Connectionists: 2nd CfP: Typology for Polyglot NLP - a workshop @ ACL2019

[dubossarsky haim]

[Apologies for x-posting]

Second Call for Abstracts
========================

Typology for Polyglot NLP (TyP-NLP), a workshop to be held at the 2019
meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Florence,
Italy, is now accepting submissions.

Contact Email: typology-and-nlp at googlegroups.com
Website: typology-and-nlp.github.io


Workshop description
====================
The huge diversity of human languages leads to an inherent variation of the
cross-lingual data with respect to the categories and structures in the
languages’ surface level. This results in poor performances of NLP
algorithms when trying to transfer between languages. Linguistic typology
provides a systematic, empirical comparison of the languages of the world
with respect to a variety of linguistic properties, and therefore holds
promise to solve this problem. However, typological information has not yet
been fully exploited. Our workshop aims at bridging this gap by encouraging
a tighter collaboration of the scientific communities from the areas of
linguistic typology and multilingual NLP.

TyP-NLP workshop is the first dedicated venue for typology-related research
and its integration in multilingual NLP. The workshop is specifically aimed
at raising awareness of linguistic typology and its potential in supporting
and widening the global reach multilingual NLP. The topics of the workshop
will include, but are not limited to:

- **Language-independence in training, architecture design, and
hyperparameter tuning.** Is it possible (and if yes, how) to unravel
unknown biases that hinder the cross-lingual performance of NLP algorithms
and to leverage the knowledge on such biases in NLP algorithms?
- **Integration of typological features in language transfer and joint
multilingual learning.** In addition to established techniques such as
“selective sharing”, are there alternative ways to encoding heterogeneous
external knowledge in machine learning algorithms?
- **New applications.** The application of typology to currently uncharted
territories, i.e. the use of typological information in NLP tasks where
such information has not been investigated yet.
- **Automatic inference of typological features.** The pros and cons of
existing techniques (e.g. heuristics derived from morphosyntactic
annotation, propagation from features of other languages, supervised
Bayesian and neural models) and discussion on emerging ones.
- **Typology and interpretability.** The use of typological knowledge for
interpretation of hidden representations of multilingual neural models,
multilingual data generation and selection, and typological annotation of
texts.
- **Improvement and completion of typological databases.** Combining
linguistic knowledge and automatic data-driven methods towards the joint
goal of improving the knowledge on cross-linguistic variation and
universals.


Important Dates
===============
- Submission Deadline: Friday, April 26, 2019
- Notification of Acceptance: Friday, May 24, 2019
- Camera-ready copy due from authors: Monday, June 3, 2019
- Workshop: Thursday, August 1, 2019

Submission Type
===============

We accept **extended abstracts**.
These may report on work in progress or may be cross submissions that have
already appeared in a non-NLP venue. The extended abstracts are of maximum
2 pages + references. These submissions are non-archival in order to allow
submission to another venue. The selection will not be based on a
double-blind review and thus submissions of this type need not be
anonymized.

The abstracts should use ACL 2019 templates. These should be submitted via
softconf: https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/typnlp/
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