VarDial 2019

Sixth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

VarDial 2019 will be co-located with NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis, United States. The workshop will take place on June 6th or 7th, 2019.

VarDial is a well-established series of workshops promoting a forum for scholars working on a range of topics related to the study of diatopic language variation from a computational perspective.

Previous editions of the workshop were VarDial 2018 co-located with COLING, VarDial 2017 co-located with EACL, VarDial 2016 co-located with COLING, LT4VarDial 2015 co-located with RANLP, and VarDial 2014 co-located with COLING.

The workshop deals with computational methods and language resources for closely related languages, language varieties, and dialects. Corpus-driven exploitation of different degrees of linguistic variation such as lexicon and grammar is another topic of interest.

We welcome papers dealing with one or more of the following topics:

• Language resources and tools for similar languages, varieties and dialects
• Adaptation of tools (taggers, parsers) for similar languages, varieties and dialects;
• Evaluation of language resources and tools when applied to language varieties;
• Reusability of language resources in NLP applications (e.g., for machine translation, POS tagging, syntactic parsing, etc.);
• Corpus-driven studies in dialectology and language variation;
• Computational approaches to the study of mutual intelligibility between dialects and similar languages;
• Automatic identification of lexical variation;
• Automatic classification of language varieties;
• Text similarity and adaptation between language varieties;
• Linguistic issues in the adaptation of language resources and tools (e.g., semantic discrepancies, lexical gaps, false friends);
• Machine translation between closely related languages, language varieties and dialects.

Papers presented at the past editions of VarDial focused on machine translation between closely related languages and language varieties, adaptation of POS taggers and parsers for similar languages and language varieties, compilation of corpora, spelling normalization, computational approaches to the study of mutual intelligibility, and the automatic identification of similar languages and dialects.

The VarDial proceedings will be published by ACL and all papers will be available at the ACL Anthology.

Together with VarDial 2019 we are organizing an evaluation campaign with multiple shared tasks.