1st ALP Workshop will be co-located with RANLP 2023 at Varna, Bulgaria

Ancient languages contain rich human historical and cultural wealth. So far there has been some good advancement in applying language technologies to ancient languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Latin, Ancient Greek and Ancient Chinese, especially in the construction of digital language resources and resources to facilitate automatic analysis. The workshop on Ancient Language Processing aims to focus specifically on ancient languages and scripts from the emergence of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt c. 3000 BCE to the entire world up till 800 AD. We wish to provide a recognized forum to further advance this subfield of NLP, where researchers and practitioners can meet and discuss their latest work, and exchange ideas in addressing shared epigraphical challenges in language processing across various ancient languages, such as non-Latin and non-alphabetic scripts, Right-to-Left, transliteration conventions and fragmentary texts. In addition, we propose shared tasks on Machine Translation for Ancient Chinese and Akkadian, respectively, to provide an opportunity to address the unique challenges faced by ancient language machine translation.

Languages of interest include, but are not limited to:

Mesopotamia: Sumerian, Akkadian
Iran: Elamite, old and middle Persian
Levant: Eblaite, Amorite, Aramaic (incl. Mandaic and Syriac), Ancient Hebrew, Phynician, Ugaritic
Anatolia: Hittite, Luwian and minor Anatolian languages
Egypt: Ancient Egyptian, Coptic
Mediterranean: Linear A and B, Ancient Greek, Latin
Arabia: Ancient North Arabian, old Arabic
India: Sanskrit, Eastern Panjabi, Pali
China: Literary Chinese, Tibetan
Mesoamerica: Mayan
Japan: Old Japanese

Papers and contributions are encouraged for any work related to Natural Language Processing of Ancient Languages. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Charset (Unicode)
Input method (transliteration and transcription)
Tokenization (word segmentation)
Morphological analysis (both inflectional and derivational)
Philological issues in NLP
Linguistic Linked Data supporting NLP
Syntactic analysis
Semantic analysis
Machine translation
Pre-trained models
Deep learning based NLP
Multi-lingual comparison for NLP purposes
Data mining
Knowledge extraction
Language varieties and dialects
NLP issues in the analysis of broken texts and uncertain readings
Minimal computing in NLP

We welcome two types of submissions:

Long Papers that describe original and unpublished work in any topic area of the workshop. Long papers are limited to 8 pages for content, with 2 additional pages for references.
Short Papers that describe either work in progress or a research proposal. They may also be in the style of a position paper that surveys and criticizes existing literature. Short papers must include clear directions for future research. Submissions of this type are limited to 4 pages for content, with 2 additional pages for references.

Please also note the following:

The papers accepted will be included in the ACL Anthology.
Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available from here (Latex and Word): https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files. Please submit your papers in PDF format.
The review will be double-blind. Please do not include any self-identifying information in the submission. This includes anonymizing the already-published work by removing acknowledgments, self-citations, etc.

Important dates

Paper submission due: July 10, 2023
Notification of acceptance: August 5, 2023
Camera-ready paper due: August 25, 2023
Workshop date: September 7, 2023
All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).

Submission

Submission can be made through this: https://softconf.com/ranlp23/ALP/

Contact:

Direct your workshop related inquiries to: ancientnlp@gmail.com
Direct your general (including registration related) inquiries to: 2023@ranlp.org

Organizing Committee

Dr. Adam Anderson, UC Berkeley, USA
Dr. Shai Gordin, Ariel University, Israel
Dr. Bin Li, Nanjing Normal University, China
Dr. Yudong Liu, Western Washington University, USA
Dr. Marco C. Passarotti, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy

Program Committee

Tero Alstola, University of Helsinki, Finland
Masayuki Asahara, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan
Jonathan Berant, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Monica Berti, Leipzig University, Germany
Patrick Burns, New York University, USA
Christian Chiarchos, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
Gregory Crane, Tufts University, USA
Sanhong Deng,Nanjing University, China
Minxuan Feng, Nanjing Normal University, China
Ethan Fetaya, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Toon Van Hal, University of Leuven, Belgium
Renfen Hu, Beijing Normal University, China
Heidi Jauhiainen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Kyle P. Johnson, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Germany
Orly Lewis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Johann-Mattis List, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
Chao-Lin Liu, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Congjun Long, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China
Francesco Mambrini, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy
Hubert Mara, MLU Halle, Germany
Martijn Naaijer, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Christian M. Prager, University of Bonn, Germany
Avital Romach, Yale, USA
Luis Sáenz, Ariel University/Heidelberg University, Israel/Germany
Si Shen, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China
Xiaodong Shi, Xiamen University, China
Qi Su, Peking University, China
Thea Sommerschield, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
Rachele Sprugnoli, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy
Gabriel Stanovsky, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Niek Veldhuis, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Dongbo Wang, Nanjing Agricultural University, China