Full Title: 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021 (ACL 2021)
Short Title: LChange 2021
Date: 05-Aug-2021 – 06-Aug-2021
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Contact Person: Yang Xu
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Web Site: https://languagechange.org/events/2021-acl-lchange/
Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
Call Deadline: 26-Apr-2021
Meeting Description:
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.
Although there exists rich empirical work on language change from historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics, computational approaches to the problem of language change particularly how word forms and meanings evolve 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 search, and understanding 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.
The workshop builds upon its first iteration in 2019, where we received over 50 submissions and had over 65 attendees. Just like the first one, the second LChange workshop will be co-located with ACL 2021, and, pending on the situation, a hybrid event with possible online participation.
Call for Papers:
We invite original research papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:
– Novel methods for detecting diachronic semantic change and lexical replacement
– Automatic discovery and quantitative evaluation of laws of language change
– Computational theories and generative models of language change
– Sense-aware (semantic) change analysis
– Diachronic word sense disambiguation
– Novel methods for diachronic analysis of low-resource languages
– Novel methods for diachronic linguistic data visualization
– Novel applications and implications of language change detection
– Quantification of sociocultural influences on language change
– Cross-linguistic, phylogenetic, and developmental approaches to language change
– Novel datasets for cross-linguistic and diachronic analyses of language
We accept three types of submissions, long papers, short papers and abstracts, following the ACL2021 style, and the ACL submission policy.
Details on paper length and submission proceedure will be posted once released by ACL2021.
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.
Important Dates:
– April 26, 2021: Paper submission
– May 28, 2021: Notification of acceptance
– June 7, 2021: Camera-ready papers due
– August 5-6, 2021: Workshop date (day will be decided upon later)
Organisers: Nina Tahmasebi, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, Simon Hengchen, Syrielle Montariol, and Haim Dubossarsky