17th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora --- Call for Papers
Co-located with LREC-COLING 2024
Torino, Italia, 20 May 2024

Workshop website: https://comparable.limsi.fr/bucc2024/
Workshop proceedings to be published in the ACL Anthology


MOTIVATION

In the language engineering and linguistics communities, research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In language engineering, on the one hand, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as statistical and neural machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest because they enable cross-language discoveries and comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that comparable corpora consist of documents that are comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions across several languages. Parallel corpora are on the one end of this spectrum, unrelated corpora on the other.

Comparable corpora have been used in a range of applications, including Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Cross-lingual text classification, etc. The linguistic definitions and observations related to comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for applications of neural NLP, for example, to extract parallel corpora from comparable corpora for neural machine translation. As such, it is of great interest to bring together builders and users of such corpora.


TOPICS

We solicit contributions on all topics related to comparable (and parallel) corpora, including but not limited to the following:

Building Comparable Corpora:

- Automatic and semi-automatic methods
- Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the web
- Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
- Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora
- Rare and minority languages, across language families
- Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora

Applications of comparable corpora:

- Human translation
- Language learning
- Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization
- Bilingual and multilingual projections
- (Unsupervised) Machine translation
- Writing assistance
- Machine learning techniques using comparable corpora

Mining from Comparable Corpora:

- Cross-language distributional semantics, word embeddings and pre-trained multilingual transformer models
- Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from comparable corpora
- Methods to derive parallel from non-parallel corpora (e.g. to provide for low-resource languages in neural machine translation)
- Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of single words, multi-word expressions, proper names, named entities, sentences, paraphrases etc. from comparable corpora
- Induction of morphological, grammatical, and translation rules from comparable corpora
- Induction of multilingual word classes from comparable corpora

Comparable Corpora in the Humanities:

- Comparing linguistic phenomena across languages in contrastive linguistics
- Analyzing properties of translated language in translation studies
- Studying language change over time in diachronic linguistics
- Assigning texts to authors via authors' corpora in forensic linguistics
- Comparing rhetorical features in discourse analysis
- Studying cultural differences in sociolinguistics
- Analyzing language universals in typological research

IMPORTANT DATES

21 Feb 2024: Paper submission deadline
24 Mar 2024: Notification of acceptance
7 Apr 2024: Camera-ready final papers
20 May 2024: Workshop date

For updates, please see the workshop website


PRACTICAL INFORMATION

The workshop is an in-person event. Workshop registration is via the main conference registration site, see BLOCKEDlrec-coling-2024[.]org/BLOCKED

The workshop proceedings will be published in the ACL Anthology.


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please follow the style sheet and templates (for LaTeX, Overleaf and MS-Word) provided for the main conference at BLOCKEDlrec-coling-2024[.]org/authors-kit/BLOCKED
Papers should be submitted as a PDF file using the START conference manager

Submissions must describe original and unpublished work and range from 4 to 8 pages plus unlimited references.
Reviewing will be double blind, so the papers should not reveal the authors' identity. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, which will be included in the ACL Anthology.

Double submission policy: Parallel submission to other meetings or publications is possible but must be immediately (i.e. as soon as known to the authors) notified to the workshop organizers by e-mail.

For further information and updates, please see the BUCC 2024 website


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

- Pierre Zweigenbaum (Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, Orsay, France)
- Reinhard Rapp (University of Mainz and Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, Germany)
- Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
Contact: pz (at) lisn (dot) fr


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

- Ebrahim Ansari (Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, Iran)
- Thierry Etchegoyhen (Vicomtech, Spain)
- Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
- Natalie Kübler (Université Paris Cité, France)
- Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
- Yves Lepage (Waseda University, Japan)
- Shervin Malmasi (Amazon, USA)
- Michael Mohler (Language Computer Corporation, USA)
- Emmanuel Morin (Nantes Université, France)
- Dragos Stefan Munteanu (Language Weaver, Inc., USA)
- Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA)
- Ayla Rigouts Terryn (KU Leuven, Belgium)
- Reinhard Rapp (University of Mainz and Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, Germany)
- Nasredine Semmar (CEA LIST, Paris, France)
- Silvia Severini (Leonardo Labs, Italy)
- Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
- Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, USA)
- Tim Van de Cruys (KU Leuven, Belgium)
- Pierre Zweigenbaum (Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, Orsay, France)