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14th WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA (online)

Co-located with RANLP 2021 (online)

Monday, September 6, 2021

Workshop website: https://comparable.limsi.fr/bucc2021/

RANLP website: https://ranlp.org/ranlp2021

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MOTIVATION

In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In language engineering, on the one hand, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as statistical and neural machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest because they enable cross-language discoveries and comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that comparable corpora consist of documents that are comparable in content and form in various degrees and dimensions across several languages. Parallel corpora are on the one end of this spectrum, unrelated corpora on the other.

Comparable corpora have been used in a range of applications, including Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Cross-lingual text classification, etc. The linguistic definitions and observations related to comparable corpora can improve methods to mine such corpora for applications of statistical NLP, for example to extract parallel corpora from comparable corpora for neural MT. As such, it is of great interest to bring together builders and users of such corpora.


TOPICS

This year our special topic is "Neural Networks in Comparable Corpora Research". But we solicit contributions on all topics related to comparable (and parallel) corpora, including but not limited to the following:

Building Comparable Corpora:

* Automatic and semi-automatic methods
* Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the web
* Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
* Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora
* Rare and minority languages, across language families
* Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora

Applications of comparable corpora:

* Human translation
* Language learning
* Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization
* Bilingual and multilingual projections
* Machine translation
* Writing assistance
* Machine learning techniques using comparable corpora

Mining from Comparable Corpora:

* Cross-language distributional semantics, word embeddings and pre-trained multilingual transformer models
* Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from comparable corpora
* Methods to derive parallel from non-parallel corpora (e.g. to provide for low-resource languages in neural machine translation)
* Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of single words and multi-word expressions, proper names, and named entities from comparable corpora
* Induction of morphological, grammatical, and translation rules from comparable corpora
- Induction of multilingual word classes from comparable corpora


IMPORTANT DATES

July 5, 2021: Paper submission deadline
July 31, 2021: Notification of acceptance
August 31, 2021: Camera ready final papers
September 6, 2021: Workshop date

For updates see the workshop website at https://comparable.limsi.fr/bucc2021/


PRACTICAL INFORMATION

The workshop proceedings will be published in the ACL Anthology.

The link for participation in the online workshop will be communicated to registered participants in due time.

Workshop fees are 45 Euros for presenters (30 Euros for student presenters) and 15 Euros for non-presenters. For further details see https://ranlp.org/ranlp2021/fees.php


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please follow the style sheet and templates provided for the main conference at
https://ranlp.org/ranlp2021/submissions.php
Papers should be submitted as a PDF file using the START conference manager at https://www.softconf.com/ranlp2021/BUCC2021/
Submissions must describe original and unpublished work and range from 4 to 8 pages plus unlimited references.
Reviewing will be double blind, so the papers should not reveal the authors' identity. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, which will be included in the ACL Anthology.

Double submission policy: Parallel submission to other meetings or publications is possible but must be immediately notified to the workshop organizers by e-mail.

For further information and updates see the BUCC 2021 website: https://comparable.limsi.fr/bucc2021/

In case of questions, please contact Reinhard Rapp: reinhardrapp (at) gmx (dot) de


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

* Reinhard Rapp (Athena R.C.; Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences; University of Mainz, Germany), chair and contact person: reinhardrapp (at) gmx (dot) de
* Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
* Pierre Zweigenbaum (Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, Orsay, France)


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

* Ahmet Aker (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
* Ebrahim Ansari (Institue for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, Iran)
* Thierry Etchegoyhen (Vicomtech, Spain)
* Hitoshi Isahara (Otemon Gakuin University, Japan)
* Kyo Kageura (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
* Natalie Kübler (CLILLAC-ARP, Université de Paris, France)
* Philippe Langlais (Univerité de Montréal, Canada)
* Yves Lepage (Waseda University, Japan)
* Emmanuel Morin (Université de Nantes, France)
* Dragos Stefan Munteanu (RWS, USA)
* Reinhard Rapp (Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences and University of Mainz, Germany)
* Nasredine Semmar (CEA LIST, Paris, France)
* Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
* Richard Sproat (OGI School of Science & Technology, USA)
* Tim Van de Cruys (KU Leuven, Belgium)
* Pierre Zweigenbaum (Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, Orsay, France)