1st ALP Workshop will be co-located with RANLP 2023 at Varna, Bulgaria
Ancient languages contain rich human historical and cultural wealth. So far there has been some good advancement in applying language technologies to ancient languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Latin, Ancient Greek and Ancient Chinese, especially in the construction of digital language resources and resources to facilitate automatic analysis. The workshop on Ancient Language Processing aims to focus specifically on ancient languages and scripts from the emergence of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt c. 3000 BCE to the entire world up till 800 AD. We wish to provide a recognized forum to further advance this subfield of NLP, where researchers and practitioners can meet and discuss their latest work, and exchange ideas in addressing shared epigraphical challenges in language processing across various ancient languages, such as non-Latin and non-alphabetic scripts, Right-to-Left, transliteration conventions and fragmentary texts. In addition, we propose shared tasks on Machine Translation for Ancient Chinese and Akkadian, respectively, to provide an opportunity to address the unique challenges faced by ancient language machine translation.
Languages of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Mesopotamia: Sumerian, Akkadian
- Iran: Elamite, old and middle Persian
- Levant: Eblaite, Amorite, Aramaic (incl. Mandaic and Syriac), Ancient Hebrew, Phynician, Ugaritic
- Anatolia: Hittite, Luwian and minor Anatolian languages
- Egypt: Ancient Egyptian, Coptic
- Mediterranean: Linear A and B, Ancient Greek, Latin
- Arabia: Ancient North Arabian, old Arabic
- India: Sanskrit, Eastern Panjabi, Pali
- China: Literary Chinese, Tibetan
- Mesoamerica: Mayan
- Japan: Old Japanese
Papers and contributions are encouraged for any work related to Natural Language Processing of Ancient Languages. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Charset (Unicode)
- Input method (transliteration and transcription)
- Tokenization (word segmentation)
- Morphological analysis (both inflectional and derivational)
- Philological issues in NLP
- Linguistic Linked Data supporting NLP
- Syntactic analysis
- Semantic analysis
- Machine translation
- Pre-trained models
- Deep learning based NLP
- Multi-lingual comparison for NLP purposes
- Data mining
- Knowledge extraction
- Language varieties and dialects
- NLP issues in the analysis of broken texts and uncertain readings
- Minimal computing in NLP
We welcome two types of submissions:
- Long Papers that describe original and unpublished work in any topic area of the workshop. Long papers are limited to 8 pages for content, with 2 additional pages for references.
- Short Papers that describe either work in progress or a research proposal. They may also be in the style of a position paper that surveys and criticizes existing literature. Short papers must include clear directions for future research. Submissions of this type are limited to 4 pages for content, with 2 additional pages for references.
Please also note the following:
- The papers accepted will be included in the ACL Anthology.
- Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available from here (Latex and Word): https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files. Please submit your papers in PDF format.
- The review will be double-blind. Please do not include any self-identifying information in the submission. This includes anonymizing the already-published work by removing acknowledgments, self-citations, etc.
Important dates
- Paper submission due: July 3, 2023
- Notification of acceptance: August 5, 2023
- Camera-ready paper due: August 25, 2023
- Workshop date: September 8, 2023
All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).
Submission
Submission can be made through this: https://softconf.com/ranlp23/ALP/
Contact:
- Direct your workshop related inquiries to: ancientnlp [at] gmail.com
- Direct your general (including registration related) inquiries to: 2023 [at] ranlp.org
Organizing Committee
- Dr. Adam Anderson, UC Berkeley, USA
- Dr. Shai Gordin, Ariel University, Israel
- Dr. Bin Li, Nanjing Normal University, China
- Dr. Yudong Liu, Western Washington University, USA
- Dr. Marco C. Passarotti, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy
Program Committee
- Tero Alstola, University of Helsinki, Finland
- Masayuki Asahara, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan
- Jonathan Berant, Tel Aviv University, Israel
- Monica Berti, Leipzig University, Germany
- Patrick Burns, New York University, USA
- Christian Chiarchos, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
- Gregory Crane, Tufts University, USA
- Sanhong Deng,Nanjing University, China
- Minxuan Feng, Nanjing Normal University, China
- Ethan Fetaya, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
- Toon Van Hal, University of Leuven, Belgium
- Renfen Hu, Beijing Normal University, China
- Heidi Jauhiainen, University of Helsinki, Finland
- Kyle P. Johnson, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Germany
- Orly Lewis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
- Johann-Mattis List, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
- Chao-Lin Liu, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
- Congjun Long, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China
- Francesco Mambrini, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy
- Hubert Mara, MLU Halle, Germany
- Martijn Naaijer, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Christian M. Prager, University of Bonn, Germany
- Avital Romach, Yale, USA
- Luis Sáenz, Ariel University/Heidelberg University, Israel/Germany
- Si Shen, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China
- Xiaodong Shi, Xiamen University, China
- Qi Su, Peking University, China
- Thea Sommerschield, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
- Rachele Sprugnoli, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy
- Gabriel Stanovsky, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
- Niek Veldhuis, University of California, Berkeley, USA
- Dongbo Wang, Nanjing Agricultural University, China