<div dir="ltr">CALL FOR PAPERS<div>=================</div><div><br></div><div><div>FIRST WORKSHOP ON LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES FOR INDIAN SOCIAL MEDIA (सOCIAL-ईNDIA)</div><div>===============================================================================</div><div><br></div><div>RATIONALE</div><div>==========</div><div>The evolution of social media texts – such as blogs, micro-blogs (e.g., Twitter), and chats (e.g., Facebook messages) – has created many new opportunities for information access and language technology, but also many new challenges, making it one of the prime present-day research areas. Automatic processing of these types of texts warrants new strategies, in particular since they often are very ‘noisy’, that is, they are characterised by having a high percentage of spelling errors and containing creative spellings (gr8 for ‘great’), word play (goooood for ‘good’), abbreviations (OMG for ‘Oh my God!’), Meta tags (URLs, Hashtags), and so forth. So far, most of the research on social media texts has concentrated on English, whereas most of these texts now are in non-English languages. In social media, non-English speakers do not always use Unicode to write in their own language, they use phonetic typing, frequently insert English elements (through code-mixing and Anglicisms. See the following example 1), and often mix multiple languages to express their thoughts, making automatic language processing of social media texts a very challenging task. Thus it is clear that even though English still is the principal language for web communication, there is a growing need to develop technologies for other languages. Here we will concentrate on social media text in Indian languages, a nation with more than 20 official languages. ICON is a well-established gathering for the industrial and academic research communities both internationally and in India. Therefore, we believe that it is the best place to bring research attention towards developing language technologies for Indian social media text. The workshop will hold an embedded tutorial on code-mixing in social media. The three primary goals of the proposed workshop are:</div><div><br></div><div>1. To focus community awareness on language technologies for Indian social media.</div><div>2. Sharing of corpora and resources to promote future research.</div><div>3. Exchange of ideas and experiences amongst researchers.</div><div><br></div><div>Example 1. ICON isbar Goa mein ho raha hai! Great chance to visit Goa! </div><div><br></div><div>EMBEDDED TUTORIAL ON CODE-MIXING IN SOCIAL MEDIA</div><div>================================================</div><div>Abstract: Code-mixing, or mixing of more than one language in a single conversation or utterance is a common phenomenon in any multilingual society. Extreme multilinguality of India makes code-mixing extremely common on social media content posted in Indian languages and by Indian users. In this tutorial, we will talk about why code-mixing is, on one hand a computational challenge that must be solved to effectively process IL content, and on the other hand, a wonderful linguistic resource for studying several allied phenomena. The tutorial will also introduce some basic NLP techniques for code-mixed data.</div><div>DURATION: Half Day</div><div><br></div><div>TUTORIAL COORDINATORS</div><div>======================</div><div>Monojit Choudhury</div><div>Microsoft Research Lab India</div><div>Website: <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/monojitc/">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/monojitc/</a></div><div><br></div><div>Kalika Bali</div><div>Microsoft Research Lab India</div><div>Website: <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/kalikab/">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/kalikab/</a> </div><div><br></div><div>LIST OF TOPICS</div><div>===============</div><div>We welcome original and unpublished submissions on all aspects of language technologies for Indian languages in the social media context. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: </div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Part of Speech (POS) Tagging</div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Language Detection</div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Morphological Analysis</div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Name Entity Recognition (NER)</div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Dependency Parsing</div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Lexical Resources</div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Annotated corpora</div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Transliteration</div><div>•<span class="" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Sentiment Analysis </div><div><br></div><div>WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS</div><div>====================</div><div>Amitava Das</div><div>University of North Texas, USA</div><div>Website: <a href="http://amitavadas.com/">http://amitavadas.com/</a> </div><div><br></div><div>Björn Gambäck</div><div>Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway</div><div>Website: <a href="http://www.ntnu.edu/employees/gamback">http://www.ntnu.edu/employees/gamback</a> </div><div><br></div><div>Dipankar Das</div><div>Jadavpur University</div><div>Website: <a href="http://www.dasdipankar.com/">http://www.dasdipankar.com/</a> </div><div><br clear="all"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Thanks,</div><div>Amitava</div><div>----------------------------------------------------------------</div><div><b><font size="4">Dr. AMITAVA DAS</font></b><br></div><div>Research Scientist</div><div>Department of Computer Science and Engineering</div><div>University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA</div><div>Phone: +1 940 442 7560</div><div>Web Page: <a href="http://www.amitavadas.com/" target="_blank">http://www.amitavadas.com/</a></div><div><div>----------------------------------------------------------------</div></div></div></div>
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