Student travel support to the Fourth Universal Dependencies Workshop (2020)

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this student travel support project is to enhance the diversity of the fourth Universal Dependencies workshop by supporting students to participate in it. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, one of the largest computational linguistics conferences worldwide. By participating in the workshop in such a context, the students are offered an excellent opportunity for networking and building connections across institutions. They are also gaining exposure by presenting their work. Such experience is particularly valuable for researchers from smaller institutions, with less funding available for travel. Universal Dependencies is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation of human language, which to date has been used to create treebanks for 90 languages. The framework is well suited as the basis for cross-linguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports natural language processing computer applications as well as broader linguistic studies. One of the goals of the workshop is to cover more low-resource languages, thereby expanding the languages represented in the Universal Dependencies corpora. This project aims at attracting students who are working on such languages and whose work would benefit the Universal Dependencies community. The workshop encourages a spirit of collaborative research and builds a supportive environment for computational and non-computational linguists interested in a broad, cross-lingual perspective on the field. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.