The First International Workshop on NLP Solutions for Under Resourced Languages (NSURL 2019)
co-located with ICNLSP 2019

Workshop Description

The workshop aims to draw the attention of researchers in the  under resourced languages  communities and encourage them to cooperate and intensify efforts to provide solutions and  resources for such under resourced languages.
To achieve this goal, the workshop offers the possibility for researchers to organize  shared tasks/ competitions for solving NLP problems. These tasks are usually provided with training and test data by the task organizers to allow participating solutions to be evaluated and compared with other solutions. Task description papers and the participating solutions including the performance evaluations will be published in the ICNLSP proceedings that will be indexed in IEEExplore. In addition to these papers, paper related to under resourced languages are also possible. See call for papers section   Tasks Organization   The workshop tasks are organized by language, where under each language one or more tasks can be offered. These tasks can be also organized in related sub tasks. A task is managed by a task organizer who may be one or several researchers who are responsible for the following: 1. Announcing the task and the task dates. This includes:

• The date on which the training, test data are available.
• The dates of the task competitions start and end.
• The deadlines for the paper submission, peer-evaluation, and camera ready.

2. Publishing the task training data according to the given dates. 3. publishing the test data and receiving the task competition results from the participants. 4. Writing a task description paper. This paper includes task description, data sets, the participating teams, and the evaluation results. This paper is the task reference. 5. Organizing the paper review process, where the participants are going to review the papers of each other. 6. Organizing the delivery of the camera ready paper. 7. Participating in the workshop organization. Each task corresponds to a session in the workshop and the task organizer is going to be the chair of that session.     Task preparation     For a task to participate in the workshop, the following need to be prepared and sent to the workshop organizers before the tasks proposals deadline. For preparing the task, the following should be provided:

1. The task name
2. The targeted language
3. The task definition
4. A brief summary of similar tasks in the targeted language (if there are any)
5. A brief description of the data relevant for the task
6. The availability of the train, and test data
7. The evaluation procedure
8. The task evaluation baseline(s).

If the task is divided in several related tasks, a description of each of the sub tasks should be provided.  

Workshop phases The workshop has the following phases:

1.  Call for task proposals: The Workshop organizers release call for task proposals and give the chance to task organizers to send their task proposals. This phase is limited to 8 weeks.
2.  Task proposals notification: The workshop organizers send acceptance/rejection notifications for the task organizers. This phase is limited to 2 Weeks.
3. Task announcement: In this phase, the organizers of approved tasks announce their tasks, as explained previously. This phase is limited to 2 weeks after the acceptance notification.
4. Task Execution: In this phase, interested participating teams begin their work on the tasks according to the plan announced by the task organizers. This phase is limited to 12 weeks. During this phase, the participant teams start registration. The deadline for the registration is the last day of this phase.
5.  Results delivery for evaluation: In this phase, the participating teams deliver the results of their systems based on the task organizers instructions.
6. Evaluation and Results announcement: In this phase, the task organizers evaluate the results of the participating systems and announce the result of the task competition(s). This phase is limited to one week.
7. Paper submission: In this phase, the participating teams submit papers that describe their systems. This phase is limited to 4 weeks.
8.  Paper Review: In this phase, the participating teams in a task review the papers of other teams. Then, they send their review to the task organizers who send the reviews to the paper authors to do eventual paper revision. This phase is limited to three weeks.
9.  Camera ready: In this phase, the teams revise their papers according to the reviewers comments. This phase is limited to 3 weeks.
10.  Presenting the paper: See the workshop dates.