1st Call for Papers

Natural Language Engineering Journal - Cambridge University Press
Special Issue on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
URL: https://sites.google.com/view/nledialects

Guest Editors
Marcos Zampieri (University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar)

Topics

Recent initiatives in language technology have led to the development of at least minimal language processing toolkits for all EU-official languages, as well as for languages with a large number of speakers worldwide such as Chinese and Arabic. Apart from those official languages, a large number of dialects or closely-related language varieties are in daily use, not only as spoken colloquial languages but also in written media and social networks. Building language resources and tools from scratch is expensive, but the efforts can often be reduced by making use of pre-existing resources and tools for related, resource-richer languages.

The interest in language resources and computational models for the study of similar languages, language varieties and dialects has been growing substantially in recent years. This is evidenced by a number of publications on this topic in NLP journals and conferences and the organization of the now well-established VarDial workshop series co-located yearly with top-tier NLP conferences.

We welcome papers dealing with one or more of the following topics:

- Language resources and tools for similar languages, varieties and dialects;
- Adaptation of tools (taggers, parsers) for similar languages, varieties and dialects;
- Evaluation of language resources and tools when applied to language varieties;
- Reusability of language resources in NLP applications (e.g., for machine translation, POS tagging, syntactic parsing, etc.);
- Corpus-driven studies in dialectology and language variation;
- Computational approaches to the study of mutual intelligibility between dialects and similar languages;
- Automatic identification of lexical variation;
- Automatic classification of language varieties;
- Text similarity and adaptation between language varieties;
- Linguistic issues in the adaptation of language resources and tools (e.g., semantic discrepancies, lexical gaps, false friends);
- Machine translation between closely related languages, language varieties and dialects.

Important Dates

- Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2018
- First-round author notification: 15 December 2018
- Submission of revised versions: 1 February 2019
- Second-round author notification (final): 1 April 2019
- Camera-ready versions: 15 April 2019

Contact: m.zampieri(at)wlv.ac.uk