts, data specialists and Digital Humanities researchers who work in and across their domains get involved in the Computational Linguistics community and present their fundamental or applied research results. It has already been demonstrated how cross-disciplinary exchange not only supports work in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage communities but also promotes work in the Computational Linguistics community to build richer and more effective tools and models.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• adaptation of NLP tools to Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and literature;
• automatic error detection and cleaning of textual data;
• complex annotation schemas, tools and interfaces;
• creation (fully- or semi-automatic) of semantic resources;
• creation and analysis of social networks of literary characters;
• discourse and narrative analysis/modelling, notably in literature;
• emotion analysis for the humanities and for literature;
• generation of literary narrative, dialogue or poetry;
• identification and analysis of literary genres;
• linking and retrieving information from different sources, media, and domains;
• modelling dialogue literary style for generation;
• modelling of information and knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage;
• profiling and authorship attribution;
• search for scientific and/or scholarly literature;
• work with linguistic variation and non-standard or historical use of language.

Invited speaker

The workshop will feature an invited talk, as usual. The speaker will be Professor Elke Teich.

We expect, optimistically enough, that it will be an actual talk but it just may have to assume a remote guise...

Information for authors

We invite papers on original, unpublished work in the topic areas of the workshop. In addition to long papers, we will consider short papers and system descriptions (demos). We also welcome position papers.

• Long papers, presenting completed work, may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of references; final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
• A short paper / demo can present work in progress, or the description of a system, and may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus additional pages of references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings.
• A position paper — clearly marked as such — should not exceed six (6) pages including references.

All submissions must adhere to the COLING stylesheets (for LaTeX and MS Word) posted at https://coling2020.org/coling2020.zip. Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF, at https://www.softconf.com/coling2020/LaTeCH-CLfL/.

Reviewing will be double-blind. Please do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, or any references to Web sites, project names, acknowledgements and so on — anything that immediately reveals the authors’ identity. Self-references should be kept to a reasonable minimum, and anonymous citations cannot be used.

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and later available in the ACL Anthology.

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: September 25, 2020
Notification of acceptance: October 26, 2020
Camera-ready papers due: November 1, 2020 (if possible, we will push the deadline several days forward)
Workshop date: December 12, 2020

More on the organisers

Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
Anna Kazantseva, National Research Council of Canada
Nils Reiter, Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), Stuttgart University
Stan Szpakowicz, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa

Contact

latech-clfl [at] googlegroups.com

SIGNLL, the Association for Computational Linguistics' Special
Interest Group on Natural Language Learning, invites submissions to
the 24th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
(CoNLL 2020). The conference will be held on November 11-12, 2020, in
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, immediately following EMNLP 2020.

*Invited speakers*

- Emmanuel Dupoux (EHESS and Facebook AI Research, Paris, France)
- Kristina Toutanova (Google, Seattle, USA)

The main focus of CoNLL is on theoretically, cognitively and
scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics,
rather than on work driven by particular engineering applications.
Such approaches include:

- Computational learning theory and other techniques for theoretical
analysis of machine learning models for NLP
- Models of first, second and bilingual language acquisition by humans
- Models of language evolution and change
- Computational simulation and analysis of findings from
psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments
- Analysis and interpretation of NLP models using methods inspired by
cognitive science or linguistics, or other methods
- Data resources, techniques and tools for scientifically-oriented
research in computational linguistics
- Connections between computational models and formal languages or
linguistic theories
- Linguistic typology and other multilingual work

We welcome work targeting any aspect of language, including:

- Speech and phonology
- Lexical and compositional semantics
- Syntactic parsing
- Discourse and coreference
- Dialogue and interactive language use
- Sociolinguistics
- Multimodal and grounded language learning

Submitted papers must be anonymous and adhere to the CoNLL format by
using our LaTeX style files or Word template. Submitted papers may
consist of up to 8 pages of content plus unlimited space for
references. Authors of accepted papers will have an additional page
to address reviewers' comments in the camera-ready version (9 pages
of content in total, excluding references). Anonymized supplementary
materials are allowed as an optional PDF appendix, in line with
EMNLP 2020 guidelines. Submission is electronic, using the Softconf
START conference management system.

CoNLL adheres to the ACL anonymity policy, as described in the
EMNLP 2020 Call for Papers.

*Multiple submission policy*

CoNLL 2020 will not consider any paper that is under review at the
time of submission, and submitted papers must not be submitted
elsewhere during the CoNLL 2020 review period. In addition, we will
not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or
results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere.
Authors submitting more than one paper to CoNLL 2020 must ensure that
the submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other
in content or results.

*Important dates*

- May 5, 2020: Anonymity period starts
- June 5, 2020: Paper submission deadline
- August 28, 2020: Notification of acceptance and end of anonymity period
- November 11-12, 2020: Conference (immediately after EMNLP 2020)

All deadlines are at 11:59pm UTC-12h ("anywhere on earth").

*CoNLL 2020 Chairs*

- Raquel Fernández (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
- Tal Linzen (Johns Hopkins University, USA)