2011 - Workshop on Algorithms and Resources for Modelling of Dialects and Language Varieties

Workshop on Algorithms and Resources for Modelling of
Dialects and Language Varieties

We invite submissions to the First Workshop on Algorithms and Resources for
Modelling of Dialects and Language Varieties. The workshop will be held in
conjunction with EMNLP 2011 on July 31, in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. It will
consist of one day of oral presentations and poster sessions.

Conference URL: http://www.ofai.at/~dialects2011/

General Information

The currently prevailing statistical paradigm has made possible major
achievements in many areas of natural language processing. But since the
methods employed critically depend on the availability of large training
corpora, the applicability of these methods is generally limited to major
languages / standard varieties, to the exclusion of dialects or varieties
that substantially differ from the standard.

The crucial obstacle is scarcity of data. Most important of all, substantial
corpora of language varieties or dialects are rare. Moreover, authoritative
orthographic conventions usually do not exist. As a result, the notation of
written texts can vary widely and there are no obvious conventions for the
annotation of speech corpora.

This situation calls for novel approaches, methods and techniques to overcome
or circumvent the problem of data scarcity, but also to enhance and
strengthen the standing that language varieties and dialects have in natural
language processing technologies as well as in interaction technologies that
build upon the former.

While there will be a clear focus on machine learning applied to the before
mentioned problems, this workshop aims at gathering researchers with
expertise in various disciplines.

Topics

* Machine learning algorithms operating in the regime of data scarcity
* Bootstrapping and active learning schemes for principled acquisition,
annotation or generation of training data
* Methods to acquire resources by exploiting the proximity between varieties
and standard language
* Issues of orthography and annotation
* Machine translation between language varieties or dialects
* Speech synthesis of dialects with limited corpora
* Interaction technologies dealing with social identity in speech and text
* Novel approaches transcending the paradigm of statistical modelling

Progress in the above listed topics requires an interdisciplinary approach:
machine learning, machine translation, speech synthesis, automatic speech
recognition but also linguistics and interaction technologies will have to
contribute. We invite researchers with a genuine interest in modelling of
language varieties and the advancement of natural language processing in this
area.

Important Dates

* Paper submission deadline: April 22, 2011
* Acceptance notification: May 20, 2011
* Camera-ready copy due: June 3, 2011
* Workshop meeting: July 31, 2011

All deadlines refer to 11:59pm Samoa time (UTC/GMT -11 hours)

Submissions

We invite high-quality submissions on original, unpublished work in areas
relating to the aforementioned topics. Both significant theoretical advances
and descriptions of successful practical systems involving processing or
generation of language varieties are welcome. Submission of work that is only
incremental in nature or describes minor progress is explicitly discouraged.

Two paper categories will be distinguished:

* Long papers are expected to report on contributions of lasting value and
will be presented orally in the plenary session of the workshop. Submissions
should not exceed a length of 9 pages, excluding references.

* Short papers are ideally suited for exciting new work that is not yet mature
enough for a long paper, but has substantial merit. The work will be
presented during the poster session and - depending on the type of work - a
system demonstration can be given. The length of short papers is restricted
to 4 pages, excluding references.

Reviewing will be double-blind, so please ensure your submission is properly
anonymized. In particular, the paper should not reveal the authors'
identities or include acknowledgments or references to project names,
websites, software or such that might give away the identity.

Submissions should follow the two-column format of the ACL 2011 proceedings.
The official style files can be obtained at
http://www.acl2011.org/call.shtml. Submission will be handled using the START
system. Papers must be uploaded until April 22; detailed information will be
made available at a later stage.

Policy regarding submission to multiple workshops/conferences: It is
acceptable to submit the same paper to another workshop or conference.
However, in this case we request that you inform the organizers in a separate
e-mail in advance, such that we know the paper might be withdrawn. In
addition, if you do decide to withdraw, we request that you notify us by May
26th, at the very latest.

Committee

Organizing Comittee

* Jeremy Jancsary - Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
* Friedrich Neubarth - Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
* Harald Trost - Section for AI, Medical University of Vienna, Austria

Program Comittee

* Gérard Bailly - Speech & Cognition department, CNRS Grenoble, France
* Nick Campbell - CLCS, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
* Martine Grice - IfL, Phonetik Köln, Germany
* Gholamreza Haffari - BC Cancer Research Center, Vancouver, Canada
* Inmaculada Hernaez Rioja - Univ. of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain
* Philipp Koehn - ILCC, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK
* Michael Pucher - ftw, Vienna, Austria
* Milan Rusko - SAS, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
* Kevin Scannell - Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Saint Louis
University, USA
* Yves Scherrer - LATL, Université de Genève, Switzerland
* Beat Siebenhaar - Institut für Germanistik, Univ. of Leipzig, Germany