ComputEL: A workshop to explore the use of computational methods in the study of endangered language

2014年6月，在NSF的支持下，在马里兰州巴尔的摩举行的第52届计算语言学协会(ACL)年会期间，首次举办了ComputEL研讨会。该讲习班的目标是作为计算机科学家和活跃在ACL领域的计算语言学家和从事濒危语言工作的文献语言学家之间的初步交汇点。这项建议寻求在第一次ComputEL研讨会上吸取的经验教训的基础上，并鼓励两个研究界之间进行新的合作。记录世界濒危语言的当代努力有赖于广泛使用的现代记录技术，特别是数字音频和视频记录设备以及对这种设备产生的记录进行注释的软件。然而，尽管十多年来致力于记录濒危语言的资助计划，支持参与这项工作的人的活动的技术格局仍然支离破碎，新技术的承诺在很大程度上仍然没有兑现。此外，总的来说，计算机科学家的努力大多与纪录片语言学家的日常工作脱节，使得每一组的知识很难告知另一组。第二次ComputEL研讨会将通过聚集现场语言学家和计算机科学家来探讨如何创造计算技术和工具来更好地帮助分析濒危语言来解决这一问题。一个特别的重点将是如何促进这一进程，通过这一进程，这一领域的研究成果可以发展成得到充分支持的软件，供记录该领域濒危语言的人使用。讲习班将于2016年10月在得克萨斯州奥斯汀与自然语言处理经验方法会议(EMNLP)合办。这将使它能够接触到比其他情况下更广泛的受众，同时利用其地理位置吸引来自附近地区的参与者。在第一天，与会者将作为闭门会议的一部分参加讨论，该会议旨在为改进计算方法在濒危语言研究中的应用制定近期议程。第二天将包括与EMNLP主要会议联合安排的研究报告。研讨会的论文将发表在计算语言学协会的会议记录上，并将编写一份额外的报告，总结闭门会议的结论。世界各地较小的发言者社区将从这些结果中受益，这将有助于更好地记录和保护濒危语言。

In June 2014, with support from NSF, the first ComputEL workshop was held in conjunction with the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Baltimore, Maryland. The goal of that workshop was to serve as an initial meeting point between computer scientists and computational linguists active in ACL and documentary linguists engaged in work on endangered languages. This proposal seeks to build on lessons learned in the first ComputEL workshop, and to encourage new collaborations between the two research communities. Contemporary efforts to document the world's endangered languages are dependent on the widespread availability of modern recording technologies, in particular digital audio and video recording devices and software to annotate the recordings that such devices produce. However, despite well over a decade of funding programs dedicated to the documentation of endangered languages, the technological landscape that supports the activities of those involved in this work remains fragmented, and the promises of new technology remain largely unfulfilled. Moreover, the efforts of computer scientists, on the whole, are mostly disconnected from the day-to-day work of documentary linguists, making it difficult for the knowledge of each group to inform the other. The second ComputEL workshop will address this state of affairs by bringing together field linguists and computer scientists to explore how computational techniques and tools can be created to better aid in the analysis of endangered languages. A particular focus will be on how to facilitate the process through which research results in this domain can be developed into software that is well-supported for use by those documenting endangered languages in the field. The workshop will be co-located with the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Austin, Texas, in October 2016. This will allow it to reach a wider audience than would otherwise be possible, while taking advantage of its location to involve participants from nearby areas. On the first day, participants will take part in discussions as part of a closed meeting that will be designed to lay out a near-term agenda for the improved application of computational methods to the study of endangered languages. The second day will consist of research presentations scheduled jointly with the main EMNLP conference. The papers from the workshop will be published in the Association for Computational Linguistics conference proceedings, and an additional report will be produced summarizing the conclusions of the closed meeting. Smaller speaker communities worldwide will benefit from the results which will support better documentation and preservation of endangered languages.