This workshop is made possible due to the generous support of the Information and Intelligent Systems Directorate and the Office of International Science and Engineering of the National Science Foundation.
Research in Computational Linguistics (CL) and related fields is carried out in all of the Americas. However, interaction among investigators from the different countries in this half of the world is rare. The goal of the workshop is to increase awareness of the state-of-the-art research on computational approaches to languages of the Americas by bringing together young investigators from across the Americas doing research on these languages. The workshop program and activities allow the attendees to explore the possibilities for international collaborations. In addition, this workshop also includes an open discussion session for proposing mechanisms to promote a more interactive community in the Americas.
This event contributes to the advancement of science by: (1) helping participants to extend their network of collaboration across international borders, and (2) promoting cross pollination of research ideas by raising awareness of the research done in different countries in the Americas, as well as (3) disseminating information on funding opportunities for international collaborations.
This project received support from NSF to organize a workshop for young investigators working in computational linguistics in the Americas. The workshop was held on June 6th, 2010, immediately following the 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, NAACL-HLT 2010, in Los Angeles. The goal of this workshop was to bring together researchers from all of the Americas developing human language technologies that are interested in establishing international collaborations. We received a great response to the call for papers of this workshop. In total we received 21 submissions from 8 countries. The final program ended up very international, as was originally intended. It brought together researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Uruguay and the USA. The contributions that were accepted for presentation in the workshop, and in the corresponding proceedings, are of three types: research papers, project overviews and opinion papers. The research papers included recent advances in topics from opinion mining, to textual entailment, to adaptation of NLP approaches to software engineering. The survey papers presented an overview of larger research projects by a single university or research group. These overviews presented interesting efforts in dialogue systems, text simplification, language generation, and corpus based approaches to verb subcategorization and relation extraction. The proceedings also included two opinion papers that describe the research situation of the NLP communities in Costa Rica and Brazil. All contributions described how international collaborations can push research forward by either listing the resources and/or experience sought or what specific resources and experience can be contributed. In sum, these proceedings provide a broad coverage of research on computational linguistics addressing three different languages: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and English. The agenda of the workshop was designed to meet the primary goals of the workshop: 1) increasing awareness of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related fields in the Americas, 2) promoting international collaborations among researchers, and 3) contributing to the growth of the NLP community. Therefore the 1 day workshop included a combination of oral presentations, posters and a panel discussion. The ice breaker for the workshop was a pre-workshop dinner where all participants had the chance to interact with each other. This kick-off dinner allowed the workshop participants to get acquainted to each other and thus facilitated the discussion during the actual workshop. At the closing of the workshop, and in follow-up email communications participants have expressed their satisfaction from participating at the workshop. Common themes among the participants included the great opportunity this workshop provided to connect with other researchers in the Americas, to learn about the research situation of neighboring countries and find the similarities and differences with their own home country. Lastly, another important outcome includes the ties that were made with researchers across the Americas, especially in Mexico with the PI’s visit to two institutions of higher education. This visit allowed the PI to promote the graduate program in Computer and Information Sciences and encourage undergraduate students there to continue their education and pursue a graduate degree in a computer related field.
