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LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY FOR CLOSELY-RELATED LANGUAGES AND
LANGUAGE VARIANTS

Workshop associated with EMNL 2014

25 or 29 October 2014, Doha, QATAR

http://emnlp2014.org/workshops/LT4CloseLang/call.html

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MOTIVATION

Recent initiatives in language technology have lead 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. This is a big step towards the automatic processing and/or extraction of information, especially from official documents
and newspapers, where the standard, literary language is used.

Apart from those official languages, a large number of dialects or closely-related language variants 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. Examples of language variants include the different variants of Spanish in Latin America, the Arabic dialects in North Africa and the Middle East, German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, French in France and in Belgium, Dutch in the Netherlands and
Flemish in Belgium, etc. Examples of pairs of related languages include Swedish-Norwegian, Bulgarian-Macedonian, Serbian-Bosnian, Spanish-Catalan, Russian-Ukrainian, Irish-Gaelic Scottish, Malay-Indonesian, Turkish–Azerbaijani, Mandarin-Cantonese, Hindi–Urdu, and
many other.

This workshop intends to bring together specialists working on LT-Applications dealing with various related language pairs, discuss novel approaches in exploring language closeness, and
raise attention on this particular topic. A previous version of this workshop was organised at RANLP 2013 and showed a great interest from communities worldwide as well as the necessity for further activities.

SUBMISSION

We are looking for original unpublished work related (but not limited to) following topics
- Adaptation of monolingual tools for closely-related languages and language variants
- Case studies of using language resources and tools for standard languages on documents
in language variants
- Machine translation among closely related languages
- Evaluation of language resources and tools for language variants and close languages.
- Linguistic issues in adaptation of language resources and tools (e.g., semantic discrepancies, lexical gaps, false friends)


Submission should be done using START:

https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2014/LT4CloseLang14

Papers should be up to 9 pages long and should follow the formatting instructions for EMNLP'2014 under:
http://emnlp2014.org/submissions.html

IMPORTANT DEADLINES
Submission deadline: July 26, 2014, 11:59 p.m. PST
Acceptance/rejection notification: August 26, 2014
Camera-ready deadline: September 12, 2014, 11:59 p.m. PST
Workshop: October 25 or 29, 2014

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Petya Osenova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Cristina Vertan, University of Hamburg

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE


Laura Alonso y Alemany (Univeristy of Cordoba, Argentina)
César Antonio Aguilar (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile, Chile)
José Castaño (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
David Chiang (University of Southern California, USA)
Marta Costa-Jussà (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore)
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Kareem Darwish (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Tomaz Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Maria Gavrilidou (ILSP, Greece)
Francisco Guzman (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Barry Haddow (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Nizar Habash (Columbia University, USA)
Walther v. Hahn (University of Hamburg,Germany)
Francisco Guzman Herrera (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Cvetana Krstev (University of Belgrade, Serbia)
Vladislav Kubon (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic)
Thang Luong Minh (Stanford university, USA)
John Nerbonne (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
Graham Neubig (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
Kemal Oflazer (Carnegie-Mellon University, Qatar)
Maciej Ogrodniczuk (IPAN, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
Slav Petrov (Google, New York, USA)
Stefan Riezler (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
Laurent Romary (INRIA, France)
Hassan Sajjad (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Milena Slavcheva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Marco Tadic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Jörg Tiedemann (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Dusko Vitas (University of Belgrade, Serbia)
Stephan Vogel (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
Pidong Wang (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Taro Watanabe (NICT, Japan)