26.5574, Calls: Applied Ling, Cog Sci Computational Ling, Lang Acq, Neuroling, Psycholing/Slovenia

Wed Dec 16 14:12:50 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-5574. Wed Dec 16 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.5574, Calls: Applied Ling, Cog Sci Computational Ling, Lang Acq, Neuroling, Psycholing/Slovenia

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Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2015 09:12:42
From: Horacio Saggion [horacio.saggion at upf.edu]
Subject: Improving Social Inclusion Using NLP: Tools and Resources

Full Title: Improving Social Inclusion Using NLP: Tools and Resources 
Short Title: ISINLP 

Date: 23-May-2016 - 23-May-2016
Location: Portorož, Slovenia 
Contact Person: Horacio Saggion
Meeting Email: horacio.saggion at upf.edu
Web Site: http://www.ccl.kuleuven.be/ISINLP/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 07-Feb-2016 

Meeting Description:

Social media are an inherent part of life in the 21st century and should be accessible to anyone. People who are to some extent functionally illiterate are currently excluded from properly using social media such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp.

In order to overcome this exclusion, we need NLP tools and resources adapted to the needs of, among others, people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities, like Fragile X-syndrome, Down syndrome, or SLI, people with limited communication skills due to illness or accident, (deaf) people with a sign language as mother tongue, migrants wanting to socially integrate and communicate in a language / script they do not yet master, elderly people with diminishing language skills. 

Which NLP techniques are used in order to allow these groups to be socially included and use social media? What do we need in order to build applications for these groups of users?

The main topics of interest in this workshop are:

- tools for social inclusion
- conversion techniques between non-verbal and verbal systems
- non-standard spelling or grammar correction
- (non-verbal) input methods
- non-standard speech input
- text modification (simplification, rephrasing) for non-standard input
- in vivo evaluation
- available resources / corpora (+ legal issues, privacy)
- adaptivity (level of illiterateness, culture, age, …)
- reusability in other domains (second language learning, Internet-of-Things dialogue systems)

Call for Papers: 

Social media are an inherent part of life in the 21st century and should be accessible to anyone. People who are to some extent functionally illiterate are currently excluded from properly using social media such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp.

We call for papers describing tools and resources that aim to bridge the social divide by providing technology that allows more or less functionally illiterate users to be included in the current and future textual social media.

Such technologies and resources allow or facilitate the conversion of non-verbal input (like signs, pictograms) into textual output, or allow to improve ill-formed input into proper text. In the other direction, the technologies and resources allow to automatically augment textual communication by other media, such as pictures, signs, video, and other forms of Augmentative and Alternative Communication, or to simplify and reduce messages such that the information is disclosed to the targeted users, and the users are no longer excluded from taking part in social media.

We invite abstracts for 20-minute oral presentations or posters (with or without demos) reporting on tools and resources concerning social inclusion, including but not limited to the following:

Input methods of non-verbal input
- Speech recognition of non-standard speech
- Pictogram or sign selection methods

Input normalization:
- Spelling correction
- Grammar correction
- Speech or Text Corpora containing original input (with typical mistakes) + transcription (normalization)

Text adaptation:
- Simplification and summarization
- Summarization
- Augmentative and Alternative Communication
- Conversion / Translation between non-verbal and verbal communication and vice versa

Semantic representations
- Lexical semantic resources, such as WordNets
- Interlingua

Generation
- Language generation based on simplified / non-verbal input
- Adaptations to voices in text-to-speech
- Generation of non-verbal messages

Evaluation
- What type of (non-verbal) communication is best for a specific group of users (such as level of literacy, type of disability, culture)
-  In vivo evaluation

Ethics
- Legal and ethical issues
- Privacy issues for vulnerable group of users
- Reusability of Social Inclusion-approaches (second language learning, Internet-of-Things)

More information can be found at the ISI-NLP website (www.ccl.kuleuven.be/ISINLP). This website will be updated when new information becomes available.

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