2nd CfP: First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (LT-EDI-2021) from John McCrae on 2021-01-04 (public-bpmlod@w3.org from January 2021)

From: John McCrae <john@mccr.ae>
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2021 10:08:14 +0000
To: john@mccr.ae
Message-ID: <d421adac-fe44-d4f3-1408-02e2c8a6cfc8@mccr.ae>

First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity,
Inclusion (LT-EDI-2021)

@EACL 2021

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is an important agenda across
every field in the world. Language as a major part of communication
should be inclusive and treat everyone equally. The internet community
that uses language technology has a direct impact on people across the
globe. EDI is crucial to make everyone valued and included, so it is
necessary to build language technology that serves this purpose. Our
workshop brings together researchers to research into inclusivity of
gender, racial, sexual orientation, persons with disability, and other
minorities in language technologies with the aim to build and use
datasets addressing the concerns of EDI.

The broader objective of LT-EDI-2021 will be

To investigate challenges related to language resource creation for EDI.

To promote research in inclusive language technology.

To adopt and adapt appropriate language technology models to suit EDI.

To provide opportunities for researchers from the language
technology community from around the world to collaborate with other
researchers to identify and bring possible solutions to the
challenges of EDI.

We hope that through these engagements we can develop language
technology tools to be more inclusive of everyone.

Call for Papers:

Our main theme in this workshop is to promote equality, diversity, and
inclusivity in language technologies. We invite researchers and
practitioners to submit papers reporting on these issues and datasets to
ameliorate the same. We also encourage related qualitative studies.
LT-EDI-2021 welcomes theoretical and practical paper submissions on any
language that contribute to research in Equality, Diversity and
Inclusion. We will particularly encourage studies that address either
practical application or resource improvement.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Corpus development to include EDI

Gender inclusivity in language technology

LGBT inclusivity in language technology

Racial inclusivity in language technology

Persons with disability inclusivity in language technology

Unconscious bias and ways to avoid them in language technologies

Tackling rumors and fake news about gender, racial, and LGBT minorities.

Tackling discrimination against gender, racial, and LGBT minorities.

Important Dates:

Jan 6: Pre-submission paper due

Jan 18: Workshop Paper due

Feb 18: Notification of Acceptance

Mar 1: Camera-ready papers due

April 19-20:Workshop Dates

Mentoring: We will follow the ACL SRW mentoring program, since English
is not the first language of many of the participating researchers.“The
goal of the pre-submission mentor-ship program is to improve the quality
of writing and presentation of the researcher's work, not to criticize
the work itself. Participation is optional but encouraged.
Pre-submission mentor-ship is not anonymous” similar to ACL SRW.
Pre-submission paper due : Jan 8, 2021

Submission:

Papers must describe original, completed / in progress and unpublished
work. Each submission will be reviewed by three program committee
members. Accepted papers will be given up to 8 pages (for full papers),
4 pages (for short papers and posters) in the workshop proceedings, and
will be presented as oral paper or poster. Papers should be formatted
according to theEACL 2021 style-sheet
<https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/eacl-2021-proceedings-template/jprrhhtnbrrm>,
which is provided on the website (https://2021.eacl.org/
<https://2021.eacl.org/calls/papers/>). You can find the EACL-2021 LaTeX
templatehere
<https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/eacl-2021-proceedings-template/jprrhhtnbrrm>ordownload
the zip file <https://2021.eacl.org/downloads/eacl2021-templates.zip>.
Please submit papers in PDF format.

We are seeking submissions under the following category

Full papers (8 pages)

Short papers (work in progress, innovative ideas/proposals, research
proposal of students: : 4 page)

Demo (of working online/standalone systems: : 4 page)

For electronic submission of all papers, please
use:https://www.softconf.com/eacl2021/LTEDI2021/

Task 1: Dataton on language resource creation for Equality, Diversity
and Inclusivity (EDI).

In many places, supporting diversity and promoting inclusion is still a
major issue, as it is in language technology as well. Data created with
bias propogrates and makes systems developed using the dataset biased as
well [1]. We could describe ‘bias’ as an unfair discrimination against
any individual or a group of individuals that occurs systematically in
favour of others [2]. In other words, we could also say that Bias occurs
when there is systematic unfair discrimination. Bias may be introduced
in the data as a result of the following three scenarios:

Pre-existing Bias : Any bias that occurs in institutions, practices
and attitude in society

Technical Bias : Any bias that originates from technical constraints
and decisions

Emergent Bias: Any bias that occurs when a system designed for one
context is applied in another

In this dathon, we propose bringing researchers together to create
datasets to be more inclusive not only with respect to gender issues but
also racial, sexuality, people with disability etc. The participants
will be asked to create language resources or improve existing datasets
to deal with EDI in their native language. The participants can create
datasets for socio-pragmatics, morphology, syntax etc.

The datathon is to create a new dataset or remediate bias in an already
existing dataset. We encourage participant to submit the data statement,
dataset and paper describing the dataset. Sample data statements are
available here:

https://sites.google.com/uw.edu/data-statements-for-nlp/sample-data-statements?authuser=0Resources
will be evaluated in terms of resource quality and the EDI factors
considered. Participants are expected to submit the datasets along with
a data statement.

Evaluated on

terms of resource quality

EDI factors

Paper submission

Each team participating in the datathon is expected to submit a
short/long paper along with a data statement. The paper should explain
the data collection processes and tools used to collect the resource.
The methodology/strategy should be documented in such a way that the
readers and other researchers are able to replicate the work from the
system description paper. Submit the paper, datastatement and data to
lt-edi@insight-centre.org <mailto:lt-edi@insight-centre.org>and
priya.rani@insight-centre.org <mailto:priya.rani@insight-centre.org>.
Deadline is same as workshop deadlines.

Organizers

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Insight SFI Research Centre for Data
Analytics, Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway

Ruba Priyadharshini, ULTRA Arts and Science College, Madurai, India

Theodorus Fransen, Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics,
Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway

Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India

John P. McCrae, Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, Data
Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway

Paul Buitelaar, Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, Data
Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway

Manel Zarrouk, Institut Galilée @ University Sorbonne North Paris

Student Volunteers

Priya Rani, PhD Student, Insight SFI Research Centre for Data
Analytics, Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway

Koustava Goswami, PhD Student, Insight SFI Research Centre for Data
Analytics, Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway

Shardul Suryawanshi, PhD Student, Insight SFI Research Centre for
Data Analytics, Data Science Institute, National University of
Ireland Galway

References:

[1]Bender, E.M. and Friedman, B., 2018. Data statements for natural
language processing: Toward mitigating system bias and enabling better
science. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
6, pp.587-604.

[2] Friedman, Batya, and Helen Nissenbaum. "Bias in computer systems."
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)14.3 (1996): 330-347.

Task 2: Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Hope is considered significant for the well-being, recuperation and
restoration of human life by health professionals. Hope speech reflects
the belief that one can discover pathways to one's desired objectives
and become motivated to utilise those pathways[1-5]. Our work aims to
change the prevalent way of thinking by moving away from a preoccupation
with discrimination, loneliness or the worst things in life to building
confidence, support and good qualities based on comments by
individuals. The goal of this task is to identify whether a comment
contains hope speech or not. The comment/post may contain more than one
sentence but the average sentence length of the corpora is 1. Each
comment/post is annotated at a comment/post level. This dataset also
has class imbalance problems depicting real-world scenarios.

The participants will be provided development, training and test dataset
in English, Tamil, and Malayalam. To download the data and participate,
go to codalab and click “Participate tab”.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first shared task on Hope
Speech Detection.

Codalab link:https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/27653

Organizers

Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Insight SFI Research Centre for Data
Analytics, Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway

Vigneshwaran Muralidaran, School of Computer Science and
Informatics, Cardiff University, United Kingdom

Reference:

[1] Harvey Milk. 1997. The hope speech. We are every where: A historical
source book of gay and lesbian politics,pages 51–53

[2] Edward C. Chang. 1998. Hope, problem-solving ability, and
coping in a college student population: Some implications for
theory and practice. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 54(7):953–962

[3] Carolyn M. Youssef and Fred Luthans. 2007. Positive organizational
behavior in the workplace: The impact of hope, optimism, and resilience.
Journal of Management, 33(5):774–80

[4] Rob Cover. 2013. Queer youth resilience: Critiquing the discourse of
hope and hopelessness in lgbt suicide representation.M/C Journal, 16(5).

[5]Snyder, C. R., Harris, C., Anderson, J. R., Holleran, S. A., Irving,
L. M., Sigmon, S. T., et al.(1991). The will and the ways: Development
and validation of an individual-differences measure of hope. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 570-585.

Received on Monday, 4 January 2021 10:08:37 UTC