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<div class="moz-text-html" lang="x-western">First Call for
Papers
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<h1 itemprop="name">1st International Workshop on
Computational Approaches to Historical Language
Change 2019</h1>
<div class="article-metadata">
<div> <span itemscope="" itemprop="author"
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> <span
itemprop="name"><a
href="https://languagechange.org/events/2019-acl-lcworkshop/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://languagechange.org/events/2019-acl-lcworkshop/</a><br>
</span></span><span itemscope=""
itemprop="author"
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span
itemprop="name"></span> </span> </div>
<span class="article-date"> <time
datetime="2018-11-30 09:30:00 +0100 CET"
itemprop="dateModified"></time></span></div>
</div>
<p>The workshop will be co-located with <a
href="http://www.acl2019.org/"
moz-do-not-send="true">ACL 2019 </a> in Florence,
July 29th - August 2nd, 2019. </p>
<p>Natural languages change over time. Every language
relies on a finite lexicon to express an infinite set
of emerging ideas driven by sociocultural and
technological development. This tension is often
manifested in the historical emergence of novel word
forms and meanings, and the obliteration of existing
words and word meanings. Compared to other aspects of
language where there are rich formal treatments of
change (e.g., phonology, grammar), computational
approaches to the time-varying properties of word
meanings and forms have just begun to take shape in
computational linguistics, natural language
processing, and related disciplines.</p>
<p>Characterizing the time-varying nature of language
will have broad implications and applications in
multiple fields including linguistics, artificial
intelligence, digital humanities, computational
cognitive and social sciences. In this workshop, we
will bring together the world's pioneers and experts
in <strong>computational approaches to historical
language change with the focus on digital text
corpora.</strong> In doing so, this workshop carries
the triple goals of disseminating the state-of-the-art
research on diachronic modeling of language change,
fostering international cross-disciplinary
collaborations, and exploring the fundamental
theoretical and methodological challenges in this
growing niche of computational linguistic research.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div> <span itemscope="" itemprop="author"
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> <span
itemprop="name">Organizers: Nina Tahmasebi</span>
</span>, <span itemscope="" itemprop="author"
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> <span
itemprop="name">Lars Borin</span> </span>, <span
itemscope="" itemprop="author"
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> <span
itemprop="name">Adam Jatowt</span> </span>, <span
itemscope="" itemprop="author"
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> <span
itemprop="name">Yang Xu</span> </span> </div>
<h1>Important Dates</h1>
<ul>
<li>April 26, 2019: Paper submission</li>
<li>May 24, 2019: Notification of Acceptance</li>
<li>June 3, 2019: Camera-ready papers due</li>
<li>August 1-2, 2019: Workshop Dates</li>
</ul>
<h1>Workshop Topics</h1>
<p>Human language changes over time, driven by the dual
needs of adapting to ongoing sociocultural and
technological development in the world and
facilitating efficient communication. In particular,
novel words are coined or borrowed from other
languages, while obsolete words slide into obscurity.
Similarly, words may acquire novel meanings or lose
existing meanings. This workshop explores these
phenomena by bringing to bear state-of-the-art
computational methodologies, theories and digital text
resources on exploring the time-varying nature of
human language.</p>
<p>Although there exists rich empirical work on language
change from historical linguistics, sociolinguistics
and cognitive linguistics, computational approaches to
the problem of language change <em>particularly how
word forms and meanings evolve</em> have only begun
to take shape over the past decade or so, with
exemplary work on semantic change and lexical
replacement . The motivation has long been related to
<em>search</em>, and <em>understanding</em> in
diachronic archives . The emergence of long-term and
large-scale digital corpora was the prerequisite and
has resulted in a slightly different set of problems
for this strand of study than have traditionally been
studied in historical linguistics. As an example,
studies of lexical replacement have largely focused on
named entity change (names of e.g., countries and
people that change over time) because of the large
effect these name changes have for temporal
information retrieval.</p>
<p>The aim of this workshop is three-fold. First, we
want to provide pioneering researchers who work on
computational methods, evaluation, and large-scale
modeling of language change <span><strong>an outlet
for disseminating cutting-edge research on topics
concerning language change</strong></span>.
Currently, researchers in this area have published in
a wide range of different venues, from computational
linguistics, to cognitive science and digital
archiving venues. We want to utilize this proposed
workshop as a platform for sharing state-of-the-art
research progress in this fundamental domain of
natural language research.</p>
<p>Second, in doing so we want to <strong>bring
together domain experts across disciplines</strong>.
We want to connect those that have long worked on
language change within historical linguistics and
bring with them a large understanding for general
linguistic theories of language change; those that
have studied change across languages and language
families; those that develop and test computational
methods for detecting semantic change and laws of
semantic change; and those that need knowledge (of the
occurrence and shape) of language change, for example,
in digital humanities and computational social
sciences where text mining is applied to diachronic
corpora subject to lexical semantic change.</p>
<p>Third, the detection and modelling of language change
using diachronic text and text mining raise <strong>fundamental
theoretical and methodological challenges</strong>
for future research in this area. The
representativeness of text is a first critical issue;
works using large diachronic corpora and computational
methods for detecting change often claim to find
changes that are universally true for a language as a
whole. But the jury is out on how results derived from
digital literature or newspapers accurately represent
changes in language as a whole. We hope to engage
corpus linguists, big-data scientists, and
computational linguists to address these open issues.
Besides these goals, this workshop will also support
discussion on the evaluation of computational
methodologies for uncovering language change.
Verifying change only using positive examples of
change often confirms a corpus bias rather than
reflecting genuine language change. Larger quantities
and higher qualities of text over time result in the
detection of more semantic change. In fact, multiple
semantic laws have been proposed lately where later
other authors have shown that the detected effects are
linked to frequency rather than underlying semantic
change . The methodological issue of evaluation,
together with good evaluation testsets and standards
are of high importance to the research community. We
aim to shed some light on these issues and encourage
the community to collaborate to find solutions.</p>
<p>The work in semantic change detection has, to a large
extent, moved to (neural) embedding techniques in
recent years . These methods have several drawbacks:
the need for very large datasets to produce stable
embeddings, and the fact that all semantic information
of a word is encoded in a single vector thus limiting
the possibility to study word senses separately. A
move towards multi-sense embeddings will most likely
require even more texts per time unit, which will
limit the applicability of these methods to other
languages than English, and a few others. We want to
bring about a discussion on the need for methods that
can discriminate and disambiguate among a word's
senses (meanings) and that can be used for
resource-poor languages with little hope of acquiring
the order of magnitude of words needed for creating
stable embeddings, possibly using dynamic embeddings
that seem to require less text. Finally, knowledge of
language change is useful not only on its own, but as
a basis for other diachronic textual investigations
and in search. </p>
<p>A digital humanities investigation into the living
conditions of young women through history cannot rely
on the word <em>girl</em> in English, as in the past
the reference of <em>girl</em> also included young
men. Automatic detecting of language change is useful
for many researchers outside of the communities that
study the changes themselves and develop methods for
their detection. By reaching out to these other
communities, we can better understand how to utilize
the results for further research and for presenting
them to the interested public. In addition, we need
good user interfaces and systems for exploring
language changes in corpora, for example, to allow for
serendipitous discovery of interesting phenomena. In
addition to facilitate research on texts, information
about language changes is used for measuring document
across-time similarity, information retrieval from
long-term document archives, the design of OCR
algorithms and so on.</p>
<p>We invite original research papers from a wide range
of topics, including but not limited to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Automatic detection of semantic change and
diachronic lexical replacement</li>
<li>Fundamental laws of language change</li>
<li>Computational theories and generative models of
language change</li>
<li>Sense-aware (semantic) change analysis</li>
<li>Methodologies for resource-poor languages</li>
<li>Diachronic linguistic data visualization and
online systems</li>
<li>Applications and implications of language change
detection</li>
<li>Sociocultural influences on language change</li>
<li>Cross-linguistic and phylogenetic approaches to
language change</li>
<li>Methodological aspects of, as well as datasets
for, evaluation</li>
</ul>
<p>The workshop is planned to last a full day.
Submissions are open to all, and are to be submitted
anonymously. All papers will be refereed through a
double-blind peer review process by at least three
reviewers with final acceptance decisions made by the
workshop organizers. We plan to edit a book on the
basis of extended workshop papers and are currently
discussing the publication with a publisher.</p>
<p>Contact us at <b><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:PC-ACLws2019@languagechange.org"
moz-do-not-send="true">PC-ACLws2019@languagechange.org</a>
</b>if you have any questions.<br>
</p>
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