Call for Papers

VarDial - Fifth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

VarDial 2018: http://alt.qcri.org/vardial2018/

Co-located with COLING 2018, in VarDial we anticipate discussion on computational methods and on language resources for closely related languages, language varieties and dialects. Corpus-driven studies on different degrees of linguistic variation such as lexicon and grammar is another topic of interest.

Together with the VarDial workshop we are organizing the second edition of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign with five shared tasks (http://alt.qcri.org/vardial2018/index.php?id=campaign). Registration is now open and the training data will be released in March.

Topics

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.

Instruction for Authors

Submissions should be formatted according to the COLING template and submitted in PDF format. The review process will be double-blind.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: May 18, 2018
Acceptance Notification: June 20, 2018
Camera-ready versions: June 30, 2018
Workshop: August 20 or 21, 2018

Program Committee

Željko Agić (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Cesar Aguilar (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile)
Laura Alonso y Alemany (University of Cordoba, Argentina)
Jorge Baptista (University of Algarve and INESC-ID, Portugal)
Eckhard Bick (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)
Johannes Bjerva (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Francis Bond (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Aoife Cahill (Educational Testing Service, United States)
David Chiang (University of Notre Dame, United States)
Paul Cook (University of New Brunswick, Canada)
Marta Costa-Jussà (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain)
Jon Dehdari (Think Big Analytics, United States)
Liviu Dinu (University of Bucharest, Romania)
Stefanie Dipper (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)
Sascha Diwersy (University of Montpellier, France)
Mark Dras (Macquire University, Australia)
Tomaž Erjavec (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Mikel L. Forcada (Universitat d'Alacant, Spain)
Binyam Gebrekidan Gebre (Phillips Research, The Netherlands)
Cyril Goutte (National Research Council, Canada)
Nizar Habash (New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE)
Chu-Ren Huang (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong)
Jeremy Jancsary (Nuance Communications, Austria)
Lung-Hao Lee (National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan)
Marco Lui (Rome2Rio Ltd., Australia)
Teresa Lynn (Dublin City University, Ireland)
John Nerbonne (University of Groningen, Netherlands and University of Freiburg, Germany)
Kemal Oflazer (Carnegie-Mellon University in Qatar, Qatar)
Maciej Ogrodniczuk (IPAN, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
Petya Osenova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Santanu Pal (Saarland University, Germany)
Barbara Plank (Unviersity of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Francisco Rangel (Autoritas Consulting, Spain)
Taraka Rama (University of Oslo, Norway)
Reinhard Rapp (University of Mainz, Germany and University of Aix-Marsaille, France)
Paolo Rosso (Technical University of Valencia, Spain)
Fatiha Sadat (Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada)
Tanja Samardžić (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Felipe Sánchez Martínez (Universitat d'Alacant, Spain)
Kevin Scannell (Saint Louis University, United States)
Yves Scherrer (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Milena Slavcheva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Marco Tadić (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Liling Tan (Rakuten Institute of Technology, Singapore)
Elke Teich (Saarland University, Germany)
Joel Tetreault (Grammarly, United States)
Francis Tyers (Higher School of Economics, Russia)
Duško Vitas (University of Belgrade, Serbia)
Taro Watanabe (Google Inc., Japan)
Pidong Wang (Machine Zone Inc., United States)

Organizers

Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar)
Marcos Zampieri (University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom)
Nikola Ljubešić (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia and University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Jörg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Shervin Malmasi (Harvard Medical School, United States)
Ahmed Ali (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar)

Contact

Workshop: vardialworkshop(at)gmail.com