34.193, Confs: Computational Linguistics, Writing Systems/Canada

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-193. Fri Jan 20 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.193, Confs: Computational Linguistics, Writing Systems/Canada

Moderators:

Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2023 03:22:34
From: Kyle Gorman [kgorman at gc.cuny.edu]
Subject: ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language

 
ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language 
Short Title: CAWL 

Date: 14-Jul-2023 - 15-Jul-2023 
Location: Toronto, Canada 
Contact: Kyle Gorman 
Contact Email: kgorman at gc.cuny.edu 
Meeting URL: https://cawl.wellformedness.com 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Writing Systems 

Meeting Description: 

The first ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL) will be held
in conjunction with ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada, on July 13th or 14th 2023
(TBD). It will feature invited talks by Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University)
and Amalia Gnanadesikan (University of Maryland, College Park). Most work in
NLP focuses on language in its canonical written form. This has often led
researchers to ignore the differences between written and spoken language or,
worse, to conflate the two. Instances of conflation are statements like
“Chinese is a logographic language'' or “Persian is a right-to-left
language'', variants of which can be found frequently in the ACL anthology.
These statements confuse properties of the language with properties of its
writing system. Ignoring differences between written and spoken language
leads, among other things, to conflating different words that are spelled the
same (e.g., English bass), or treating as different, words that have multiple
spellings (e.g., Japanese umai ‘tasty’, which can be written 旨い, うまい, ウマい, or
美味い).

Furthermore, methods for dealing with written language issues (e.g., various
kinds of normalization or conversion) or for recognizing text input (e.g. OCR
& handwriting recognition or text entry methods) are often regarded as
precursors to NLP rather than as fundamental parts of the enterprise, despite
the fact that most NLP methods rely centrally on representations derived from
text rather than (spoken) language. This general lack of consideration of
writing has led to much of the research on such topics to largely appear
outside of ACL venues, in conferences or journals of neighboring fields such
as speech technology (e.g., text normalization) or human-computer interaction
(e.g., text entry).

This workshop will bring together researchers who are interested in the
relationship between written and spoken language, the properties of written
language, the ways in which writing systems encode language, and applications
specifically focused on characteristics of writing systems. Topics of interest
include but are not limited to:

* Text entry
* Text tokenization
* Disambiguation of abbreviations and homographs
* Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, transliteration, and diacritization
* Text normalization for speech and for processing ''informal'' genres of text
* Computational study of literary devices involving writing systems, such as
eye dialect
* Information-theoretic and machine-learning approaches to decipherment
* Methods for specialized text genres, e.g., clinical notes
* Optical character (incl. handwriting) recognition and historical document
processing
* Orthographic representation for unwritten languages
* Spelling error detection and correction
* Script normalization and encoding
* Writing system typology and its relevance to speech and language processing

We invite submissions on the relationship between written and spoken language,
the properties of written language, the ways in which writing systems encode
language, and applications specifically focused on characteristics of writing
systems.
 






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