Community/workshop

The First NLPL Workshop on Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing will be held on September 30, 2019 in Turku, Finland (co-located with the NoDaLiDa Conference).

Topic and Goals

The use of deep neural networks and related techniques has led to major improvements on many NLP tasks and has in a short time profoundly changed the research landscape in our field. Making adequate use of these techniques, however, not only requires new technical knowledge on the part of researchers but also presupposes access to large-scale computing resources often with dedicated, specialized hardware. Keeping up with the development is therefore a challenge, especially for smaller research groups in academic environments, which are common in the Nordic countries.

The Nordic Language Processing Laboratory (NLPL) is a collaboration of university research groups in the Nordic countries, with support from the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC). The goal of NLPL is to create a virtual laboratory for data- and compute-intensive NLP research based on a common software, data and service stack in multiple Nordic HPC centers, to pool competencies within the user community and among expert support teams, and thereby to enable internationally competitive, data-intensive research and experimentation on a scale that would be difficult to sustain for individual research groups on commodity computing resources.

The First NLPL Workshop on Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing seeks to facilitate platform building and knowledge exchange among NLP researchers in the Nordic countries. The goal of the workshop is to support NLP research based on deep learning or other techniques that require high-performance computing and to provide a forum for researchers in the Nordic countries to exchange ideas and discuss ongoing research in the area. A special focus of the workshop will be how to enable competitive research given the limitations of available resources and how to ease entry into the field for new researchers. Consequently, the workshop will not be limited solely to methodological and resource description papers, but will welcome all kinds of contributions addressing the abovementioned focus.

We invite papers on all relevant topics, including but not limited to:

• Using deep learning to solve NLP problems
• Making deep learning more usable and accessible for NLP researchers
• Improving our understanding of deep learning models in the context of NLP
• Representation learning for natural language
• Interpretation of neural representations
• Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of deep learning models
• Contextualized and multimodal representations
• Multitask learning with deep neural networks
• Deep learning with scarce resources and noisy data
• Transfer learning and multilinguality with deep models

Invited Presentations

The workshop will feature two keynote speakers:

• Barbara Plank, IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
• Jussi Karlgren, Gavagai and KTH (Sweden)

Important Dates

• Paper submission: August 16, 2019
• Notification of acceptance: August 26, 2019
• Final workshop papers due: September 6, 2019
• Workshop: September 30, 2019

Paper Submission

All submissions are expected to have a maximum of 8 pages plus a list of references not restricted in length. Note that we do not have separate categories for long and short papers. All submissions should follow the official Nodalida 2019 format templates. The submissions are expected to be blind and follow the ACL Author Guidelines. Parallel submission to another forum is permitted providing that the organizers are informed without delay, should the author choose to present the work at the other venue and withdraw it from this workshop. At least one author of each accepted paper must register to attend the workshop.

The submission site is: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dl4nlp

Programme Committee

The workshop is co-organized by members of the NLPL team, with Joakim Nivre serving as the chair of the Programme Committee.