• Event title: 1st UniDive training school
• Location: Chișinău, Moldova (relocated from Jerusalem, Israel)
• Date: 8-12 July 2024
• Location: Technical University of Moldova
• Local Organizer: Victoria Bobicev

Apply by: April 29, 2024

We are happy to announce the 1st edition of UNIDIVE Summer School on Universality, Diversity and Idiosyncrasy in Language Technology. It is dedicated mainly (but not exclusively) to young researchers and investigators. Researchers working on low-resourced languages, dialects and varieties are particularly welcome. See below for the application details.

The courses considered for this training school include:

• Dependency syntax, Surface-Syntactic UD and UD - by Sylvain Kahane and Francis Tyers (to confirm)
• Annotation of multiword expressions for newcomers - by Verginica Mititelu and Voula Giouli
• Corpus annotation infrastructure (annotation platforms, format validators, Git etc.) - by Bruno Guillaume, Daniel Zeman and Agata Savary

Additionally, the program will include:

• a brainstorming hackaton on topics submitted by the trainees
• posters of selected student projects

Each applicant should submit a project for a construction of a resource related to the topics of the training school (e.g. a new/enhanced UD treebank, a new PARSEME corpus, a resource adding a new annotation layer on top of a UD/PARSEME corpus, etc.). The length of the application should be 2 pages (excluding references). The application should contain:

• The title
• Applicant’s name and affiliation (including the country)
• A list of 3-4 key-words
• Description of a resource related to the topics of the training school
• Explanation how the participation in the training school will be useful for the project
• Open questions related to the project which could be addressed during the brainstorming hackathon
• Short statement of the project phase (planning, started, in the process of creation)

The projects are to be submitted via the OpenReview portal.

We can fund about 40 trainees to come to Chișinău (additionally to local trainees). In case of a larger number of candidates, the selection criteria will include:

• Trainee’s country: trainees only from COST countries and Near-Neighbour Countries can be funded. See here and here.
• Age (Young Researchers and Invesitgators, i.e. under the age of 40, are promoted)
• Gender and geographical balance (notably between Inclusiveness Target Countries and others COST countries)
• Relevance and quality of the project submitted by the trainee
• Status of the language on which the trainee intends to work (low-resourced languages, dialects or genres are promoted)

If you are not selected on the basis of these criteria and you can find other financial sources to cover your travel, accommodation and meals, you are also welcome to participate.

The authors of the selected projects may optionally present them in a poster session during the Training School.

• Victoria Bobicev
• Olesea Caftanatov
• Atul Kr. Ojha