Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects

Dr. Marcos Zampieri is an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses in linguistics and natural language processing. He received his PhD for Saarland University in Germany with a thesis on computational models applied to pluricentric languages. Dr. Zampieri is one of the organizers of the well-established VarDial workshop series on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects. His research deals with the application of computational models to large collections of texts. He has worked on a variety of topics including language acquisition and variation, (machine) translation and post-editing, and social media mining. Dr. Preslav Nakov is Principal Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He leads the Tanbih mega-project, developed in collaboration with MIT. He co-authored a book on Semantic Relations between Nominals, two books on computer algorithms, and many research papers in top-tier conferences and journals. He received the Young Researcher Award at RANLP'2011. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. Dr. Nakov's research was featured in over 100 news outlets, including Forbes, Boston Globe, and MIT Technology Review.

• Introduction Marcos Zampieri and Preslav Nakov; Part I: Language variation James Walker; Phonetic variation in dialects Rachael Tatman; 3. Similar languages, varieties and dialects Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere; 4. Mutual intelligibility Charlotte Gooskens and Vincent J. van Heuven; 5. Dialectology for computational linguists John Nerbonne, Wilbert Heeringa, Jelena Prokić and Martijn Wieling; Part II: 6. Data collection and representation for similar languages, varieties and dialects Tanja Samardžić and Nikola Ljubešić; 7. Adaptation of morphosyntactic taggers Yves Scherrer; 8. Sharing dependency parsers between similar languages Željko Agić; Part III: 9. Dialect and similar language identification Marcos Zampieri; 10. Dialect variation on social media Dong Nguyen; 11. Machine translation between similar languages Preslav Nakov and Jorg Tiedemann; 12. Automatic spoken dialect identification Pedro Torres-Carrasquillo and Bengt Borgström; 13. Arabic dialect processing Nizar Habash; 14. Automatic classification of varieties of Mandarin Chinese Hongzhi Xu, Menghan Jiang, Jingxia Lin, Dingxu Shi and Chu-Ren Huang.

'Variation is a key aspect of human language, and yet it has been too often overlooked in computational linguistics. The book edited by Marcos Zampieri and Preslav Nakov is an important step towards filling this gap with top-level contributions that offer a new alliance between natural language processing and linguistic theory to understand this complex phenomenon and its impact on applications.' Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa