With the ever increasing digitisation of all areas of life, the field of computational linguistics and language technologies has reached an unprecedented level of importance and relevance.
'Language Technologies for the Challenges of the Digital Age' is the main theme of GSCL 2017, the bi-annual international conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, to be held at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin from 13 tot 15 September 2017.
The digital age is creating multiple key challenges, many of which can be fully or partially addressed by language technologies, the conference organisers say.
One of these crucial digital challenges is the increasing economic, social and political relevance of online news and online media. See, for example, the fake news and filter bubble debates.
Another crucial challenge of the digital age are multilingual technologies for multilingual societies, for example to bridge language barriers, to improve communication with refugees, to foster economic growth.
Other digital challenges are high-quality text analytics for big data or digital humanities applications, and robust spoken language interfaces for connected devices (Internet of Things), both at home and in manufacturing contexts.
An orthogonal challenge has recently been emerging, as the conference organisers say, in the form of several breakthroughs in applied Artificial Intelligence research, especially Deep Learning. In that regard, key questions revolve, among others, around the integration of Deep Learning approaches and architectures into traditional symbolic Natural Language Processing pipelines (and vice versa).
The conference organisers invite contributions to any topic related to computational linguistics and language technology. They especially encourage submissions that are related to the main theme, i.e., models, methods, approaches or technologies that address one or more of the key challenges of the digital age, only some of which are briefly mentioned above. Submissions do not necessarily need to have an applied or technology component, theoretical papers presenting the results of basic research related to the main conference theme (or other topics) are also welcome. Submissions that concentrate on the German language are encouraged in particular. The deadline to submit contributions is 27 May 2017.
The organisers also invite proposals for pre-conference workshops and tutorials to be held under the umbrella of GSCL 2017 on 11 and 12 September.
For more information about the conference, please visit http://gscl2017.dfki.de
For more information about the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, please visit http://www.gscl.org/