Connectionists: 1st CfP: Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Multilingual and Interlingual Semantic Representations for Natural Language Processing

[Marta Ruiz]

*CfP: Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: *


*Multilingual and Interlingual Semantic Representations forNatural Language
Processing*



Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Multilingual and Interlingual
Semantic Representations for Natural Language Processing

Guest Editors: Marta R. Costa-jussà, Cristina España-Bonet, Pascale Fung,
Noah A. Smith

* Submission deadline: March 1, 2019 *
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Call for Papers
---------------

Semantic representations at different levels – word, sentence, paragraph –
are central to many solutions to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks.  Text
annotation, information retrieval, sentiment analysis, text summarisation,
question answering, and machine translation solutions have achieved
significant improvements using semantic representations of words. The
number of tasks has also grown with the popularisation of unsupervised word
embeddings, a fast and efficient way of estimating continuous
representations of words. Now, representations derived from deep learning
methods are giving a new boost to the field.



But in an increasingly globalised world, multilingual and cross-language
applications are needed. Extensions to monolingual representations of words
such as multilingual Brown clusters, multilingual or interlingual word
embeddings, multilingual topic models, and cross-lingual semantic parsers
have been successfully applied, though performance lags behind their
monolingual counterparts. On the other hand, multilinguality should be able
to overcome one of the main limitations of standard representations:
multiple senses of a word are conflated into a single vector. In addition,
representations of sentences and paragraphs are arising through the
encoder-decoder approach (in the fields of natural language inference,
machine translation, and text summarization, among others) and the
extension to multilingual inputs is equally or even more interesting for
NLP applications.



Abstract semantic representations attract interest both in academia and
industry, as shown by the wide and varied publications from universities
and companies on this topic. Achieving improvements in this direction will
change the conception of translation (from pairwise to interlingua), enable
greater sharing among different NLP applications, and overcome low-resource
limitations through zero-shot learning, among other advantages. This
research direction will not only increase the performance of current
architectures in cross-language settings, but will also lead to novel
language-independent architectures and tasks for NLP.


Topics
------

This call aims to motivate research on multilingual and interlingual
representations that, in the context of any NLP task, go beyond projections
from one language into another one and that target crosslinguality. The
special topic proposed aims to put together a compact and openly accessible
volume, which presents high quality research works that cover an overview
of this multidisciplinary field as well as most recent advances.



Topics include, but are not limited to:



·      Multilingual and crosslingual embeddings for words, sentences,
paragraphs, or documents

·      Interlingual representations for disambiguation (e.g., embeddings of
interlingual word senses, concepts, etc.)

·      Disambiguated representations through multilinguality

·      Intrinsic evaluation of multilingual or crosslingual representations

·      Extrinsic evaluation on NLP tasks



We strongly encourage submissions that include experimental findings on
languages and dialects less commonly studied in natural language processing
at present.


Submission Date
---------------

Submission of full articles: March 1st 2019


Submission Instructions
-----------------------

Papers should be submitted according to the Computational Linguistics
style: *http://cljournal.org/ <http://cljournal.org/>*
As in regular submissions to the journal, paper submissions should be made
through the CL electronic submission system:
*http://cljournal.org/submissions.html
<http://cljournal.org/submissions.html>*. In Step 1 of the submission
process, please select 'Special Issue: Multilingual and Interlingual
Semantic Representations' under the 'Journal Section' heading. Please note
that papers submitted to a special issue undergo the same reviewing process
as regular papers.



Guest Editors
-------------

*Marta R. Costa-jussà*

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
marta.ruiz AT upc.edu

*Cristina España i Bonet*

DFKI and Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
cristinae AT dfki.de

*Pascale Fung*

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

pascale AT ee.ust.hk

*Noah A. Smith*

University of Washington and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

nasmith AT cs.washington.edu
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