Second Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL 2024)

What's the workshop about?
Most work on NLP focuses on language in its canonical written form. This has often led researchers to ignore the differences between written and spoken language or, worse, to conflate the two. Instances of conflation are statements like “Chinese is a logographic language" or “Persian is a right-to-left language", variants of which can be found frequently in the ACL anthology. These statements confuse properties of the language with properties of its writing system. Ignoring differences between written and spoken language leads, among other things, to conflating different words that are spelled the same (e.g., English bass), or treating as different, words that have multiple spellings (e.g., Japanese umai ‘tasty’, which can be written 旨い, うまい, ウマい, or 美味い).

Furthermore, methods for dealing with written language issues (e.g., various kinds of normalization or conversion) or for recognizing text input (e.g. OCR & handwriting recognition or text entry methods) are often regarded as precursors to NLP rather than as fundamental parts of the enterprise, despite the fact that most NLP methods rely centrally on representations derived from text rather than (spoken) language. This general lack of consideration of writing has led to much of the research on such topics to largely appear outside of ACL venues, in conferences or journals of neighboring fields such as speech technology (e.g., text normalization) or human-computer interaction (e.g., text entry).

Invited Speaker: Nizar Habash (NYU Abu Dhabi)
Title of talk: On Writing Arabic
Abstract: The Arabic language, broadly defined, encompases a diverse collection of varieties that are tied together historically and linguistically, but with a high degree of variations in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon, and naturally orthography. In this talk we present a condensed summary of the challenges of writing Arabic and the evolution of different orthographic solutions to address them. The accumulation and persistence of different conventions have led to many co-existing orthographies today creating a complex space of challenges for computational modeling. Among the examples we discuss are subtle differences in Standard Arabic spelling across Arab countries, using scripts other than Arabic for writing Arabic dialects, and, most recently, social media experimentation with reverting to ancient orthographic conventions to fight AI censorship algorithms.

Schedule

9:00-9:10	Organizers	Opening remarks
9:10-10:10	Invited speaker: Nizar Habash	On Writing Arabic
10:10-10:30	Rayyan Merchant & Kevin Tang	ParsText: A Digraphic Corpus for Tajik-Farsi Transliteration
10:30-11:00	Coffee Break
11:00-11:30	Invited talk: Jalal Maleki	Balancing Linguistic Integrity and Practicality: The Design Journey of Dabire, a Romanized Writing System for Persian
11:30-12:00	Wieke Harmsen, Catia Cucchiarini, Roeland van Hout & Helmer Strik	A Joint Approach for Automatic Analysis of Reading and Writing Errors
12:00-12:20	Luna Peck & Susan Brown	Tool for Constructing a Large-Scale Corpus of Code Comments and Other Source Code Annotations
12:20-2:00	Lunch break
2:00-2:30	Rastislav Hronsky & Emmanuel Keuleers	Tokenization via Language Modeling: the Role of Preceding Text
2:30-2:50	Kyle Gorman & Brian Roark	Abbreviation across the world's languages and scripts
2:50-3:20	Daan van Esch	Now You See Me, Now You Don't: ‘Poverty of the Stimulus' Problems and Arbitrary Correspondences in End-to-End Speech Models
3:20-3:40	Logan Born, M. Willis Monroe, Kathryn Kelley & Anoop Sarkar	Towards Fast Cognate Alignment on Imbalanced Data
3:40-4:00	Organizers	SIGWrit business meeting
4:00-4:30	Coffee Break
4:30-4:50	Yixia Wang & Emmanuel Keuleers	Simplified Chinese Character Distance Based on Ideographic Description Sequences
4:50-5:00	Organizers	Closing remarks, discussion

Organization

Program Committee:

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, University College London, UK
Manex Agirrezabal, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Sina Ahmadi, George Mason University, USA
Cecilia Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Mark Aronoff, Stony Brook University, USA
Steven Bedrick, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, UC San Diego, USA
Amalia Gnanadesikan, University of Maryland, USA
Christian Gold, CATALPA, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
Alexander Gutkin, Google, UK
Nizar Habash, NYU Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Yannis Haralambous, IMT Atlantique & CNRS Lab-STICC, France
Cassandra Jacobs, University at Buffalo, USA
Martin Jansche, Amazon, UK
Kathryn Kelley, Università di Bologna, Italy
George Kiraz, Princeton University, USA
Christo Kirov, Google, USA
Jordan Kodner, Stony Brook University, USA
Anoop Kunchukuttan, Microsoft, India
Yang Li, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Constantine Lignos, Brandeis University, USA
Zoey Liu, University of Florida, USA
Jalal Maleki, Linköping University, Sweden
M. Willis Monroe, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Gerald Penn, University of Toronto, Canada
Yuval Pinter, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
William Poser, independent scholar, Canada
Shruti Rijhwani, Google, USA
Maria Ryskina, MIT, USA
Anoop Sarkar, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Lane Schwartz, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, USA
Djamé Seddah, Sorbonne University & Inria, France
Shuming Shi, Tencent, China
Claytone Sikasote, University of Zambia (UNZA), Zambia
Fabio Tamburini, University of Bologna, Italy
Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii, University of Tokyo, Japan
Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Google, USA
Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

Schedule

Organization

Sponsorship