5th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2024

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Abbreviated Title: 
LChange’24
Location: 
ACL 2024
Thursday, 15 August 2024
Country: 
Thailand
Contact Email: 
City: 
Bangkok
Contact: 
LChange
Submission Deadline: 
Friday, 10 May 2024

Workshop description

The LChange workshop targets all aspects of computational modeling of language change, historical as well as synchronic change. It is running in its fifth iteration and will be co-located with ACL 2024 in Bangkok (Thailand), as a hybrid event. The workshop will take place on Thursday 15 August 2024.
The main topics of the workshop remain the same: all aspects around computational approaches to language change with a focus on digital text corpora. LChange explores state-of-the-art computational methodologies, theories and digital text resources on exploring the time-varying nature of human language.
The aim of this workshop is to provide pioneering researchers who work on computational methods, evaluation, and large-scale modeling of language change an outlet for disseminating research on topics concerning language change. Besides these goals, this workshop will also support discussion on evaluating computational methodologies for uncovering language change. 
We’ll also be offering mentorship to students, to discuss their research topic with a member of the field, regardless of whether they are submitting a paper or not.

Important Dates (tentative)

  • May 10,2024: Paper submission
  • June 20, 2024: Notification of acceptance
  • June 30, 2024: Camera-ready papers due
  • August 15, 2024: Workshop date

AXOLOTL-24 Shared Task

This year, echoing LChange 22 in Dublin, we are hosting a shared task within LChange: the AXOLOTL-24 Shared Task on Explainable Semantic Change Modeling.
AXOLOTL-24 stands for “Ascertain and eXplain Overhauls of the Lexicon Over Time at LChange'24” and is organized by Mariia Fedorova and Andrey Kutuzov (University of Oslo), Timothee Mickus, Niko Partanen and Janine Siewert (University of Helsinki), and Elena Spaziani (Sapienza University Rome).
Note that the papers describing the shared task submissions will be peer-reviewed and published in the LChange proceedings along with the rest of the workshop papers.

The shared task presents two subtasks:

More information, including a timeline and instructions, is available here: https://github.com/ltgoslo/axolotl24_shared_task/.

Submissions

We accept two types of submissions, long and short papers, consisting of up to eight (8) and four (4) pages of content, respectively, plus unlimited references; final versions will be given one additional page of content so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account.  
We also welcome papers focusing on releasing a dataset or a model; these papers fall into the short paper category.
We invite original research papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

  • Novel methods for detecting diachronic semantic change and lexical replacement
  • Automatic discovery and quantitative evaluation of laws of language change
  • Computational theories and generative models of language change
  • Sense-aware (semantic) change analysis
  • Diachronic word sense disambiguation
  • Novel methods for diachronic analysis of low-resource languages
  • Novel methods for diachronic linguistic data visualization
  • Novel applications and implications of language change detection
  • Quantification of sociocultural influences on language change
  • Cross-linguistic, phylogenetic, and developmental approaches to language change
  • Novel datasets for cross-linguistic and diachronic analyses of language

Accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters and included in the workshop proceedings.
 Submissions are open to all and are to be submitted anonymously. All papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer review process by at least three reviewers with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organizers. If you have published in the field previously, and are interested in helping out in the program committee to review papers, please send us an email!

Keynote Talks

To be announced. If you have any good suggestions, or anyone you would like to listen to, please contact us.

Workshop organizers

Nina Tahmasebi, University of Gothenburg 
Syrielle Montariol, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
Andrey Kutuzov, University of Oslo
Simon Hengchen, iguanodon.ai and Université de Genève
David Alfter, University of Gothenburg 
Francesco Periti, University of Milan 
Pierluigi Cassotti, University of Gothenburg