Our workshop will be collocated with NAACL HLT 2018, taking place in New Orleans, USA from June 1 - June 6, 2018.
The workshop will be held on June 5.
9:15–9:30 Opening Remarks
9:30–10:30 Invited Talk by JamesW. Pennebaker: Measuring Linguistic Variation with Function Words
10:30–11:00 Break
11:00–11:30 Stylistic variation over 200 years of court proceedings according to gender and social class
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb
11:30–12:00 Stylistic Variation in Social Media Part-of-Speech Tagging
Murali Raghu Babu Balusu, Taha Merghani and Jacob Eisenstein
12:00–12:30 Detecting Syntactic Features of Translated Chinese
Hai Hu, Wen Li and Sandra Kübler
12:30–14:00 Lunch
14:00–15:00 Invited Talk by Rada Mihalcea: What Does Language Tell us about the People Behind it
15:00–15:30 Evaluating Creative Language Generation: The Case of Rap Lyric Ghostwriting
Peter Potash, Alexey Romanov and Anna Rumshisky
15:30–16:00 Break
16:00–17:00 Invited Talk by Barbara Plank: Author Profiling from Text and Beyond
17:00–17:30 Cross-corpus Native Language Identification via Statistical Embedding
Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Julian Brooke and Alexandra Uitdenbogerd
17:30-17:45 Final Remarks
People express themselves in different ways due to their background, their intended audience, the conventions of their language for the genre in question, or just as a matter of personal style.
The associated variation in phonological, lexical, syntactic, or discourse realisation of a particular semantic content have important consequences for low-level NLP tasks such as text normalization, POS tagging, and parsing. At the same time, this variation influences downstream applications such as text simplification, sentiment analysis, information retrieval, or text generation, and directly enables the reverse tasks of predicting variables such as individual speaker, speaker demographics, target audience, genre, language, etc.
Leveraging these stylistic differences in NLP can be beneficial for machines and humans alike, while on the other hand opening a range of ethical questions. An informed discussion on these timely topics requires gathering at one table researchers who encounter stylistic variation directly or indirectly in their work - from the design of computational methods to the interpretation of results in other fields - and collecting and aggregating the current development, challenges and opportunities.
The overarching questions that motivate this workshop are:
1. To what extent it is possible or desirable to go beyond superficial, uninterpretable, task-specific stylistic features to deeper, broader, more systematic, and more psychologically-plausible conceptualizations of stylistic variation.
2. To what extent does stylistic variation indirectly impact applied tasks historically treated as stylistically uniform, and to what extent is an isolation of the stylistic factor desirable in these applications.
3. To what extent recent advances in related areas such as distributional semantics can be applied to better capture stylistic variation and which new challenges arise with using and interpreting these approaches.
For purposes of the workshop, “stylistic variation” includes variation in phonological, lexical, syntactic, or discourse realization of particular semantic content, due to differences in extralinguistic variables such as individual speaker, speaker demographics, target audience, genre and so on.
We welcome submissions including the proposed topics and applications of interest from the following non-exhaustive list.
Suggested topics:
Possible applications:
We accept regular long (8 pages + references) and short papers (4 pages + references) following the NAACL 2018 format.
Submit your papers via START: https://www.softconf.com/naacl2018/Style-Var18/user/scmd.cgi?scmd=submitPaperCustom&pageid=0
Lucie Flekova, Amazon Research
Julian Brooke, Thomson Reuters
Thamar Solorio, University of Houston
Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University
Prof. Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan
Prof. James W. Pennebaker, University of Texas at Austin
Prof. Barbara Plank, University of Groningen
Previous year: https://sites.google.com/site/workshoponstylisticvariation/program
Nikolaos Aletras (University of Sheffield)
Yves Bestgen (Université catholique de Louvain)
Alberto Barrón-Cedeño (Qatar Computing Research Institute)
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp)
Jacob Eisenstein (Georgia Tech)
Roger Evans (University of Brighton)
Alexander Gelbukh (Instituto Politécnico Nacional)
Adam Hammond (San Diego State University)
Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
Dirk Hovy (University of Copenhagen)
Eduard Hovy (Carnegie Mellon University)
Ekaterina Kochmar (Cambridge University)
Vasileios Lampos (University College London)
Dominique Legallois (Université Paris 3, Sorbonne-Nouvelle)
Manuel Montes-y-Gomez (Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Optica y Electronica)
Dong Nguyen (Alan Turing Institute)
Umashanthi Pavalanathan (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Ellie Pavlick (University of Pennsylvania)
Barbara Plank (University of Groningen)
Martin Potthast (Leipzig University)
Vinod Prabhakaran (Computer Science, Stanford)
Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro (University of Pennsylvania)
Emily Prud’hommeaux (Rochester Institute of Technology)
Sudha Rao (University of Maryland)
Paolo Rosso (Universitat Politècnica de València)
Maarten Sap (University of Washington)
Andrew H. Schwartz (Stony Brook University)
Anders Soegaard (University of Copenhagen)
Benno Stein (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Joel Tetreault (Grammarly)
Sandra Uitdenbogerd (RMIT University)
Sowmya Vajjala (Iowa State University)
Svitlana Volkova (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Wei Xu (Ohio State Unversity)
Marcos Zampeiri (University of Wolverhampton)
9 March 2018: 16 March 2018: Paper Due Date
6 April 2018: Notification of Acceptance
16 April 2018: Camera-ready Papers Due