2nd International Workshop Towards Digital Language Equality (TDLE): Focusing on Sustainability
co-located with LREC-COLING 2024
Lingotto Conference Centre, Torino, Italia
Workshop description
The key aim of this half-day workshop co-located with LREC-COLING 2024, to be held in Turin (Italy) in May 2024, is to discuss and promote the importance of sustainability in the design, development, creation, use, distribution and sharing of language data, resources, platforms, infrastructures, tools and technologies, with the intention of achieving Digital Language Equality (DLE). While some important work has recently addressed these crucial areas (e.g. Fort and Couillault, 2016; Hessenthaler et al., 2022; Ramesh et al., 2023; Castilho et al., forthcoming), the relevant contributions seem to be as yet unsystematic and relatively isolated. The workshop intends to provide an inclusive forum to encourage in-depth debate and facilitate collaborations to promote the sustainability of resources and technologies in any (combination of) languages, in support of multilingualism and of the overarching goal of DLE.
Suitable submissions rejected from the main LREC-COLING 2024 conference programme are welcome, but they should be clearly relevant to the focus of the workshop and address explicitly its topics of interest (see here).
Background and 1st TDLE workshop held in 2022
The second 2024 edition of the workshop builds on the success of the first Towards Digital Language Equality (TDLE) workshop, that was held at LREC 2022 in Marseille (France) on 20 June 2022, and whose accepted papers were published in a dedicated volume of proceedings, Aldabe et al. (2022).
Following this well-received inaugural workshop held in June 2022, the second event in the series will be co-located with LREC-COLING 2024 in Turin (Italy) in May 2024, and will focus specifically on the highly relevant topic of the sustainability of language resources and technologies in connection with multilingualism and digital language equality.
References
Itziar Aldabe, Begoña Altuna, Aritz Farwell and German Rigau, editors. 2022. Proceedings of the Workshop Towards Digital Language Equality (TDLE). European Language Resources Association, Marseille, France.
Sheila Castilho, Federico Gaspari, Joss Moorkens, Maja Popović and Antonio Toral, editors. Forthcoming. Journal of Specialised Translation. Special Issue n. 41 on “Translation Automation and Sustainability”.
Karën Fort and Alain Couillault, 2016. “Yes, We Care! Results of the Ethics and Natural Language Processing Surveys”. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16). European Language Resources Association, Portorož, Slovenia. 1593–1600.
Marius Hessenthaler, Emma Strubell, Dirk Hovy and Anne Lauscher, 2022. “Bridging Fairness and Environmental Sustainability in Natural Language Processing”. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. 7817–7836.
Krithika Ramesh, Sunayana Sitaram and Monojit Choudhury, 2023. “Fairness in Language Models Beyond English: Gaps and Challenges”. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023. Association for Computational Linguistics, Dubrovnik, Croatia. 2106–2119.