2nd CfP: First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (LT-EDI-2021)

    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

 1.

    terms of resource quality

 2.

    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

 1.

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

 2.

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

 3.

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

 4.

    Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India

 5.

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

 6.

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

 7.

    Manel Zarrouk,  Institut Galilée @ University Sorbonne North Paris

Student Volunteers

 1.

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

 2.

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

 3.

    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

 1.

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

 2.

    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.