[In English по-русски]

Third International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages

Organised by ACL SIGUR and The University of Oslo St. Petersburg Representative Office.

23th January, 2017, St. Petersburg, Russia

Proceedings

A preview of the Pre-proceedings is available in our github.

The final proceedings version are available in the ACL SIGUR section of ACL anthology.

Programme

Preliminary schedule, subject to change. Printable version is available (editable) on overleaf.

Day/Time Event
23rd January Main conference
10:00–10:15 Opening ceremony
10:15–11:30 Invited Talk
11:30–11:45 Poster Boasters:
11:30–11:33 Synchronised Mediawiki…
11:33–11:36 Giellatekno Open-source click-in-text…
11:36–11:39 Languages under the influence…
11:39–11:42 Instant Annotations…
11:45–12:30 Posters and Demos with Coffee break
12:30–14:00 Lunch
14:00–16:00 Oral Sessions:
14:00–14:30 Preliminary Experiments concerning Verbal…
14:30–15:00 Language technology resources and tools for Mansi…
15:00–15:30 Annotation schemens in North Sámi Dependency…
15:30–16:00 A morphological analyser for Kven…
16:00–16:30 The LRE Map, LR Matrices and LR Impact factor…
16:30–17:15 Posters and Demos with Coffee break
17:15–18:00 ACL SIGUR business meeting
19:00– Conference Dinner
24th January Workshopping / open discussions
  Uralic dependencies
  Перспективы развития “Корпуса коми языка” и “Коми онлайн библиотеки” (Perspectives for the development of the language corpus and online library for Komi)
  Morphology
  QA
  (suggest your own topics)

Informations for authors: a Poster boaster is an elevator pitch of your poster / demo topic to invite people to come talk, you may use up to three slides, typically a title slide, a content slide and picture of poster. In Oral sessions the speaker slot of 30 minutes is not strictly allocated between the presentations and questions, but it is usually good to aim to talk 20–25 minutes. If you have a presentation, make sure it’s either on the presentation computer or that you can connect to the projector without technical difficulties in a during a coffee or lunch break before your turn.

Venue

The workshop will be held in the room at the second floor in the Norwegian University Centre, in Kalužskiy pereulok 3, 191015 St. Petersburg, Russia. We are in an auditorium that fits at least 30 people. There is a data projector and coffee will be served in the auditorium. There’s a possibility to print at the venue at a cost.

OpenStreetMap to venue Kalužskiy pereulok 3, 191015 St. Petersburg

Number 3 is before the “Диски” (no. 7) on the left if you are walking down the street. On the door is “Бизнес центр НРК”.

Registration

To register for the workshop please fill out registration form. NB: there is an optional 50 euro fee for participation that will be used to cover running costs.

Invited speaker

Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Tartu ülikool: Language technology in Tartu: dreams and realities

Accepted papers

In no specific order:

  1. Guersande Chaminade and Thierry Poibeau: Preliminary Experiments concerning Verbal Predicative Structure Extraction from a Large Finnish Corpus
  2. Csilla Horváth, Norbert Szilágyi, Veronika Vincze and Ágoston Nagy: Language technology resources and tools for Mansi: an overview
  3. Francis M. Tyers and Mariya Sheyanova: Annotation schemes in North Sámi dependency parsing
  4. Jack Rueter and Mika Hämäläinen Synchronized Mediawiki based analyzer dictionary development
  5. Jack Rueter DEMO: Giellatekno Open-source click-in-text dictionaries for bringing closely related languages into contact
  6. Ciprian Gerstenberger, Niko Partanen, Michael Rießler and Joshua Wilbur: Instant Annotations – Applying NLP Methods to the Annotation of Spoken Language Documentation Corpora
  7. Sindre Reino Trosterud, Trond Trosterud, Anna-Kaisa Räisänen, Leena Niiranen, Mervi Haavisto and Kaisa Maliniemi: A morphological analyser for Kven
  8. Eszter Simon and Nikolett Mus Languages under the influence: Building a database of Uralic languages
  9. Joseph Mariani and Gil Francopoulo: The LRE Map, LR Matrices and LR Impact factor

Call for papers

The purpose of the conference series International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages is to bring together researchers working on computational approaches to working with these languages. We accept long and short papers as well as tutorial proposals working on the following languages: Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Võro, the Sámi languages, Komi (Zyrian, Permyak), Mordvin (Erzya, Moksha), Mari (Hill, Meadow), Udmurt, Nenets (Tundra, Forest), Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, Mansi, Khanty, Veps, Karelian (Olonets), Karelian, Ingrian (Izhorian), Votic, Livonian, Ludic, and other related languages.

All Uralic languages exhibit rich morphological structure, which makes processing them challenging for state-of-the-art computational linguistic approaches, the majority also suffer from a lack of resources and many are endangered.

Research papers should be original, substantial and unpublished research, that can describe work-in-progress systems, frameworks, standards and evaluation schemes. Demos and tutorials will present systems and standards towards the goal of interoperability and unification of different projects, applications and research groups Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to):

  • Parsers, analysers and processing pipelines of Uralic languages
  • Lexical databases, electronic dictionaries
  • Finished end-user applications aimed at Uralic languages, such as spelling or grammar checkers, machine translation or speech processing
  • Evaluation methods and gold standards, tagged corpora, treebanks
  • Reports on language-independent or unsupervised methods as applied to Uralic languages
  • Surveys and review articles on subjects related to computational linguistics for one or more Uralic languages
  • Any work that aims at combining efforts and reducing duplication of work
  • How to elicit activity from the language community, agitation campaigns, games with a purpose

To maximise the possibility of reproducibility, replication and reuse, we particularly encourage submissions which present free/open-source language resources and make use of free/open-source software.

One of the aims of this gathering is to avoid unnecessary duplicated work in field of Uralistics by establishing connections and interoperability standards between researchers and research groups working at different sites. We have also identified a serious lack of gold standards and evaluation metrics for all Uralic languages including those with national support, any work towards better resources in these fields will be greatly appreciated. To further these goals we propose to start discussions on forming an ACL special interest group (or similar) on Uralistics at the event. In this year’s edition we particularly encourage researchers of minority Uralic languages in Russia to participate.

Important Dates

  • 3rd July 2016: Call for papers announced
  • 1st October 2016 2nd call for papers
  • 1st November 14th November 2016: Paper submission deadline
  • 1st December 6th December 2016: Paper notification
  • 14th December 23rd December 2016: Camera-ready deadline
  • 11th January 2017: Fill in the registration form, only registered participants have access to the venue and we need to have a participant list ready.
  • 23th and 24th January 2017: Workshop held in St. Petersburg

Submission of papers

Language of submission: Submissions should be made in English or Russian with optional abstract(s) in Uralic Language(s).

Submission format: There are multiple submission types: long and short research papers, and demonstrations and tutorials. Research papers should be up to 18 pages in length excluding references, the descriptions for demonstrations and tutorials up to 5 pages. Submissions should be formatted using LaTeX default article style with b5paper option. Citations should be managed with bibtex and e.g., unsrt bibliography style. Linguistic glosses should follow Leipzig glossing rules and use expex LaTeX package (make sure to update expex regularly as it is developed actively). Preferred LaTeX version is XeLaTeX and therefore you should use UTF-8 encoded Unicode in your sources rather than TeX encoded characters where possible. You will find the workshop template here (also in zip format templates).

If you do not have access to LaTeX text processign system, please contact us for alternative templates and instructions.

Submissions can be made here using the EasyChair conference management system.

Publication venue: Proceedings of the workshop will be published open-access in ACL anthology, SIG proceedings for SIGUR (new)

Conflicts of interest: The reviewing process will be anonymous (double-blind peer review) and authors should state in their submission all conflicts of interest with members of the programme committee. Members of the programme committee are also expected to state their conflicts of interest during review bidding. If the programme committee finds themselves unable to review some of the submissions, external reviewers may be called.

Double submission: To maximise the impact of work in the field of computational linguistics for the Uralic languages we are open to the possibility of double submission, or submission of work which has been partially published elsewhere. Any double submission should however be reported to the programme committee at the time of submission. In the advent of double acceptance the authors should choose in which venue to publish.

Travel

Participants from outside Russia area may require a visa to visit Russia. If you require an invitation letter confirming your participation, please get in contact with the local organising committee.

A small number of travel stipends will be available for authors of accepted papers. After submitting your paper please contact the organising committee to request consideration.

Accommodation

Hotels maybe found through your preferred online hotel price comparison site. If you have any questions about accommodation, please feel free to contact the organisers.

Suggested hotels by Norwegian University Centre in St. Petersburg:

Visa / Invitation

Please note that Norwegian University Centre requires all foreign participants to have a proper visa, no tourist visas allowed.

If you need an invitation for Russian Visa, please contact Michael Rießler of local organisation team.

Organisers

  • Tommi A. Pirinen, Universität Hamburg
  • Michael Rießler, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
  • Trond Trosterud, UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta
  • Francis M. Tyers, UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta

and The University of Oslo St. Petersburg Representative Office

Programme committee

  • Tommi A. Pirinen, Universität Hamburg
  • Francis M. Tyers, UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta
  • Michael Rießler, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
  • Марина Федина, Centre of Innovative Language Technology, Komi Republican Academy of State Service and Administration
  • Trond Trosterud, UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta
  • Veronika Vincze, Szegedi tudományegyetem
  • Mans Hulden, University of Colodaro in Boulder
  • Eszter Simon, Magyar tudományos akadémia
  • Miikka Silfverberg, University of Helsinki
  • Тимофей Архангельский, Higher School of Economics

Contact

Any questions should be directed to the organising committee on iwclul@googlegroups.com.