CFP LaTeCH-CLfL 2020

25 Sep 2020 - 00:00

The 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

to be held in conjunction with COLING 2020 in Barcelona

https://sighum.wordpress.com/events/latech-clfl-2020/

Renewed First Call for Papers (with apologies for cross-posting)

Organisers: Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz

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The main conference has been moved three months forward, and so has our workshop. It may not be a face-to-face meeting of the participants and the fans but let us not cross that bridge yet. Stay tuned.
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LaTeCH-CLfL 2020 is the fourth joint meeting of two communities with overlapping research goals and a similar research focus. The SIGHUM Workshops on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH) have been a forum for researchers who develop new technologies for improved information access to data from the broadly understood humanities and social sciences. The ACL Workshops on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLfL) have focussed on applications of NLP to a wide variety of literary data. The first three joint workshop (LaTeCH-CLfL 2017, 2018 and 2019) brought together people from both communities. We count on this workshop to broaden the scope of our work even further, and to encourage new common research initiatives.

Topics and content

In the Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Heritage and literary communities, there is increasing interest in, and demand for, NLP methods for semantic and structural annotation, intelligent linking, discovery, querying, cleaning and visualization of both primary and secondary data. This is even true of primarily non-textual collections, given that text is also the pervasive medium for metadata. Such applications pose new challenges for NLP research: noisy, non-standard textual or multi-modal input, historical languages, vague research concepts, multilingual parts within one document, and so no. Digital resources often have insufficient coverage; resource-intensive methods require (semi-)automatic processing tools and domain adaptation, or intense manual effort (e.g., annotation).

Literary texts bring their own problems, because navigating this form of creative expression requires more than the typical information-seeking tools. Examples of advanced tasks include the study of literature of a certain period, author or sub-genre, recognition of certain literary devices, or quantitative analysis of poetry.

NLP methods applied in this context not only need to achieve high performance, but are often applied as a first step in research or scholarly workflow. That is why it is crucial to interpret model results properly; model interpretability might be more important than raw performance scores, depending on the context.

More generally, there is a growing interest in computational models whose results can be used or interpreted in meaningful ways. It is, therefore, of mutual benefit that NLP experts, data specialists and Digital Humanities researchers who work in and across their domains get involved in the Computational Linguistics community and present their fundamental or applied research results. It has already been demonstrated how cross-disciplinary exchange not only supports work in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage communities but also promotes work in the Computational Linguistics community to build richer and more effective tools and models.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• adaptation of NLP tools to Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and literature;
• automatic error detection and cleaning of textual data;
• complex annotation schemas, tools and interfaces;
• creation (fully- or semi-automatic) of semantic resources;
• creation and analysis of social networks of literary characters;
• discourse and narrative analysis/modelling, notably in literature;
• emotion analysis for the humanities and for literature;
• generation of literary narrative, dialogue or poetry;
• identification and analysis of literary genres;
• linking and retrieving information from different sources, media, and domains;
• modelling dialogue literary style for generation;
• modelling of information and knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Heritage;
• profiling and authorship attribution;
• search for scientific and/or scholarly literature;
• work with linguistic variation and non-standard or historical use of language.

Invited speaker

The workshop will feature an invited talk, as usual. The speaker will be Professor Elke Teich.

We expect, optimistically enough, that it will be an actual talk but it just may have to assume a remote guise...

Information for authors

We invite papers on original, unpublished work in the topic areas of the workshop. In addition to long papers, we will consider short papers and system descriptions (demos). We also welcome position papers.

• Long papers, presenting completed work, may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus additional pages of references; final camera-ready versions of accepted long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
• A short paper / demo can present work in progress, or the description of a system, and may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus additional pages of references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings.
• A position paper — clearly marked as such — should not exceed six (6) pages including references.

All submissions must adhere to the COLING stylesheets (for LaTeX and MS Word) posted at https://coling2020.org/coling2020.zip. Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF, at https://www.softconf.com/coling2020/LaTeCH-CLfL/.

Reviewing will be double-blind. Please do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, or any references to Web sites, project names, acknowledgements and so on — anything that immediately reveals the authors’ identity. Self-references should be kept to a reasonable minimum, and anonymous citations cannot be used.

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, and later available in the ACL Anthology.

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: September 25, 2020
Notification of acceptance: October 26, 2020
Camera-ready papers due: November 1, 2020 (if possible, we will push the deadline several days forward)
Workshop date: December 12, 2020