<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=iso-8859-1"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><div><div>1st Call for Participation: Shared Task on Language ID in Code-Switching Data <br><br>Code-switching (CS) is the phenomenon by which multilingual speakers switch back and forth between their common languages in written or spoken communication. CS is pervasive in informal text communications such as news groups, tweets, blogs, and other social media of multilingual communities. Such genres are increasingly being studied as rich sources of social, commercial and political information. Apart from the informal genre challenge associated with such data within a single language processing scenario, the CS phenomenon adds another significant layer of complexity to the processing of the data. <br><br>We are organizing a shared task on language identification of CS data. The goal is to allow participants to explore the use of unsupervised and supervised approaches to detection of language at the word level in code-switching data. We will release a small gold standard data for tunning systems in four language pairs, Spanish-English, Modern Standard Arabic and Arabic dialects, Chinese-English and Nepalese-English. <br><br>------------------------- <br>Task Definition <br>------------------------- <br>For each word in the Source, identify whether it is Lang1, Lang2, Mixed, Other, Ambiguous, or NE (for named entities, which are proper names that represent names of people, places, organizations, locations, movie titles, and song titles). The focus of the task is on microblog data, so we will use Twitter as the source of data, although each language combination will have data from a "surprise genre" as additional test data as well. <br>The languages of interest are: Arabic MSA-Arabic Dialect, Arabic-English, Mandarin Chinese-English, Nepali-English, and Spanish-English<br><br></div>---------------------<br><div>Venue</div><div>---------------------</div><div>The evaluation task will be associated with the EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Linguistic Code Switching in Qatar October 2014. </div><br><div>------------------------- <br>Important Dates <br>------------------------- <br>Trial data release: March 12, 2014 <br>Training data release: April 28, 2014 <br>Task window: July 7-13, 2014 <br>Results posted: July 20, 2014 <br>Workshop paper: July 25, 2014 <br>Task papers: August 8, 2014 <br>Notification for Workshop papers: August 26, 2014 <br>Notification for task papers: September 5, 2014 <br>Camera ready for workshop papers (workshop and task papers) submission deadline: September 12, 2014 <br><br>------------------------- <br>Shared Task Organizers <br>------------------------- <br>Mona Diab, GWU<br>Pascale Fung, HKUST <br>Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University <br>Thamar Solorio, UAB<br><br>------------------------- <br>Shared Task Information <br>------------------------- <br>Website: <a href="http://emnlp2014.org/workshops/CodeSwitch/call.html">http://emnlp2014.org/workshops/CodeSwitch/call.html</a> <br>Registration to the shared task: <a href="http://coral.cis.uab.edu/registration/">http://coral.cis.uab.edu/registration/</a> <br>Please join our google group to receive announcements and other relevant information for the workshop: <a href="mailto:codeswitching_workshop@googlegroups.com">codeswitching_workshop@googlegroups.com</a> <br><br></div></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><br><div><br></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; border-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; border-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Mona T. Diab, PhD<br><br>Associate Professor</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Department of Computer Science </div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">School of Eng. & Applied Science</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">The George Washington University</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><a href="http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mtdiab">http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mtdiab</a></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Tel.: 202 994.8109</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br></div></span></div></span></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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