We welcome submissions to the special issue of the Cambridge University Press journal Natural Language Engineering on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects.
The deadline for submissions is November 5, 2018.
Recent initiatives in language technology have led to the development of at least minimal language processing toolkits for all EU-official languages, as well as for languages with a large number of speakers worldwide such as Chinese and Arabic. This is a big step toward the automatic processing and/or extraction of information, especially from official documents and newspapers, where the standard, literary language is used.
Apart from those official languages, a large number of dialects or closely-related language varieties are in daily use, not only as spoken colloquial languages but also in written media and social networks. Building language resources and tools from scratch is expensive, but the efforts can often be reduced by making use of pre-existing resources and tools for related, resource-richer languages.
The interest in language resources and computational models for the study of similar languages, language varieties and dialects has been growing substantially in recent years. This is evidenced by a number of publications on this topic in NLP journals and conferences and the organization of the now well-established VarDial workshop series co-located yearly with top-tier NLP conferences.
We welcome papers dealing with one or more of the following topics:
Examples of language varieties include pluricentric languages like English, Spanish, French or Portuguese and examples of pairs of related languages include Swedish-Norwegian, Bulgarian-Macedonian, Serbian-Bosnian, Russian-Ukrainian, Irish-Gaelic Scottish, Malay-Indonesian, Turkish–Azerbaijani, Mandarin-Cantonese, Hindi–Urdu, and many other.
*IMPORTANT: We received a very large number of submissions to this special issue and we processed them on a first come, first served basis.
Given the large number of submissions, this special issue was divided into two volumes. The first volume was published in September 2019 as NLE 25:5 and the second volume will appear in 2020. All papers will appear online first in the journal's website shortly after acceptance.
Instructions for preparing your manuscript for the journal Natural Language Engineering are available here.
Please submit your article through the NLE manuscript submission system. When submitting your manuscript, please select NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects in the field Special Issue Designation.
m(dot)zampieri(at)wlv(dot)ac(dot)uk