36.26, 39. Romanistiktag, Section "The Quantitative Turn: NLP and AI Methods in Romance Linguistics"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-26. Wed Jan 08 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.26, 39. Romanistiktag, Section "The Quantitative Turn: NLP and AI Methods in Romance Linguistics"

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Joel Jenkins, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Erin Steitz <ensteitz at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 08-Jan-2025
From: Iris Ferrazzo [iris.ferrazzo at uni-bonn.de]
Subject: 39. Romanistiktag, Section "The Quantitative Turn: NLP and AI Methods in Romance Linguistics"


Full Title: 39. Romanistiktag, Section "The Quantitative Turn: NLP and
AI Methods in Romance Linguistics"

Date: 22-Sep-2025 - 25-Sep-2025
Location: Konstanz, Germany
Contact Person: Iris Ferrazzo
Meeting Email: iris.ferrazzo at uni-bonn.de
Web Site:
https://www.romanistiktag.de/xxxix-romanistiktag/sektionen/sektion-13/

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Text/Corpus
Linguistics
Subject Language(s): French (fra)
                     Italian (ita)
                     Spanish (spa)

Call Deadline: 25-Jan-2025

Meeting Description:
The German Romance Studies Association organises the German Romance
Studies Day every two years. It is always organised at a different
Romance department and consists of around 25 sections with a
linguistic, literary, cultural and didactic focus.
At the Romance Studies Day, the German Romance Studies Association
awards the Elise Richter Prize for outstanding dissertations and
post-doctoral theses.
Call for Papers
The quantitative turn: NLP and AI Methods in Romance Linguistics
In recent decades, linguistic research has embraced new methods that
prioritize data-driven approaches and mathematical modeling. This
shift, known as the “Quantitative Turn” (Kortmann 2021), stems from a
desire to move beyond theories based solely on the intuitions of a few
experts. Instead, researchers now harness readily available data from
sources like social media and online platforms, such as Amazon
Mechanical Turk (Winter 2022). These sources provide access to more
spontaneous language use, offering a richer view of how people
communicate.
However, working with this type of data comes with challenges. Social
media posts, speech transcripts, and other unstructured language data
often need to be organized or “cleaned” before they can be analyzed.
Doing this manually is both time-consuming and expensive. Fortunately,
advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial
Intelligence (AI) offer solutions.
Technologies like word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013), BERT (Devlin et al.
2019), and others based on transformer architectures (Vaswani et al.
2017) are capable of processing vast amounts of data. These tools
allow researchers to analyze patterns in language without extensive
manual effort. Applications range from studying how dialects change
over time to developing tools for understanding text, such as parsers
for unstructured data and systems for resolving pronouns in sentences
(Dobrovolskii 2021).
Despite these advances, many of the latest NLP and AI techniques have
focused on widely spoken languages like English. As a result, Romance
languages and their diverse dialects remain underrepresented in this
research (Kellert & Zaman 2023). This gap stands for a missed
opportunity to apply cutting-edge tools to answer important questions
about Romance languages and to explore their unique linguistic
characteristics.
This workshop invites researchers to explore how NLP and AI methods
can address challenges in Romance Linguistics, with a focus on
adapting these tools to less-studied Romance languages and varieties.
Suggested topics
We welcome contributions that address questions such as:
 - How can we handle unstructured data in linguistic research?
 - How can Romance languages benefit from the latest NLP and AI tools?
 - What steps can ensure reliable linguistic insights from large-scale
social media data?
 - How can collaborations between linguists and AI experts advance the
study of Romance languages?
 - What role does the Quantitative Turn play in language policy for
Romance-speaking communities?
 - What unique challenges do Romance languages pose for NLP and AI
development?
Submission Guidelines:
• Working languages: English, German, and Romance Languages
• Abstract Length: 4000 characters (including white spaces and
bibliography)
• Event Dates: September 22nd-25th, 2025
• Location: Konstanz, Germany
Please submit your abstract as a PDF attachment to
iris.ferrazzo at uni-bonn.de. Include your name, affiliation, and contact
information in the body of the email. We welcome submissions from
researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The decision on the
choice of abstracts will be announced on January 31st, 2025.
Event Coordinators:
• Iris Ferrazzo (Universität Bonn / Bonner Center for Digital
Humanities)
• Olga Kellert (Universität A Coruña / Universität Göttingen)
For any inquiries or further information, please contact
iris.ferrazzo at uni-bonn.de.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List to support the student editors:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

Elsevier Ltd http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-26
----------------------------------------------------------