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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2020

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Abstract

Type
Introduction
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

We are delighted to present Part 2 of the Special Issue on Natural Language Processing for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects. It follows Part 1 of the special issue, which was published in September 2019 as NLE 25:5. The special issue followed the success of the series of workshops on Natural Language Processing for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial), which were organized yearly since 2014 together with top-tier international Natural Language Processing conferences.

The two parts of this special issue once again confirmed the strong interest of the Natural Language Processing community in diatopic language variation. We are happy that we received a total of 51 submissions, which is an all-time record for a special issue of the NLE journal. We accepted a number of high-quality articles that appear in Part 1 and Part 2 of the special issue, namely NLE 25:5 and NLE 26:6. Moreover, as some high-quality articles could not fit in the two volumes of the special issue, they were published in regular issues of the journal.

The present volume features six articles including a survey by the editors of this special issue with Yves Scherrer. The other articles cover topics such as language, dialect, and language variety identification in text and speech, as well as part-of-speech tagging. A number of dialects and language varieties were addressed—Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish, to name a few.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our amazing guest editorial board members, who worked very hard to review the unexpectedly large number of submissions we received. The names of all board members are listed on the special issue website.Footnote a We further thank the NLE editorial staff, who helped us with the preparation of this special issue and who made it possible for us to divide the special issue into two volumes, so that we could accommodate more articles.

Marcos Zampieri

Preslav Nakov

Guest Editors of the NLE Special Issue on Natural Language Processing for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects