[Languagechange News] Final CfP: LChange'19: 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change - ACL2019
Nina Tahmasebi
nina.tahmasebi at gu.se
Fri Apr 12 16:17:43 CEST 2019
Final Call for Papers [apologies for x-posting]
*1^st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical
Language Change 2019
(LChange’19)*
ACL 2019, Florence, Italy
August 2, 2019
_https://languagechange.org/events/2019-acl-lcworkshop/_
_https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/lcworkshop/ _
Submission deadline: Friday, 26th, 2019 (anywhere in the world)
Natural languages change over time. Every language relies on a finite
lexicon to express an infinite set of emerging ideas driven by
sociocultural and technological development. This tension is often
manifested in the historical emergence of novel word forms and meanings,
and the obliteration of existing words and word meanings. Compared to
other aspects of language where there are rich formal treatments of
change (e.g., phonology, grammar), computational approaches to the
time-varying properties of word meanings and forms have just begun to
take shape in computational linguistics, natural language processing,
and related disciplines [1].
Characterizing the time-varying nature of language will have broad
implications and applications in multiple fields including linguistics,
artificial intelligence, digital humanities, computational cognitive and
social sciences. In this workshop, we will bring together the world's
pioneers and experts in *computational approaches to historical language
change with the focus on digital text corpora.* In doing so, this
workshop carries the triple goals of disseminating the state-of-the-art
research on diachronic modeling of language change, fostering
international cross-disciplinary collaborations, and exploring the
fundamental theoretical and methodological challenges in this growing
niche of computational linguistic research.
*Organizers:*Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
*Submissions*
We accept three types of submissions, long papers, short papers and
abstracts, following the ACL2019 style, and the ACL submission policy
https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Policies_for_Submission,_Review_and_Citation
Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus
unlimited references, short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages
of content; final versions will be given one additional page of content
so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account. Abstracts may
consist of up to two (2) pages of content, plus unlimited references.
Submissions should be sent in electronic forms, using the Softconf START
conference management system. The submission site is now available at
_https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/lcworkshop/
_
*Important Dates*
* April 26, 2019: Paper submission
* May 24, 2019: Notification of Acceptance
* June 3, 2019: Camera-ready papers due
* August 2, 2019: Workshop Dates
**
*Keynote Talk*
*Confirmed Speaker:*Claire Bowern (Professor of Linguistics at Yale
University) https://ling.yale.edu/people/claire-bowern, Haim Dubossarsky
(Research Fellow at University of Cambridge)
*Title & Abstract:*tba
*Workshop Topics*
Human language changes over time, driven by the dual needs of adapting
to ongoing sociocultural and technological development in the world and
facilitating efficient communication. In particular, novel words are
coined or borrowed from other languages, while obsolete words slide into
obscurity. Similarly, words may acquire novel meanings or lose existing
meanings. This workshop explores these phenomena by bringing to bear
state-of-the-art computational methodologies, theories and digital text
resources on exploring the time-varying nature of human language.
Although there exists rich empirical work on language change from
historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics,
computational approaches to the problem of language change,
/particularly how word forms and meanings evolve/, have only begun to
take shape over the past decade or so, with exemplary work on semantic
change and lexical replacement. The motivation has long been related to
/search/, and /understanding/ in diachronic archives. The emergence of
long-term and large-scale digital corpora was the prerequisite and has
resulted in a different set of problems for this strand of study than
have traditionally been studied in historical linguistics. As an
example, studies of lexical replacement have largely focused on named
entity change (names of e.g., countries and people that change over
time) because of the large effect these name changes have for temporal
information retrieval.
The aim of this workshop is three-fold. First, we want to provide
pioneering researchers who work on computational methods, evaluation,
and large-scale modeling of language change *an outlet for disseminating
cutting-edge research on topics concerning language change*. Currently,
researchers in this area have published in a wide range of different
venues, from computational linguistics, to cognitive science and digital
libraries venues. We want to utilize this proposed workshop as a
platform for sharing state-of-the-art research progress in this
fundamental domain of natural language research.
Second, in doing so we want to *bring together domain experts across
disciplines*. We want to connect those that have long worked on language
change within historical linguistics and bring with them a large
understanding for general linguistic theories of language change; those
that have studied change across languages and language families; those
that develop and test computational methods for detecting semantic
change and laws of semantic change; and those that need knowledge (of
the occurrence and shape) of language change, for example, in digital
humanities and computational social sciences where text mining is
applied to diachronic corpora subject to lexical semantic change.
Third, the detection and modelling of language change using diachronic
text and text mining raise *fundamental theoretical and methodological
challenges* for future research in this area. The representativeness of
text is a first critical issue; works using large diachronic corpora and
computational methods for detecting change often claim to find changes
that are universally true for a language as a whole. But the jury is out
on how results derived from digital literature or newspapers accurately
represent changes in language as a whole. We hope to engage corpus
linguists, big-data scientists, and computational linguists to address
these open issues. Besides these goals, this workshop will also support
discussion on the evaluation of computational methodologies for
uncovering language change. Verifying change only using positive
examples of change often confirms a corpus bias rather than reflecting
genuine language change. Larger quantities and higher qualities of text
over time result in the detection of more semantic change. In fact,
multiple semantic laws have been proposed lately where later other
authors have shown that the detected effects are linked to frequency
rather than underlying semantic change. The methodological issue of
evaluation, together with good evaluation testsets and standards are of
high importance to the research community. We aim to shed some light on
these issues and encourage the community to collaborate to find solutions.
The work in semantic change detection has, to a large extent, moved to
(neural) embedding techniques in recent years. These methods have
several drawbacks: the need for very large datasets to produce stable
embeddings, and the fact that all semantic information of a word is
encoded in a single vector thus limiting the possibility to study word
senses separately. A move towards multi-sense embeddings will most
likely require even more texts per time unit, which will limit the
applicability of these methods to other languages than English, and a
few others. We want to bring about a discussion on the need for methods
that can discriminate and disambiguate among a word's senses (meanings)
and that can be used for resource-poor languages with little hope of
acquiring the order of magnitude of words needed for creating stable
embeddings, possibly using dynamic embeddings that seem to require less
text. Finally, knowledge of language change is useful not only on its
own, but as a basis for other diachronic textual investigations and in
search.
A digital humanities investigation into the living conditions of young
women through history cannot rely on the word /girl/ in English, as in
the past the reference of /girl/ also included young men. Automatic
detecting of language change is useful for many researchers outside of
the communities that study the changes themselves and develop methods
for their detection. By reaching out to these other communities, we can
better understand how to utilize the results for further research and
for presenting them to the interested public. In addition, we need good
user interfaces and systems for exploring language changes in corpora,
for example, to allow for serendipitous discovery of interesting
phenomena. In addition to facilitate research on texts, information
about language changes is used for measuring document across-time
similarity, information retrieval from long-term document archives, the
design of OCR algorithms and so on.
We invite original research papers from a wide range of topics,
including but not limited to:
* ·Automatic detection of semantic change and diachronic lexical
replacement
* ·Fundamental laws of language change
* ·Computational theories and generative models of language change
* ·Sense-aware (semantic) change analysis
* ·Methodologies for resource-poor languages
* ·Diachronic linguistic data visualization and online systems
* ·Applications and implications of language change detection
* ·Sociocultural influences on language change
* ·Cross-linguistic and phylogenetic approaches to language change
* ·Methodological aspects of, as well as datasets for, evaluation
The workshop is planned to last a full day. Submissions are open to all,
and are to be submitted anonymously. All papers will be refereed through
a double-blind peer review process by at least three reviewers with
final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organizers. The papers
are published in the ACL anthology. In addition, we plan to edit a book
on the basis of extended workshop papers and are currently discussing
with a publisher.
Contact us at *_PC-ACLws2019 at languagechange.org
<mailto:PC-ACLws2019 at languagechange.org>_ *if you have any questions.
[1] Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt: Survey of Computational
Approaches to Lexical Semantic Change. CoRR abs/1811.06278 (2018)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06278
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