VarDIAL 2020

Description

VarDial 2020 will be co-located with COLING 2020. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the workshop will be held virtually. The workshop will take place on December 13, 2020.

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.

The workshop deals with computational methods and language resources for closely related languages, language varieties, and dialects. We welcome papers dealing with one or more of the following topics:

• Corpora, 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 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.

In addition to the topics listed above, we also welcome papers dealing with diachronic language variation (e.g. philogenetic methods, historical 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. See the call for papers for more details.

Together with VarDial 2020 we are organizing an evaluation campaign with multiple shared tasks. More details are available here.