Call for papers

The purpose of the conference series International Workshop on Computational
Linguistics for Uralic Languages is to bring together researchers working on
computational approaches to working with these languages. We accept long and
short papers as well as tutorial proposals working on the following languages:
Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Võro, the Sámi languages, Komi (Zyrian, Permyak),
Mordvin (Erzya, Moksha), Mari (Hill, Meadow), Udmurt, Nenets (Tundra, Forest),
Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, Mansi, Khanty, Veps, Karelian (Olonets), Karelian,
Ingrian (Izhorian), Votic, Livonian, Ludic, and other related languages.
All Uralic languages exhibit rich morphological structure, which makes
processing them challenging for state-of-the-art computational linguistic
approaches, the majority also suffer from a lack of resources and many are
endangered.

Research papers should be original, substantial and unpublished research, that
can describe work-in-progress systems, frameworks, standards and evaluation
schemes. Demos and tutorials will present systems and standards towards the goal
of interoperability and unification of different projects, applications and
research groups Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to):

* Parsers, analysers and processing pipelines of Uralic languages
* Lexical databases, electronic dictionaries
* Finished end-user applications aimed at Uralic languages, such as spelling or
grammar checkers, machine translation or speech processing
* Evaluation methods and gold standards, tagged corpora, treebanks
* Reports on language-independent or unsupervised methods as applied to Uralic
languages
* Surveys and review articles on subjects related to computational linguistics
for one or more Uralic languages
* Any work that aims at combining efforts and reducing duplication of work
* How to elicit activity from the language community, agitation campaigns, games
with a purpose

To maximise the possibility of reproducibility, replication and reuse, we
particularly encourage submissions which present free/open-source language
resources and make use of free/open-source software. One of the aims of this
gathering is to avoid unnecessary duplicated work in field of Uralistics by
establishing connections and interoperability standards between researchers and
research groups working at different sites. We have also identified a serious
lack of gold standards and evaluation metrics for all Uralic languages including
those with national support, any work towards better resources in these fields
will be greatly appreciated.

In this year’s edition, we encourage people to present comparative evaluations
of different NLP methods as applied to Uralic languages. With all the buzz around
neural and deep-learning methods: Are they applicable to Uralic languages, which
in general have very little training data --- even monolingual data --- and also
richer morphology than the more widely treated Indo-European languages.