[Apologies for cross-postings]


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1st Call for Papers

Towards Digital Language Equality 2022 Workshop (TDLE 2022)

Date: Monday June 20, 2022

Venue: Palais du Pharo, Marseille, France

Website: https://european-language-equality.eu/tdle-2022/

Submission Deadline: 11 April 2022

Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2022/Equality/

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Workshop Description and Objectives

Language Technology (LT) is one of the most important AI application areas with a fast-growing economic impact. Current LT (NLP, Speech, Multimodal, etc.) supports many advanced applications which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In fact, the LT community in multiple sectors (Machine Translation, Text Analytics, Speech, Language Resources, etc.) is developing powerful new deep learning techniques, tools and large multilingual pre-trained language models that are revolutionizing many language-related tasks and supporting improved ways of communicating, including across languages.

Unfortunately, most of the tools and resources are not equally available for all languages and domains. Although LT has the potential to overcome the linguistic divide in the digital sphere, most languages are often neglected in this regard. A growing concern is that due to unequal access to these resources, only a small set of large IT companies and elite universities lead modern LT development (Ahmed and Wahed, 2020).

To unleash the full potential of LT and ensure that no users of these technologies are disadvantaged in the digital sphere because of the language they use, we should facilitate long-term progress towards multilingual, efficient, accurate, explainable, ethical, fair and unbiased language understanding and communication. In short, we must ensure transparent Digital Language Equality (DLE) in all areas of society: from government to business to citizens.

In this workshop, we would like to address the international, national, regional and local policies, initiatives, projects, studies and research that target DLE, such as models and tools that monitor, measure, catalog or visualize the evolution and dynamics of DLE, technological factors, (e.g., available language resources, tools and technologies) and situational context factors (e.g., societal, economic, educational, industrial) that may affect DLE. In addition, we will explore recent advances in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) towards DLE, including cost-efficient resource acquisition, processing and annotation, both monolingual and cross-lingual (such as annotation transfer), multilingual and
cross-lingual modeling techniques (transfer learning), zero-resource, zero-shot models, etc.
Topics of Interest

We invite submissions with original contributions addressing all topics related to DLE. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Use cases and best-practice examples and guidelines for LT deployment for concrete scenarios or for actual deployment of LT for specific end-users, feasibility studies, prototype implementations, cost estimates or results of desk research.

Collaborative efforts towards the identification, collection, documentation, curation, interoperability, reuse and archiving of LRs/LTs and other relevant artifacts.

International, national, regional and local policies, initiatives, projects, studies and research that target DLE or similar/related notions.

Models and tools that monitor, measure, catalog or visualize the evolution and dynamics of DLE.

Studies on technological factors, (e.g., available language resources, tools and technologies) and situational context factors (e.g., societal, economic, educational, industrial) that may affect DLE.

Analysis of the benefits of DLE policies.

Impact of DLE on society.

Main breakthroughs needed in LT for achieving DLE in a certain multilingual region or society.

Main LT visions and development goals for DLE.

Recent advances in LT and NLU that help progress towards DLE, including cost-efficient resource acquisition, processing and annotation, both monolingual and cross-lingual (such as annotation transfer), multilingual and cross-lingual modeling techniques (including but not limited to transfer learning), zero-resource, zero-shot models, etc.

Submission & Publication

We accept research papers addressing Digital Language Equality. Authors must declare if part of the paper contains material previously published elsewhere.

Papers are allowed a maximum of 8 pages, references excluded.

Accepted papers will be published in online proceedings.

Papers must strictly comply with the LREC stylesheet, be written in English and be submitted in PDF unprotected format.

Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/lrec2022/Equality/

Each submission will be reviewed by three programme committee members. In compliance with the LREC rules, papers must *not* be anonymized.
Important dates

Paper submission deadline: 11 April 2022

Notification of acceptance: 3 May 2022

Camera-ready paper: 23 May 2022

Workshop date: 20 June 2022

Invited Speakers

*TBA*
Organizing Committee

Itziar Aldabe (HiTZ, UPV-EHU)

Bego�a Altuna (HiTZ, UPV-EHU)

Aritz Farwell (HiTZ, UPV-EHU)

Federico Gaspari (ADAPT, DCU)

Maria Giagkou (Athena RC/ILSP)

Jan Hajic (Charles University)

Stelios Piperidis (Athena RC/ILSP)

Georg Rehm (DFKI)

German Rigau (HiTZ, UPV-EHU)

Andy Way (ADAPT, DCU)

To contact the organizers, please email Itziar Aldabe (itziar.aldabe@ehu.eus) and/or Aritz Farwell (aritz.farwell@ehu.eus) using Subject: [Towards DLE 2022].
Programme Committee

Xabier Arregi (HiTZ, UPV/EHU)

Dimitra Anastasiou (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology)

Albina Auksoriute (LIETUVIU KALBOS INSTITUTAS)

Jeremy Barnes (HiTZ, UPV/EHU)

Khalid Choukri (ELDA)

Bessie Dendrinos (ECSPM)

Itziar Gonzalez-Dios (HiTZ, UPV/EHU)

Kristine Eide (Language Council of Norway)

Ainara Estarrona (HiTZ, UPV/EHU)

Inma Hern�ez (HiTZ, UPV/EHU)

Jaroslava Hlaváčová (CUNI)

Mikel Iruskieta (HiTZ, UPV/EHU)

Sabine Kirchmeier (EFNIL)

Svetla Koeva (INSTITUTE FOR BULGARIAN LANGUAGE)

Krister Linden (UH)

Teresa Lynn (DCU)

Maite Melero (BSC)

Eva Navas (HiTZ, UPV/EHU)

Delyth Prys (BU)

Kepa Sarasola (HiTZ, UPV/EHU)

Claudia Soria (ELEN)

Frieda Steurs (Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal)

Jana Strakov� (CUNI)

Tam�s V�radi (Nyelvtudom�nyi Kutat�k�zpont)

Francois Yvon (CNRS)

Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!

Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description
, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2022 endorses the need to uniquely identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.